TRANSMISSION OF TRAUMA AND MEMORY: A MARXIST ANALYSIS OF ABDULRAZAK GURNAH'S THEFT

Abstract

The thesis examines the intergenerational transmission of trauma and memory in the novel Theft (2025) by Abdulrazak Gurnah, within the framework of Marxist literature criticism, which is dialectical and combines the concept of the political unconscious proposed by Fredric Jameson with the theses on the philosophy of history of Walter Benjamin. The study explores how trauma is created and perpetuated by class exploitation, economic dispossession, patronage systems and neocolonial structures across three generations in the history of Zanzibar, from the revolution in 1964 to the transition from postcolonial socialist experiments to EU-funded development and to tourism economies. By closely reading the gaps, the silences, the shifting of the centres of focalisation, the non-linearism of time, and the multivalent metaphor of ‘theft' the analysis shows that, in the novel, trauma is not only psychological but rooted in the economics of postcolonial capitalism. Family narratives, family “wrongs”, and family “silences” provide solutions to structural contradictions, ideological, whereas Benjaminian moments of revolutionary memory interrupt conformist historicism and point toward and point to utopian possibilities of care and endurance. The results show that Gurnah's work is a diagnosis of the political unconscious of unfinished decolonisation and an opportunity at the same time for fragile sites of resistance. It is a materialist perspective that combines psychoanalytical trauma theory and historical materialism and adds to postcolonial literary criticism by demonstrating ways in which literature can both reflect and remaster the “hurt” of history.