43 pages • 1-hour read
By the Sea
A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of racism and child sexual abuse.
The Unreliability of Memory and Competing Narratives
In By the Sea, Abdulrazak Gurnah explores the nature of personal history as a fluid and contested narrative rather than a fixed record. The novel’s structure, which is built around the fragmented and conflicting memories of Saleh Omar and Latif Mahmud, challenges the notion of a single objective truth, suggesting instead that understanding the past requires navigating multiple, often contradictory, stories. Through this lens, Gurnah demonstrates that memory is an active process of storytelling, constantly reshaped by trauma, guilt, and the need to make sense of one’s life.
The novel establishes the constructed nature of memory from the outset, with Saleh arriving in England equipped with a suitcase full of “paltry mementos of a life” (10). With the exception of the incense, however, these mementos are not his own; as he admits a moment later, the items he has chosen to bring are intended to convey a specific story. Though Saleh is, in this instance, aware of the “doctored” nature of that story, the episode symbolically frames what follows, highlighting how the act of remembering is inseparable from the present circumstances influencing the storyteller. In particular, it suggests that rewriting one’s past can be a means of survival, whether physical (as in Saleh’s pursuit of asylum) or psychological.
Latif’s relationship to memory exemplifies this latter form of survival. Latif’s memories of the property dispute at the novel’s heart are filtered through deep-seated feelings of betrayal and loss, particularly regarding his brother Hassan’s disappearance and the subsequent loss of the family home. His account frames Saleh as a calculating “assassin” not only because this is the story he learned from his parents but also because this villainous characterization simultaneously absolves figures like Latif’s mother for their role in events. Latif himself acknowledges the selective nature of his memory, admitting that he has willfully forgotten painful details of his past.
Ultimately, Gurnah suggests that neither Latif’s story nor Saleh’s is an objective report of events, and while Latif at times accuses Saleh of deliberately recasting his past, the reframing is rarely so conscious. Rather, as Saleh reflects, the passage of time and the accumulation of experience inevitably erase or magnify details, conflate discrete events, and generate meanings that were not obvious at the time: “[I]t is as if the details of our lives have accumulated in layers, and now some layers have been displaced by the friction of other events, and bits of contingent pieces still remain, accidentally tumbled about” (180). Certain aspects of the past thus remain contested even after Saleh and Latif have confronted their shared history, but this is in some ways beside the point. In listening to one another’s subjective truths, the two men reconstruct a picture of the past that is complete not because it is exact in every detail but because, in its very fragmentation, it captures a shared reality of loss and alienation.
The Dehumanizing Process of Seeking Asylum
Through Saleh’s journey as an asylum seeker, By the Sea offers a critique of the bureaucratic processes that systematically dehumanize individuals by reducing their complex lives to manageable cases. Gurnah contrasts Saleh’s rich interior world, filled with detailed memories and personal history, with the sterile and alienating environment of his present, illustrating how the asylum system strips away a person’s identity, status, and dignity.
The dehumanizing process begins the moment Saleh arrives at Gatwick Airport and encounters the immigration officer, Kevin Edelman. Edelman views Saleh not as an individual but as a type, one of the masses who “come pouring in here without any thought of the damage they cause” (15). He assesses Saleh’s worth based on his passport and the meager contents of his bag; that both are falsified underscores the depth of his misapprehension. The officer’s confiscation of Saleh’s precious casket of ud-al-qamari incense is a further symbol of this process, representing the erasure of personal history and memory, which are deemed irrelevant to his case.
This initial encounter sets the tone for Saleh’s subsequent experiences at the detention center and Celia’s bed-and-breakfast, both of which reinforce his loss of autonomy and identity. The detention camp is described as a holding pen for those seen as a “casual and valueless nuisance” (55), where men from diverse backgrounds are lumped together under the single, homogenizing label of detainee. Similarly, Celia’s squalid home is a place of neglect and condescension. Celia barely attempts to learn Saleh’s name, calling him “Mr. Showboat,” but seeks to micromanage his behavior, as when she chides him for seeking solitude; her attitude reflects a system that aims to control people rather than understand them.
Saleh’s response to this dehumanization hints at one possible form of resistance. Acting on advice he received, Saleh initially feigns an inability to speak English—a stance that excuses him from engaging directly with those around him. When this becomes untenable, his response is more telling still; he quotes Melville’s short story “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” whose titular character deflects everything from requests at work to inquiries into his personal history by citing preference. When Rachel, Saleh’s case manager, expresses distaste for this very story, Saleh remarks:
Perhaps in these times you have come to see people who choose humility and withdrawal as duplicitous […] 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, does not allow us to have sympathy for him. It does not allow us to say, yes, yes, in this case we understand the meaning of such behavior and we forgive it (254).
Saleh here suggests that Bartleby implicitly challenges the modern bureaucratic impulse to systematize human life and behavior; by refusing to engage, or even to explain his disengagement, he shelters his selfhood from prying eyes. However, Saleh’s own story demonstrates that this is not a perfect solution, as his silence generates practical difficulties, and his disengagement isolates him. Ultimately, the novel looks to the tentative diasporic community he forges with Latif and Rachel as a refuge from pervasive dehumanization.
The Intergenerational Burdens of Betrayal and Inheritance
By the Sea demonstrates how personal and familial betrayals create an inheritance of bitterness that transcends generations, shaping identities and fates. The consequences of deception and rivalry in Zanzibar continue to define the lives of Saleh and Latif decades later in England, suggesting that the legacies of resentment are an inescapable part of one’s history.
The narrative’s central conflict originates in a series of betrayals orchestrated by the Persian trader, Hussein. His seduction of Latif’s brother, Hassan, is a deep familial wound that results in Hassan’s disappearance and leaves a legacy of unresolved grief. Simultaneously, Hussein’s financial machinations entangle both Latif’s father, Rajab Shaaban Mahmud, and Saleh in a bitter dispute over a loan and the ownership of Rajab’s house. This house becomes the physical symbol of the feud that will poison relations between the two families for years to come.
Years later and thousands of miles away, Saleh and Latif are still living out the consequences of this inherited conflict. Their lives in exile are not a true escape from the past but a continuation of it. Saleh, fleeing the repercussions of his actions, ironically adopts the name of his old rival, Rajab Shaaban, an act that binds him directly to the very history he hopes to shed. For Latif, the mere mention of his father’s name is enough to pull him back into the “house of hatreds” that defined his youth (312). In this context, their meeting in England is the inevitable convergence of two lives shaped by the same inheritance of betrayal.
Tellingly, the process of working through that inheritance requires delving ever deeper into the past. As Saleh’s narrative eventually reveals, Hussein’s actions were only the proximate cause of the feud. A prior dispute surrounding Bi Maryam’s disposal of her property had already tainted relations between the two families. This, in turn, surfaces another story of trauma: Bi Maryam’s first husband had lost his inheritance to scheming relations, influencing her later anxieties about who would inherit her house. That the ripples extend backward as well as forward reframes the novel’s central conflict as merely the latest iteration of a long history of dispossession. In this context, the novel’s most sweeping dispossession—the exile of its characters due to the upheavals of colonialism—becomes an ironic opportunity to begin anew.
Unlock every key theme and why it matters
Get in-depth breakdowns of the book’s main ideas and how they connect and evolve.
- Explore how themes develop throughout the text
- Connect themes to characters, events, and symbols
- Support essays and discussions with thematic evidence