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Root Identity as a Postcolonial Authenticity Crisis in 
Abdulrazak Gurnah's The Last Gift

Ikechukwu Otuu Egbuta, PhD., 
Mrs. Alege M. A., 

Oyinloye Oluwatobi Olajumoke
E-mail: , +2348068378633;egbutaikechukwu@yahoo.com

 +2348033051967; +2347038627990

Abstract 
This study adopts Martin Heidegger's concept of authenticity as 
its heuristic tool to investigate root identity as a postcolonial 
identity crisis in Abdulrazak Gurnah's The Last Gift through the 
lens of postcolonial literary theory as part of the main currents in 
the study and practice of African literature. In the modern world 
with the increase of migrant identity crisis situations, hybrid 
nations and constitution of countries with different cultural 
identities and diversities, identity placing and tracing come to the 
center stage. This is because African literature in the twentieth and 
twenty-first centuries has been seen as containing contradictory 
impulses, binary oppositions sort of –towards acceptance or 
rejection. To Jean-Paul Sartre and Martin Heidegger, it is 
authenticity and inauthenticity. It manifests in Fredrick Nietzsche 
as Apollonian and Dionysian predicaments. It is “us” and “the 
others” in postcolonial context and Albert Camus calls it rebellion 
and conformism. The expression of this binary takes various 
forms because African fictive characters are portrayed to have 
emerged from colonialism and have evolved with them a double 
inheritance: authenticity and inauthenticity. Hybridity is one of 
the consequences of this dual heritage, creating uncertainty as to 
where and how root identity is to be ascertained among characters 
in the novels. In Gurnah's The Last Gift, Hanna and Jamal come to 
a clearer understanding of their root identity underwritten by the 
Sailor's tales which their father, Abbas, planted in the radio tape 

Ikechukwu Otuu Egbuta, PhD - Root Identity as a Postcolonial 
Authenticity Crisis in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s The Last Gift

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mailto:egbutaikechukwu@yahoo.com


socially or metaphorically circumscribed), the interpretation and 
reinterpretation of common history" (Loana Elena Marinescu 90). 
In fact, colonialism was not only a power control but it was a 
cultural control by the colonizer in which still colonized people 
are tied to in one way or the other. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffith 
and Helen Tiffin argue that “All post-colonial societies are still 
subject in one way or another to overt or subtle forms of neo-
colonial domination, and independence has not solved this 
problem" (2). The postcolonial atmosphere and situation is 
characterised by the tensions of struggling of newly independent 
states to achieve their cultural, political, and psychological 
identification, reflect their privacy, establish their self-
determination different from that imposed by the colonizers that 
always leads to imbalance. The struggle of the colonized subjects 
for their cultural identity and the social formation of the new 
independent nations is an aspect of cultural transformation that 
leads to a continuous, if not a perpetual conflict with the 
colonizer's culture. What characterizes postcolonial era is the 
resistance to colonialism and seeking identity to confirm their 
independence, which many countries in the post colony have not 
succeeded in doing. Then, the population movement and 
migration from former colonies to the colonizer's countries 
created new mixed, hybrid societies that clash with each other 
culturally in one hand and in the other hand between the citizens 
and migrants. 

	 Through colonial tutelage, most of the African fictive 
characters have carried with them the cultural experiences which 
predate colonialism and persisted along the relics of colonialism. 
These have affected the value system or the acceptable values in 
the behavioral patterns of characters found in the fictions either 
written by citizens of these countries or handed to them by the 
colonial masters as a moral handbook. More often, some of the 
fictions written by the formal colonized people who live abroad or 
African diaspora writers portray their own experiences and 
showcase major characters struggling to become or lost in their 

they received as his metaphorical last gift. Their mother, Maryam 
also returns to Exeter to find root into her own identity, having 
suffered from root identity and its predatory effects from 
childhood. Any sincere criticism of African literature offers one of 
the most important ways in which these root identity and migrant 
perceptions are expressed, and it is in Gurnah that the day-to-day 
realities experienced by these migrant characters have been most 
alluringly determined.

Key words: Migration, Authenticity, Inauthenticity, Hybridity, 
Root identity.

