Power Absorbency and Transmogrified Life: Traversing the Survivance in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Novel Dottie.

Abstract

Abdulrazak Gurnah is a Zanzibar-born British novelist and one of Africa's most well-known contemporary novelists. The novels written by him provide a distinctive picture of pre to postcolonial East Africa, and the effects which colonisation has on the people. The writings of Gurnah also depict the struggles that people belonging to East Africa had to face in the post-colonial age, both in and outside of their countries. Highlighting human relations has been one of the top priorities for Gurnah. In the postcolonial Western social sphere, the traditional concept of power associated with sovereignty, domination, threat or violence has been changed to surveillance, normalising judgements, categorization, discipline and observation of accepted heteronormative social ideals which have further been complicated with the practice of apartheid. Gurnah’s novel Dottie is a saga of the journey of life of its protagonist, Dottie from a naive, exploited black girl to an independent, strong woman full of self-respect. While fighting desperately to raise her siblings and herself in a racist, white social structure she confronts constant oppressive power structure that posits and assigns the Blacks a peripheral exploited position besides confronting the power discourse of her own community which is used to subdue and subjugate the woman rights and voices. Her continuous struggle for women dignity and values and for educating herself emancipates her from this fatal predicament and transmogrifies her life, ultimately leading to her absorbency of existing power mechanism in order to make her fit and accepted in the contemporary socio-cultural setting.