Bodies in Contact: Corporeality, Mobility, and Change in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Paradise (1994)

Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Paradise (1994) is set at the turn of the twentieth century, a time of political change when German colonisation gained a firmer hold on East Africa and its peoples. This article analyses how the relation between bodies and movement, bodies entering in contact with other bodies, experimenting new forms of mobility, participate in this process of change. The analysis focuses, from the perspective of mobility studies, on the embodied subject and the train as a means of mobility, on beautiful and grotesque bodies that find ways to escape the established order, and on the organic body and corporeality as body politic. It demonstrates how the body, through movement, experiences both mobility and immobility, change and permanence. It concludes that although Yusuf’s disempowerment as rehani is reconfigured in the colonial context, it remains doubtful that this change leads to empowerment.