Introduction	
Countries that have had colonial experience typically have a dual 
inheritance and this situation is not automatically remedied by the 
attainment of independence. At independence, writers from these 
former colonies start up a conversation around what is perceived 
as their pre-colonial, colonial and postcolonial experiences. These 
three conversations are encapsulated into the postcolonial 
discourse. Postcolonial is a term used for an era when colonies 
achieved freedom from European colonization. The term post 
colonialism concerns the effects of colonialism on cultures and 
communities which are formerly occidental colonies. Historians 
used it after the Second World War, WWII, to refer to the post-
independence time. Post-colonialism may also refer to the crises 
migrant characters encounter as they try to grapple with colonial 
experience and what is originally theirs. Though there are political 
changes in the post colony, many nations got independence and no 
more they are colonies, but culturally and economically there 
appear many dilemma and crisis, they are still in confusion about 
their culture and identity. The appearance of national and ethnic 
identity dilemmas and endurances in ascertaining what is 
authentic in order to bridge the gap of its inauthentic opposite 
“defined and redefined after the collapse of the Empire, the 
continuous movement between margin and centre (be it spatially, 

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control of the affairs of the colonized nations. In essence, this 
paper subscribes to the position of Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Grifiths 
and Helen Tiffin in The Postcolonial Studies Reader that the term 
postcolonial “is best used to designate the totality of practices, in 
all their rich diversity, which characterizes the societies of the 
postcolonial world from the moment of colonization to the present 
day, since colonialism does not cease with the mere fact of 
political independence and continues in a neo-colonial mode to be 
active in many societies” (xv). The implication is that the term 
“postcolonial” is used to refer to diverse practices which 
incorporate all the effects of colonization by imperial Europe both 
within the moment of colonization and afterwards. Post-colonial 
studies which emerged from the varied experiences of colonized 
peoples represent the expression of such colonial experiences. 
Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin observe that “postcolonial studies 
are based in the 'historical fact' of European colonialism and the 
diverse material effects to which this phenomenon gave rise” (2). 
One of the “diverse material effects” of British colonization of 
some part of Africa, for instance, is the denigration of the 
indigenous culture through the superimposition of western 
culture. The derogatory representation of “others” as different 
from “us” and the stereotyping of the natives found expression in 
the colonial documentation or writing by colonial administrators, 
adventurers, sailors, researchers and missionaries. Literature 
remains one of the most readily available and important modes of 
expressing the existential realities prevalent in the postcolonial 
societies. Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin further posit that, “what 
each of these literatures has in common beyond their special and 
distinctive regional characteristics is that they emerge in their 
present form out of the experience of colonization and asserted 
themselves by foregrounding the tension with the imperial power, 
and by emphasizing their differences from the assumptions of the 
imperial centre. It is this which makes them distinctly post-
colonial”(2). Essentially, the experience of colonization is 
responsible for shaping and reshaping the culture of colonized 
societies and by extension the writing that emerged from such 

own crisis of filiation. Placed in this isthmus of a middle state are 
the questions of authenticity, inauthenticity, and root identity. 

Theoretical Standpoint
 Some of the familiar issues in the discourse of African 
literature of the twenty-first century reveal the preponderance by 
writers, some of who live abroad, to confront the notions of 
migration crises in their art renditions occasioning from a call to 
self-examine one's own authentic existence in a world of diverse 
narratives. Through their narratives, they reveal varying prevalent 
social realities, especially, as it affects the blacks living in a land 
that could be called foreign, for lack of a better word. It is 
common, as one reads these literary works to encounter the child-
protagonist as it grapples with the vicissitude of daily existence 
and identity formation in a dystopian environment, and as Bill 
Ashcroft, Gareth Griffith and Helen Tiffin will affirm, “more than 
three quarters of the people living in the world today have had their 
lives shaped by the experience of colonialism.” Ashcroft et al go 
further to assert that, “literature offers one of the most important 
ways in which these new perceptions are expressed and it is in 
their writing, and through other arts that the day-to-day realities 
experienced by colonized people have been most powerfully 
encoded” (1). Postcolonial theory stands out as almost the most 
important tool for confronting African literature because of 
diverse area of its interface with migration, root identity, 
authenticity, inauthenticity, and crisis of filiation. Postcolonial 
theory therefore “deconstructs and reimagines personal, cultural 
and national identities” (Kirsti Bohata 2). 

