By the Sea

“People like you come pouring in here without any thought of the damage they cause. You don’t belong here, you don’t value any of the things we value, you haven’t paid for them through generations, and we don’t want you here.”

Immigration officer Kevin Edelman delivers these lines to Saleh, whom he believes cannot understand English. This use of dramatic irony exposes the xenophobia and colonial entitlement embedded in the asylum process, further underscored by the contrast between Edelman’s “soft-spoken” delivery and the hostility of his words. This speech exemplifies The Dehumanizing Process of Seeking Asylum, reducing Saleh to a generic, threatening otherness.

“A healthy aloe tree was useless, but the infected one produced this beautiful fragrance. Another little irony by you-know-Who.”

Saleh reflects on the origins of his precious ud-al-qamari, the incense confiscated by the immigration officer. This description functions as a metaphor for the way trauma and suffering can produce something of value, such as resilience or a compelling story. The direct reference to divine “irony” suggests a worldview shaped by finding meaning in affliction, linking the symbol of the incense to the narrator’s history of loss and exile.

“Before maps the world was limitless. It was maps that gave it shape and made it seem like territory, like something that could be possessed, not just laid waste to and plundered.”

This quote explores maps as instruments of colonial power and imagination. Saleh’s reflection distinguishes between a precolonial, “limitless” world and a modern one defined and constrained by cartography. As the word choice—“laid waste,” “plundered,” etc.—demonstrates, this precolonial world could be brutal in its own right. What distinguishes colonialism is instead the instinct to “possess,” and maps serve as a vehicle for assertions of ownership and control. This systematizing impulse is similarly on display in the asylum-seeking process, highlighting the continuities of colonial and postcolonial realities.

“And [it was clear] that left to so many neglectful hands I would be pawed and pushed and pulled and left to linger in mute humiliation while I became an instrument of other people’s contented stories.”

Just before revealing that he can speak English, Saleh reflects on his powerlessness. The verbs “pawed,” “pushed,” and “pulled” create a visceral image of objectification, illustrating how his silence has rendered him passive. His fear of becoming “an instrument of other people’s contented stories” articulates the struggle for narrative autonomy, linking the motifs of silence and storytelling to the core conflict of reclaiming one’s identity from those who would define it in self-serving ways.

“‘Latif Mahmud. That’s his name. I’ll call him later and say that we won’t be needing him after all.’ Rachel busied herself with her papers for a moment, putting everything in order, bringing our interview to an end. It was a shock to hear that name.”

Rachel, an adviser, casually reveals the name of the academic she had contacted to be Saleh’s interpreter. This moment serves as the narrative climax of the novel’s first section, connecting Saleh’s present predicament directly to the unresolved (and as yet unrevealed) conflicts of his past. The simple, declarative statement, “That’s his name,” followed by Saleh’s concise internal reaction, “It was a shock,” creates a moment of dramatic tension that invokes the theme of The Intergenerational Burdens of Betrayal and Inheritance.

“This is the house I live in, I thought, a language which barks at and scorns me behind every third corner.”

Following a racist insult, Latif, a literature academic, reflects on his relationship with the English language. His metaphor likens language to a “house,” a structure that should provide shelter but instead feels hostile and threatening. The personification of language as something that “barks at and scorns” him conveys his sense of alienation as an exile, highlighting the psychological friction of inhabiting a culture and linguistic system that simultaneously provides him with a profession and treats him as an outsider.

“Those are pearls that were his eyes. Rajab Shaaban was my father’s name. Someone had picked up his name and brought him back to life.”

Upon learning the name of the asylum seeker, Latif uses an allusion to Shakespeare’s The Tempest to frame the shocking revelation. This literary reference to transformation—in the play, the changed appearance of the listener’s father, presumed drowned—underscores the surreal nature of the past’s intrusion into his present life. That Latif reaches for this quote is one of several instances in which the novel’s characters use literature as a lens for understanding their own experiences—part of a broader exploration of narrative. The quote establishes a central mystery and illustrating how a name can act as a vessel for history, resurrecting a past Latif has tried to escape.

“He was my existential warrior, my desperado, yes, I loved him like a brother, like a father, like a beloved. Others cast covetous eyes on the grace of his glowing youth. I know they did. Then, in the end, which was not long in coming, he swaggered defiantly over the horizon, and now he is lost to me.”

Latif uses elevated, romanticized language to describe his memory of his older brother, Hassan. The list of similes—“like a brother, like a father, like a beloved”—emphasizes the multifaceted and profound nature of his hero-worship. This description, culminating in the almost mythical image of Hassan swaggering “over the horizon,” reveals the subjective and aggrandizing quality of Latif’s memory, framing his brother’s disappearance as a grand, tragic loss that is central to his identity.

