“Laugh[ing] now before life knots you up:” the Poetics of Laughter in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Paradise

In Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Paradise, characters are often shown laughing, even when facing ordeals and hardships. Drawing from the concept of utani in East Africa (usually translated as “joking relationship”) and from Western theories of laughter, this paper examines the various functions of laughter in the novel to try and determine whether it is used as a means of excluding the more vulnerable or as a tool of cohesion within a multiethnic, multilingual and transcultural society.