Coloniality of being, black male sexuality and interracial relationships in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Pilgrims Way

This article examines Gurnah’s (1988) novel, Pilgrims Way, as an exposition of the coloniality playing out in traumatising men of colour in diaspora space and impeding interracial relationships. The conception of coloniality of being is pivotal in uncovering the surviving epistemic and ontological power patterns of colonialism that intertwine with political and economic oppression. By historicising the construction of race, the article brings out the ingrained coloniality of power in sexualising and gendering black bodies into hypersexuality, bestiality and passivity. The reading of the novel engages psychoanalytical conceptions like abjection, abandonment neurosis and passive-aggression to address an uprooted black man’s predicament of deferred reterritorialisation due to the colonial past and the ongoing condition of racism. The study argues that Gurnah portrays the limits of anti-racism responses like postcolonial inversion and self-inflicting melancholia, which impede interracial relationships. To a broader audience interested in intersubjectivity and interraciality in the diaspora space, the novel advocates its thrust on the attitudes of care and communicable empathy to heal the wounds of historical wrongs, and proposes a moral obligation to hospitality to the uprooted and the marginalised.