	 The term “postcolonial” has remained a subject of spirited 
argument and controversy especially over what it should and does 
represent. At one level, postcolonial is used to refer to the period 
between colonization and right after independence only, while at 
another level, the periodization is stretched further down, 
beginning from the moment of colonization down to the present 
day. This is in view of the fact that the colonizers are still in remote 

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most influential philosophical movement between the late 18th 
and throughout 19th centuries. It is better classified as a movement 
rather than a school. The reason for this is because it is not a 
coherent system of philosophizing like rationalism, Thomism, 
Platonism, and others. Existentialists do not believe in “abstract 
speculation but rather are interested in concrete human existence, 
their philosophizing begins from man rather than from nature” 
(John Macquarrie 14). The question of authenticity is raised by 
Soren Kierkegaard (who is often referred to as the father of 
existentialism), Martin Heidegger (although would not like to be 
called an existentialist), Fredrick Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, Albert 
Camus, Karl Jaspers, Gabriel Marcel, Simon de Beauvoir, and 
Jean-Paul Sartre. The condition and quality of the existing human 
individual remains the kernel of their philosophies. Consequently, 
themes such as, “human subjectivity, facticity, finitude, absurdity, 
nothingness, anxiety, guilt, death, essence and existence, among 
others” (Jim Ijenwa Unah and Chris Osegenwune 129) recur in 
their different analysis of the human condition. In their 
determination to make man live an affirmative form of life, “they 
denied all forms of abstractions with respect to existence. Against 
all objectives and abstractions, existence, for these thinkers, takes 
precedence over essence” (David Nyong 37). 

	 Existentialists believe that against all odds, man must 
make every effort to live his life to its fullness on earth. They 
understand that there are some human “givens,” otherwise called 
facticity of existence, which may not allow man to affirm himself 
and achieve all that he wants on earth. For that reason, the only 
way to confront these existential “facticities” is to man up (be 
courageous) and live authentically. In existentialism, the concept 
of authenticity is used to “describe the way of living of one who 
takes full cognizance of the meaninglessness of the world yet 
deliberately follows a consistent course of action” (Unah and 
Osegenwune 27-28). Unfortunately, even though human beings 
may decide they want to live in a way that is true to their deepest 
beliefs, desires and passions, most of them do not in the true sense 

societies out of the horror of imperial domination. The socio-
economic and political realities that characterize colonized 
societies and their literature are products of the imperial process of 
colonization and its continuation in diverse forms in present times. 
Postcolonial practice therefore involves an attempt, a predilection 
to engage in a public discourse of the effects of European 
colonization of native populations and supplanting and 
denigration of indigenous ways of knowing. Ashcroft et al 
summarize this view through their submission that: 
	     The practice of postcolonial theorizing involves 

discussion about experience of various kinds: 
migration, slavery, suppression, resistance, 
representation, difference, race, 	gender, place and 
responses to the influential master discourses of 
imperial Europe such as history, philosophy and 
linguistics, and the fundamental experiences of 
speaking and writing by which all these come into 
b e i n g .  N o n e  o f  t h e s e  i s  ' e s s e n t i a l l y ' 	
postcolonial, but put together they form the complex 
fabric of the field (The Post-colonial Studies Reader 
2).

 The experiences of migration, authenticity, in authenticity 
and root identity constitute the material effects and reactions to 
colonialism. The major aim of this paper is to follow the traits of 
the characters in Gurnah's The Last Gift  in order to show how their 
colonial experience and migrant background model their 
inter/intra personal relationships and define their lost but found 
identity as the events of the story progress. Herein lays the 
question of their authentic or inauthentic existence in a world 
immersed with fear and black stereotype. 

The Question of Authenticity
 Authenticity and in authenticity are found in the concept of 
existentialism. Existentialism designates the series of thinkers in 
the Post-Hegelian tradition of European philosophy. It became the 

