Book Review: "The Last Gift" by Abdulrazak Gurnah

The Last Gift (2011)
Abdulrazak Gurnah
279 pages

As children grow older, many come to take an active interest in their parents’ childhood, wondering where and how they lived and grew up, and what they experienced. Realizing that they fit into a larger history that extends back through their parents’ lives, children become eager to hear whatever they can about them.

When parents keep silent about their early lives, the lack of response to their children’s questions can become a point of increasing tension. Over time, a child can experience the resulting lack of knowledge as a kind of emptiness, one that can exert an almost vertiginous pull on their path into adulthood. Precisely this situation and its profound consequences form the heart of Abdulrazak Gurnah’s beautifully crafted novel The Last Gift.

The story centers on a family in England: Abbas and his wife Maryam, and their children Jamal and Hannah, who are grown and living on their own. In the opening paragraphs, Abbas has a stroke that leaves him severely weakened and forced to relearn the ability to speak. Initially unable to even get out of bed, much less go back to work, he gradually withdraws into his own thoughts. Soon, these thoughts turn to long suppressed memories of his childhood, events that ultimately led to a traumatic moment as a young adult that suddenly and dramatically changed the course of his life.

Gurnah masterfully shifts the focus between Abbas, his wife, and their children, and we soon learn that not only has Abbas hidden this shameful event from his family, but that his secrecy has had a profound impact on his children. Despite questioning their father many times, they have been able to learn little more than accidentally revealed snippets about their father’s early life, little more than that he apparently grew up somewhere in Africa.

Maryam too has kept an embarrassing secret from the rest of the family, including her husband. Though all are aware that she grew up as an orphan, she has carefully concealed her own traumatic moment, one that turned her life, too, on its head.

Abbas and Maryam, for their part, have spent their many years together bound by a tacit agreement to not pry into each other’s pasts. For Jamal and Hannah, however, especially as they’ve moved beyond childhood, the hidden nature of their parent’s early lives, and particularly that of their father’s, begins to weigh more heavily, leaving them with a vague feeling of floundering, unconnected to any particular legacy.

Eventually Abbas regains some of his strength and ability to speak. But, he also recognizes his mortality staring him in the face, and so confronts the decision of whether to finally open up to his family before it’s too late. With Maryam acting as an increasingly insistent muse at his bedside, he tentatively begins to shed the long, deep silence he has maintained about his early life.

While the mysterious pasts of Abbas and Maryam drive the plot, the story’s heart lies in the consequences of this silence, not only on their own relationship, but especially on the lives of their children. Jamal and Hannah’s inability to learn much of anything about the early lives of their parents has marked them as adults, though in ways that have taken the two of them in different directions psychologically.

Most critically, it has colored their understanding of themselves as children of immigrants. Both were born in England and, given their parents reticence, have no concept of coming from anywhere else ancestrally, and yet they regularly find themselves viewed as outsiders, as non-English. Faced from both friends and strangers in England with the seemingly inevitable question of where do you come from?, they discover it to not only reinforce their otherness despite being English-born citizens, but also to remind them of the abiding mysteries of their parents’ pasts.

In The Last Gift, Gurnah has created a story that masterfully explores the question of identity in increasingly multicultural societies, but also the profound impact that family secrets can have on children as they grow to adulthood unable to understand their heritage.

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