“I want to look forward, but I always find myself looking back, poking about in times so long ago and so diminished by other events since then, tyrant events which loom large over me and dictate every ordinary action. Yet when I look back, I find some objects still gleam with a bright malevolence and every memory draws blood.”

Here, Latif reflects on his compulsion to revisit the past. He personifies recent events as “tyrants” that dictate his present. The imagery of objects gleaming with “bright malevolence” and memories that “draw blood” similarly frames the past as an active, painful force, articulating the traumatic weight of memory and its influence on the present. These different layers of the past also interact with one another, some eclipsing others in ways that speak to how memory evolves over time.

“Hassan was hardly at home at this time, and when he was he seemed locked in endless arguments with my mother. […] Then when the musim turned and Uncle Hussein left, Hassan disappeared. In short. He swaggered over the horizon with Uncle Hussein and we never heard from him again.”

This passage narrates the climax of the family’s fracturing, culminating in Hassan’s disappearance with Hussein. The terse sentence fragment “In short,” following a more descriptive build-up, creates a jarring, clipped rhythm that reflects the abrupt and traumatic nature of the event. This structural choice underscores the finality of the departure, reducing a complex emotional history to a blunt, painful fact and marking the central betrayal that burdens Latif’s life. The final sentence repeats an earlier image of Hassan “swagger[ing] [defiantly over the horizon” (101) but also modifies it, the larger-than-life depiction of Hassan verging on ironic now that Hussein’s influence over him is clear.

“As if he could hover over filth without soiling himself, and so could sneer and scorn at the rest of us who clumsily stumbled through it. […] As if he wasn’t the man I had seen two years ago, lithe and elegantly dressed, standing over the debris of our lives and talking unhurriedly while his eyes moved with quick darting glances to take in everything around him.”

In his memory of confronting Saleh Omar, Latif uses anaphora, repeating the phrase “As if,” to construct a portrait of deep-seated resentment. This rhetorical device builds a rhythm of accusation, revealing a perspective hardened by years of bitterness and a received family narrative. By portraying Saleh as a predator picking through the “debris” of their lives, the passage establishes Latif’s biased viewpoint, which is foundational to the novel’s exploration of the unreliability of memory and competing narratives.

“‘This is our house,’ my father said. ‘It belongs to you and to me and to your mother.’ […] ‘And those people stole it from us. This is all I can leave you when I’m gone. Your inheritance.’”

Just before Latif leaves for Germany, his father explicitly defines the lost house as a symbol of a stolen birthright. This moment is crucial to the theme of the intergenerational burdens of betrayal and inheritance, as the father formally passes the weight of the family’s conflict and sense of victimhood onto his son.

“As time has passed, so many clean, sharp details have grown fuzzy and imprecise. Perhaps that is what it means to grow old, the effects of sun and squall wiping away line after line of the picture, turning the image into its furry shadow.”

Narrated by Saleh as he awaits Latif’s arrival, this passage uses an extended metaphor comparing memory to a picture weathered by the elements. The diction—“fuzzy,” “imprecise,” “furry shadow”—and the image of “sun and squall wiping away” details characterize memory as an unstable, degrading record. This speaks to the unreliability of memory and competing narratives as a central theme.

“‘I took your father’s name to save my life,’ I said. ‘There was sweet irony in that, after your father had so very nearly succeeded in destroying it.’”

Saleh utters these words to Latif, directly confronting the central mystery of his assumed identity. This portrayal of borrowed names encapsulates the novel’s core conflict, positioning the disputed history between the two families as a matter of life and death.

“It’s as if a little length of string ties your claw to a post in the ground, and you scratch and scratch there all your time even as you imagine that you have flown worlds.”

In this simile, Latif compares life abroad to the experiences of a tethered bird, simultaneously acknowledging his migration while asserting the inescapable grip of his past. The image of a claw scratching at the same patch of ground conveys a sense of futility and confinement, suggesting that physical displacement does not equate to freedom from history. This illustrates the theme of the intergenerational burdens of betrayal and inheritance, portraying the past as a fixed point to which the characters remain irrevocably tied.

“‘You’re a thief,’ he said. ‘You stole my aunt’s house from her, and now you want to steal this one from me. What have we done to you and yours that you should be so vengeful to us?’”

This quotation, recounting Rajab Shaaban Mahmud’s furious accusation against Saleh, establishes the foundational grievance that has poisoned the families for a generation. Rajab’s dialogue frames the current property dispute not as a business matter but as the successor to a historical crime rooted in inexplicable antagonism, thereby cementing a narrative of persecution. His words define the deep-seated animosity and competing sense of victimhood that Saleh and Latif have inherited.