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world of 'things,' immersed in 'everyday distraction,' 'absorbed 
idle chatter' and primarily concerned 'about the way things are” 
(30-31). According to Rubin, this is what Heidegger refers to as 
the “inauthentic modes of everyday existence” (42). The 
inauthentic modes of existence involves “dwelling in the world 
without being in control of it” (John Tiez 43). Authenticity is its 
direct opposite. Authenticity involves living according to “what is 
formally unique and particular to each individual human being, 
[since] the 'auth' in 'authenticity' means own, proper, or peculiar, 
what is authentic, then, is what is most my own, what is essential 
most proper or peculiar to me” (Carman 233). Here, authentic 
experience requires that “we choose ourselves in order to 
overcome or transcend those elements of life that we have no 
choice over, such as our parentage, biological makeup and place of 
birth” (Mathew McDonald 58). Authenticity here entails that 
characters in Gurnah's The Last Gift have been exposed to, or have 
been carried away by the 'publicness' of everyday living, and have 
thereby become alienated from their own trueness of being, for 
“when Da-sein [loosely translated as human existence] occupies 
itself entirely with its world of care and gives itself up to the 
publicity of the 'one like many,' something like a fight of the Da-
sein from itself as from its authentic potentiality of self-being 
reveals itself” (Heidegger 60).  Da-sein as a being there has a 
thrown existence. In other words, man's existence is an existence 
that is thrown without why. His existence has no ab initio 
meaning; meaning only comes to his existence by virtue of how 
and what he authentically makes out of it. Man first exists: “he 
materializes in the world, encounters himself, and only afterward 
defines himself. If man as existentialists conceive of him cannot be 
defined, it is because to begin with he is nothing. He will not be 
anything until later and then he will be what he makes of himself” 
(Jean-Paul Sartre 22). And because the essence of man as Da-sein 
is to exist, there are two ways in which he can live his life in the 
quest to actualize all his possibilities: he can live or exist 
authentically or in authentically. In Heidegger's determination, 
human reality is a reality whose meaning is defined in reference to 

of the word. They are always comfortable following others: their 
friends, parents, teachers, the media, trends, husbands and wives. 
Others' views and opinions often shape what they do. They think, 
most often, that it is more consequential to be likened and to fit in 
than it is to be themselves or to be truly who they are. Many of 
them always think that they are not good enough, that is, they lack 
self-worth and would require others' approval for them to be truly 
human. Consequent upon this, they always do everything within 
their ambit to be like others who they think are better than they are. 
One of the adverse effects of colonial and postcolonial 
experiences on the colonized people is that most people of African 
origin such as Hanna in Gurnah's The Last Gift, still think that 
being African in culture and in values is a sign of primitivism, 
barbarism and lack of civility; thus, they do everything to appear 
like the white even when the facts point to the contrary. By so 
doing, the necessity for authenticity becomes further relegated as 
a mark of weakness and not coping up with civilized norms. This 
makes them begin to drift along the inauthentic way of existence.

	 This study adopts Heidegger's concept of authenticity as 
its heuristic tool. In Being and Time, Heidegger talks about a 
certain special kind of being in the universe. That being he calls 
Da-sein or human being, human reality. While every other thing in 
the universe simply is only Da-sein or human being exists. 
Existence for this special kind of being, Heidegger says, “is a 
possibility which exceeds actuality” (294). It is a possibility 
because human existence is a project which continues to actualize 
itself with affirmative and purposive action. Heidegger calls this 
purposive action, authenticity. Authenticity refers to what is 
“formally unique and particular to each individual human being. 
The unique first-person structure of existence,” what Heidegger 
calls its “mineness” (Taylor Carman 233). According to Yalom 
qtd.in Shawn A. Rubin, the concepts of authenticity and 
inauthenticity activate two fundamental modes of existing in the 
world: “a state of forgetfulness of being, and a state of mindfulness 
of being. To live in the state of forgetfulness of being is to live in a 

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and is very changing according to environment and culture, 
because of transfer and sovereignty which leads to a confusion in 
identity" (Francis Chan I). As part of the effects of colonialism, 
what constitutes the colonized people's identity is not stable and 
fixed, rather it “emerges as a kind of unsettled space or an 
unresolved question in that space, between a number of 
intersecting discourses” (John Hall 10). The impact of colonial 
legacy was multi-dimensional, besides there was different 
consequences of colonialism in different locations, the issue of 
identity appeared in different shapes and forms. Collective and 
individual identities also differ physically and psychologically. 
The resistance of decolonization process took various outlines due 
to countries, societies and individuals. Therefore, identity "is not 
simply imposed. It is also chosen, and actively used, albeit within 
particular social contexts and constraints.

