Volume VI Special Issue V June 2026

Name of Author : Ritashree Pal

Title of the paper : Problematizing Decolonization: A study of Gendered Violence in Abdulrazak Gurnahs Admiring Silence and Gravel Heart

Abstract: The decolonization of the island nation of Zanzibar, on the eastern coast of Africa, in December, 1963, and its union with Tanganyika to form a new nation, Tanzania, was not an unalloyed success story. It was shortly followed by genocide of the Arab community, which in the subsequent months and years also saw state sponsored atrocities on Arab and Asian women. With historical texts as its framework, this paper proposes to examine the reason and impact of this gendered violence in Gurnahs homeland in his two novels Admiring Silence 1996 and Gravel Heart 2017. Gurnah problematizes the much celebrated historical event of decolonization of Zanzibar by registering how womens bodies had been viewed as territories to be conquered Moraga, 1993, p.150 for ethnic cleansing, and determining the character of a new nation as cited in Pramod K. Nayar’s Postcolonial Literature An Introduction 2008.

Keywords : decolonization, state sponsored gendered violence, problematize, womens bodies, nation.

DOI :

Page Number : 6-13