The Gift of Legacy from a Father: A Transnational Study of Abdulrazak Gurnah’s The Last Gift

Abstract

Transnationalism is sustained linkages and ongoing exchanges among non-state actors based across national borders--- businesses, NGOs and individuals sharing the same interests such as same religious beliefs or common cultural and geographic origins. There arises a kind of multistranded identity; multifaceted cultural and socio-economic relationship across geo-political boundaries. When a Black African emigrates to a white European country, usually immigrant's ethnocultural self faces challenge in the face of dominant host culture, undergoes identity reconstruction through the process of inculturation or deculturation or hybridization and emerges as a confused, new assimilated cultural identity or a fragile attempt to keep pure past ethnic self-leading to identity crisis and quest for lost homeland. This article endeavours to map out the typical cultural conflict in the face of burning apartheid, faced by Abbas, an East African immigrant and his family in England and his ultimate gift to his children of his rich cultural heritage and ancestry in a country which hitherto deliberately denies any.