	 Through the lens of postcolonial authenticity and 
inauthenticity crisis situation of the characters, this paper covers 
the crisis of filiation that the Zanzibar family in Gurnah's The Last 
Gift suffers by benefiting also from Eduourd Glissant's theory of 
root identity. The crisis of filiation experienced by Gurnah's 
characters can be linked to what Glissant refers to as “root 
identity” and its “predatory effects.” Root identity, according to 
Glissant rests on the “violence of filiation, of a genealogy going 
back to a founding myth or origin of a land, which becomes a 
territory” and has to be preserved by being projected onto other 
territories, making their conquest legitimate” (33). This 
conception, misconception or lack of identity rests on the idea of 
autonomous self-perception of the Abbas family that then “sets in 
motion the thought of other and of voyage” (Tina Steiner 127) as 
the paper closes up with Abba's family and the crisis of filiation.

Authenticity/Inauthenticity: Abbas's Family and the Crisis of 
Filiation
Abbas is the major character in Gurnah's The Last Gift. He is 
portrayed as an immigrant character that lives in exile for forty-

other realities. In other words, man as an existing being, does not 
exist alone. He exists with other human beings, and it is through 
the reality of these other human beings like us that meaning is 
conferred on our individual existence. But, while living with 
others, Heidegger further warns that man must not allow the fact 
of the other to deny him his individual authenticity. Man must not 
allow the reality of “the human other” to rob him the reality of his 
own individuality. In other words, although man is a being that 
lives with others, his existence is not a collective existence but an 
individual existence who has his own life to live and his own death 
to die, his own identity to protect, and his own unique mannerism. 
For Heidegger, “if Da-sein makes no choice, and allows himself to 
be carried away by an 'undefined public,' 'the nobody,' 'everybody' 
and 'they factors,' 'Da-sein' ensnares himself in inauthenticity” 
(268). Heidegger however says that this process can still be 
reversed if Da-sein will endeavour to “bring itself back to itself 
from its 'lostness' in the 'they' life-world (268). When this happens, 
human existence becomes authentic and impactful. This is the 
state of rediscovery of being that happens when Hanna comes to 
the realisation that she cannot fit into the normal British life of 
Nick's family in Gurnah's The Last Gift.

The Question of Identity
In postcolonial context, identity is a complex concept that would 
be difficult to define. The identification of an individual or a group 
or a nation in postcolonial terms is related to the "other:" that 
means the post-colonies recognize themselves "us" with the 
existence of the "other." Otherness is a feature to recognize 
identity in postcolonial era, which also means it is twofold, "both 
identity and difference, so that every other, every different than 
and excluded by is dialectically created and includes the values 
and meaning of the colonizing culture even as it rejects its power 
to define" (Sachchidanand Sinha 4). In addition, this binary 
relation of otherness created a kind of identity dislocation and 
paved a hierarchical situation in the period. The national identity 
that's formed in a post-colonial states "is believed to be never fixed 

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says “Hanna used to say to Jamal that they were a strange family, 
an odd family. Their mother was an abandoned baby who had no 
idea of her real parents, and their father never spoke about his” 
(29; ch.1, pt. 1). This family lives in this circle of lost root identity 
in the text. The narrative voice reveals that Abbas never talked to 
his children about their place of origin. So, Hanna is right to have 
insinuated that they are a strange family. We read from the narrator 
that Jamal patted his father on the thigh and asked him:
	        Why do you never talk about your family? Because he 

never had, at least never to do 	 much more than 
draw a sketchy picture of a miserly father and a put-
upon mother. Sometimes, often, he talked 	about 
being a sailor and the countries he visited, or the 	
various bad jobs he had had to do over the years 
before he settled into the 	one he 	did for	the rest of 
his life, as an engineer in the electronics factory. But 
never about his family or 	even about where he cam 
from. When they were younger Hanna or Jamal 
asked, in the 	 uncomplicated way of children, 
about where their grandparents were or what they 
were like, or other questions of that kind, but most of 
the time their father brushed their 	 q u e s t i o n s 
aside, sometimes with a smile and sometimes 
without. You don't want to know about that, he would 
say. Now and then he would tell them things, precious 
little 	 things as they seemed to Jamal, but nothing 
very precise, nothing very concrete. It was 	 as if 
he spoke out of a reverie, unguarded for a few 
moments, holding up a fragment of a whimsy before 
letting it float away into the blinding light (32; ch. 1, 
pt. 1).