“I think I imagined you as a kind of relic, a metaphor of my nativity, and that I would come and examine you while you sat still and dissembling, fuming ineffectually like a jinn raised from infernal depths.”

Latif uses self-aware, analytical language—e.g., “metaphor”—to describe his preconceived image of Saleh, revealing how memory and distance have transformed a man into an abstraction of the painful family legacy Latif has inherited. The simile comparing Saleh to a “jinn raised from infernal depths” illustrates the monstrous and mythic proportions the family feud has taken on in Latif’s mind. This moment of confession exposes the psychological weight of the past and the process by which individuals are turned into symbols within a personal narrative.

“‘I’d forgotten so much,’ he said, frowning, unfrowning, brightening up, trying. ‘Willfully, I suspect. I mean that I willfully forgot so much. […] I hated to hear you speak about it. I thought of it as something that had happened in the family and no one else knew about it.’”

Latif’s admission directly addresses the theme of the unreliability of memory, framing forgetting as an active, willful act of suppression driven by shame. His surprise that Saleh, an outsider, possesses intimate knowledge of his family’s private agonies underscores the porous nature of secrets and the existence of multiple perspectives on a shared history. The realization that his narrative is incomplete and subjective forces him to confront a past he deliberately tried to bury.

“Perhaps you have lost tolerance for that desire for isolation which faith in a spirit’s ambition made heroic. So the kind of self-mortifying retreat Bartleby undertakes only has meaning as a dangerous unpredictability. Especially since the story does not allow us to know what has brought Bartleby to this condition […]”

In a conversation with his legal adviser, Saleh defends his own initial strategy of silence by analyzing the literary character of “Bartleby, the Scrivener”. Through this intertextual reference, Saleh reframes passive resistance as a form of heroic withdrawal from a world that cannot comprehend his history. This discussion explores the difficulty of communicating trauma, suggesting that silence can be an intentional act of self-preservation against a system that demands a simple, digestible narrative. Nevertheless, Saleh takes seriously Rachel’s impression of Bartleby as someone who has become mired in and isolated by “self-pity,” their differing interpretations of the same story underscoring the novel’s interest in the multiplicity and subjectivity of truth.

“Imagine being like that, I mean finding out things about your life that you didn’t even know had happened. It made me think about what we do, at work. So often we’re trying to get people to remember, to make a case for themselves. And if they can’t remember we have to make it up between us. Imagine someone else completing those stories that are missing.”

Rachel reflects on the process of constructing an asylum case, inadvertently creating a metaphor for the novel’s entire narrative project. Her statement highlights the theme of the unreliability of memory and competing narratives, positioning storytelling as a collaborative act of creation, particularly when memory is fragmented by trauma. The line “we have to make it up between us” reveals the instability of official narratives and underscores the way Saleh and Latif must piece together their shared history from incomplete accounts.

“I’ve been listening to you all this time and thinking, He’s lying, he’s lying. He’s just obsessed with his narrative. He wants to make it work. But now you’re going to improve on it, to make it into a real drama. Now it’s the turn of her and her filthy Minister to persecute you.”

Latif interrupts Saleh’s account with an outburst, accusing him of crafting a self-serving story. This moment of direct conflict dramatizes the tension between competing narratives, as Latif’s emotional loyalty to his mother’s memory resists Saleh’s version of events. The meta-commentary on narrative construction—“obsessed with his narrative,” “make it into a real drama”—forces the reader to question the objectivity of Saleh’s testimony and consider how personal histories are shaped by grievance and the desire for vindication.

“The years were written in the language of the body, and it is not a language I can speak with words. Sometimes I see photographs of people in distress, and the image of their misery and pain echoes in my body and makes me ache with them. And the same image teaches me to suppress the memory of my oppression […]”

Here, Saleh explains his inability to articulate the full horror of his years in detention camps. The metaphor of a “language of the body” conveys the idea that extreme suffering transcends verbal expression and is instead inscribed physiologically as somatic memory. This passage explores the limits of storytelling in the face of profound trauma and the way empathy can be both triggered and suppressed by the visual representation of others’ pain.

“When I escaped from GDR, I never wrote to them, and I guessed that they would not know where I was so they would never be able to write to me. I wanted nothing to do with them, and their hatreds and demands. […] it was a bit of luck, being able to escape from the GDR into a kind of anonymity, even to be able to change my name, to escape from them.”

Latif recounts his deliberate decision to sever all ties with his family after escaping to the West. This admission recasts his exile not just as a flight from political oppression but as a willful escape from the toxic “hatreds and demands” of his family, a central element of the theme of the intergenerational burdens of betrayal and inheritance. However, this deep-seated desire to erase his past and start anew has also resulted in profound loneliness and guilt.