Representation of Silence in Abdulrazak Gurnah's “The last gift and Admiring the silence”

With an emphasis on how silence functions as a narrative and moral tactic within the postcolonial migrant experience, this article explores how silence is portrayed in Abdulrazak Gurnah's Admiring Silence and The Last Gift. In these works, silence is not just a lack of communication; it is a multifaceted reaction to personal tragedy, colonial past, and displacement. The narrator's self-imposed quiet and narrative withholding in Admiring quiet expose the psychological fragmentation that results from such concealment while also revealing silence as a way of survival within a racially stratified host society. The Last Gift examines silence in a familial and intergenerational setting, where the protagonist's inability to express his history affects emotional bonds and passes on unsaid trauma to later generations. This article makes the case, using a comparative textual analysis, that Gurnah portrays silence as morally conflicted: it provides self-narrative control and security, but it also perpetuates emotional distance, misunderstanding, and alienation. Gurnah questions prevailing presumptions about voice and testimony in postcolonial writing by emphasizing silence as a key narrative element. She suggests that in defining migrant subjectivity and historical memory, what is unsaid is frequently just as important as what is uttered.