The question above ignites a certain feeling of frustration and filial 
groping in Hanna who could not imagine why their parents' 
identity remains a mystery to them. She probes the psyche of 
Jamal out of frustration: 

three years. The novel opens with an insight about Abbas's migrant 
life when the narrative voice states “one day, long before the 
troubles, he slipped away without saying a word to anyone and 
never went back. And then another day, forty-three years later” (1; 
ch. 1, pt. 1). In running away from home, Abbas plunged his 
family into the crisis of filiation or root identity. This case of 
unknown identity endures from the beginning of the text through 
to Abba's lifetime. The family has only got to have a peephole into 
their root through the tape his wife, Maryam passed on to his 
children, Hanna or Anna and Jamal. Hanna becomes outraged for 
not knowing a single thing about her own background. And so, she 
is always eager to fight at the slightest mention of root identity. As 
it is said, an ageing is always uncomfortable whenever bone 
related issue is being talked about. Even though Hanna and Jamal 
seem they have their own autonomy and have liberated 
themselves from their immigrant status to the point they can now 
lead normal British lives in England, they do not have any sense of 
belonging, because they carry the feeling of their lost identity like 
a snail carries its shell in the manner of the classical Sisyphusian 
myth. Hanna, for instance, prefers to be called Anna since it 
sounds more British. She strives to create the image of a proper 
English girl. She wants to construct an identity for herself that is 
proper in Europe, and that is why the narrative voice says that “she 
herself preferred to be called Anna, and that was the name she used 
outside the house” (Gurnah 33; ch. 1, pt. 1), and she has already 
told her teacher “'I hate the name Hanna,' she said. 'I don't know 
where they got it from'” (34). This is exactly what Heidegger 
refers to as “fallen:” a situation where man allows himself to be 
swallowed up by the cares of the world, he becomes fallen. And 
when this happens, Heidegger asserts, “he becomes inauthentic 
and lost in the 'they' life world” (32). According to Unah and 
Osegenwune, its authentic opposite “marks the tension between 
the individual's ability to attain self-realization in the midst of 
limiting conditions of facticity” (229).

	 In talking about the Abbas's family, the narrative voice 

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benign smile and asked her, 'And 	where do youcome 
from?' 'Anna's 	 B r i t i s h , '  N i c k  s a i d  c u r t l y, 
answering for her. Anthony made a soft snorting 
noise. 	 'Yes, 	 of course Anna's British,' Uncle 
Digby said. 'But what was she before she was British?' 	
They were all looking at her, waiting for her to speak, 
to tell them 	 what her real nation 	 w a s .  S h e 
wished she could get up and leave, and walk quickly 
to the train station and 	 travel to wherever her real 
nation was. She wished she had more panache and 
knew 	 how to charm people she did not like. 
'Where are your parents from, Anna?' Uncle 	
Digby asked, still kindly but smiling less fully, 
perhaps made suspicious by Anna's 	 silence. 'My 
father is 	 from East Africa,' Anna said, hating Uncle 	
Digby for being an 	 oily old fake and hating 
herself for being intimidated into a 	 disclosure 
that she had no 	 faith in. She had almost said I think 
but she had managed to suppress that (79-80).

 After a puzzling silence, Uncle Digby goes on to ask, “'you 
don't know where your father comes from! Well, I find this hard to 
believe'” (80). Anna lives in the state of forgetfulness of being in 
what Heidegger calls inauthentic mode of everyday existence. 
That's the reason she is lost in this whole web of uncomfortable 
familiarity with Nick's family. Answering uncle Digby, Anna says, 
“'I don't know,' Anna repeated, unable to think of anything else to 
say” (80). Anna is rejecting that position of weakness of being lost. 
It has become imperative for her to get on with her life, however 
uncertain and inauthentic her identity is. 

	 Maryam's own story is another web of a filial nightmare. 
The narrative voice describes how she was fostered from one 
household to another. This is exactly why Anna retorts, “I just wish 
their stories were not so pathetic and sordid” (132). Anna was 
almost drawn into tears when Nick told her: 

	   'They are lost,' she said. 'Ba deliberately lost himself a 
long time ago, and Ma found herself lost from the 
beginning, a foundling. What I want from them is a 
story that has a	beginning that is tolerable and open and 
not one that is tripped with hesitations and silences. 
Why is that so difficult? I want to be able to say this is 
what I am. Yes, I 	know, so has every human being who 
has ever given the matter any thought, but I don't want 
to crack the mystery of the soul or the nature of being. I 
just want some simple boring details. Instead we get 
snippets of secret stories we cannot ask about and 
cannot speak 	 about. I hate it. Sometimes it makes 
me feel that I am living a life of hiding and shame 	 (33; 
ch.1, pt. 1).

