43 pages • 1-hour read
By the Sea
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Symbols & Motifs
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of racism and child sexual abuse.
The Mahogany Casket of Ud-al-qamari Incense
The mahogany casket of ud-al-qamari incense is a symbol of Saleh Omar’s connection to his lost homeland and the complex history he carries into exile. The incense is a sensory relic that contrasts sharply with the sterile, bureaucratic environment of the interrogation room at Gatwick Airport, as well as Saleh’s otherwise paltry (and impersonal) items. Its confiscation by the immigration officer, Kevin Edelman, under the pretense of having it “tested,” is a pivotal act in illustrating The Dehumanizing Process of Seeking Asylum. This theft represents the stripping away of personal history and identity that defines the asylum process, where a life’s precious mementos are treated as contraband and an individual is rendered placeless and placeless.
The casket’s significance deepens through its origin story, which serves as a metaphor for the novel’s thematic core. Saleh recalls that the beautifully scented resin is produced only by an aloe tree that has been infected by a fungus. He reflects on this irony, noting that “A healthy aloe tree was useless, but the infected one produced this beautiful fragrance” (18-19). This detail connects the symbol directly to The Intergenerational Burdens of Betrayal and Inheritance, suggesting that beauty, value, and meaning—like Saleh’s and Latif’s sorrowful narratives—can emerge directly from histories of damage and trauma. That Saleh received the casket from Hussein as part of a deal that would indirectly mar much of his life underscores this point. The casket does not just represent the past; it symbolizes a past whose value is inextricably linked to its wounds.
Furniture
Furniture is a recurring motif that represents the stability of home, the material weight of memory, and the tangible legacy of characters’ lives. For Saleh, a former furniture dealer and restorer, these objects are both his livelihood and his passion, providing a physical link to history and a sense of order. In England, dispossessed and adrift, his aimless wandering through modern furniture warehouses becomes a search for this lost meaning and a way to ground himself in a disorienting new reality. As he muses, furniture “weighs us down and keeps us on the ground, and prevents us from clambering up trees and howling naked as the terror of our useless lives overcomes us” (4). This statement reveals his psychological dependence on these objects as a bulwark against the existential chaos of exile, showing how the structures people build around them serve to structure their inner lives.
The motif is central to the theme of the intergenerational burdens of betrayal and inheritance. A specific piece, a “low table on three delicately bowed legs, made of ebony” (29), helps catalyze the entire conflict between Saleh, Hussein, and Rajab Shaaban Mahmud. Saleh meets Hussein when the latter seeks to purchase the table to aid in his seduction of Hassan; this lays the groundwork for the loan agreement that ultimately costs the Mahmud family their house. Later, Saleh chooses not to return the table after taking possession of the family’s house, cementing Asha’s hatred of him and contributing to his own downfall. The table thus becomes a concrete symbol of the disputed inheritance and the chain of personal betrayals that creates decades of resentment. This demonstrates how abstract grievances become embedded in the material world, with objects carrying the weight of history and conflict across generations.
Books and Literature
Books are a key motif related to The Unreliability of Memory and Competing Narratives. Literature provides a vehicle through which the characters understand themselves—it is even Latif’s academic field—but its meaning is not stable. Rather, the same stories resonate differently depending on the character’s perspective and experiences. Saleh, for instance, sees in Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener” a model of dignified resistance to bureaucratized dehumanization, whereas Rachel sees the same character’s withdrawal as a form of aggression, remarking, “He made me think of someone dangerous, someone capable of small, sustained cruelties on himself and others weaker than himself, an abuser” (254). These widely divergent readings suggest that literature is narrative in a double sense; it not only tells a story itself but becomes part of the stories that those who read it tell about themselves. As the central dialogue between Latif and Saleh demonstrates, bridging the gap between individual narratives is difficult yet necessary. Thus, Saleh resolves to stop quoting Bartleby until he can reread the story with Rachel’s perspective in mind. Her reading does not displace his own, but he takes it into consideration.
One particular subset of literature helps yoke this exploration of personal narrative to a broader political context. Both Saleh and Latif discuss encountering books by Western authors within the framework of colonialism. Saleh, for example, remarks:
In [British] books I read unflattering accounts of my history, and because they were unflattering, they seemed truer than the stories we told ourselves. I read about the diseases that tormented us, about the future that lay before us, about the world we lived in and our place in it. It was as if they had remade us, and in ways that we no longer had any recourse but to accept, so complete and well-fitting was the story they told about us” (23).
Saleh here describes the alienating experience of having a narrative imposed on one—particularly when that narrative frames itself not as simply another story but as objective truth. Latif recounts a similar experience of “trembling through abuse and scorn” while reading British literature (134), but he also recalls discovering American and then Russian literature as Zanzibar’s political orientation shifted in the years following independence. While the young Latif receives these new works with pleasure, feeling that they are free of colonialist baggage, the novel implies that they are part of a neocolonialist project, with first the US and then the USSR using literature to perpetuate cultural hegemony. On a global level as well as a personal one, the novel thus examines how literature serves those who write, read, and promulgate it.
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