  Hanna's struggle with identity triggers some feeling of 
curiosity in Jamal as a student of migration trends and policies in 
the European Union. This is why Jamal, “always, when he saw 
someone like him, someone dark, someone as old as his 
neighbour, he wanted to ask, where are you from? Have you come 
a long way? How can you bear to be so far away? Was it so 
intolerable there, wherever it was? It must have been, for you to 
choose to live in this ugly northern city. How has it been here in all 
these years? Have you come through? (60).
	 In the dinner scene with Nick's family, Uncle Digby 
pushes Anna a lot about her origin. That's why she is very 
uncomfortable in their company. It is equally the very reason she 
contemplates on not wanting to marry or bear a child for Nick. She 
feels so uncomfortable with Uncle Digby's constant chasing of her 
background. She just does not want to keep up with the Nick's and 
live in that internal distress all the rest of her life. Anna's 
belongingness to a British society in Nick's family becomes 
questionable since her identity is indefinable. She cannot trace her 
root. The following conversation speaks volume:
	       At some point Uncle Digby, who was sitting across 

from her, turned towards her 	 with a 	pungent ly 

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	 Identity filiation in Gurnah's The Last Gift is a sustaining 
construct that holds the narrative of the novel from the beginning 
to the end. Having forced Abbas to speak into the radio tape which 
Maryam handed over to Hanna and Jamal as the metaphorical last 
gift, they started to trace their root. First, they tried to see if there is 
any existing conviction of who the parents of their mother are. 
Unfortunately, this revelation was not made as their attempt was 
nothing but futile. On the letter he writes to his sister Hanna, Jamal 
comes to the conclusion that “of course we'll go to Zanzibar. I want 
to see that tree where our father was shelling groundnuts while the 
great world was churning just out of eyeshot” (185). This going 
back is a way of humanity. That is why Uncle Digby waved 
Hanna's words away when she told him that she does not know 
where her parents come from. The narrative voice says that:
	     We see families falling apart because children do not 

want to know about the world their parents came from. 
To keep communities together, host and stranger need 
to know each other, but we cannot know each other if 
we don't know ourselves. We who care for the welfare 
of immigrants work as hard as we know how to get that 
message across, to encourage people to know. Those 
words I am British feel like a cold tragic blast to me 	
sometimes'” (80). 

 At the end, even if Hanna and Jamal could not locate the 
root of their mother's parentage, they are well aware of their 
father's. It is therefore the position of this paper that so many 
Africans living in Europe with lost identities should trace their 
identity. It is only through this rediscovery of self that everything 
authentic in them would come to full actualization. 

Conclusion
Using Rene Girard's mimetic theory, Belachew Gebrewold has 
argued that African migration to Europe is not primarily driven by 
poverty and violence but by a mimetic desire to be like the former 
colonizers and to live among them. Gebrewold listed these 

	    'I mean I feel sorry for people like you because you don't 
know how to look after 	 yourselves. Your father was 
a whingeing tyrant, bullying everyone with one misery 	
or another, in the grip of a psychic crisis, so it seemed. 
But he only had diabetes, a 	 t h o r o u g h l y  t r e a t a b l e 
disease, that's all. Your mother was an abandoned baby 
and 	doesn't 	 know who she is. Well, it doesn't 
take a genius to find out that kind of information. Why 	
couldn't she just pay an agency to check it out for her? Or 
why couldn't you, or your 	 brother, do it for her? She, 
and all of you, would have known within days. But no, it 	
had to be another festering drama. And then it turns out 
your father is an absconder and a 	 bigamist  but he 
couldn't just talk about this, 	the whole crowd of you in 
the grip of a 	hope less  melodrama,  ac t ing  l ike 
immigrants' (157).

 This incident becomes an eye opener to Hanna. She not 
only walks away from Nick, she also comes to terms with her 
authentic self. That one is born short, slim, black, poor, born into a 
certain family and country are existential “givens,” in Heidegger's 
habit of though, which have the capacity to weigh man down in 
perpetual grumbling. These facts are not of man's making. He is 
born into them and most often make man fallen with tendencies 
for resignation. As such, the feeling that we are “factically” 
thrown into the world, most often makes man run away from 
action, from choice and from himself. Man at birth, does not 
choose to be born nor the type of family to be born into, yet he is 
born anyway, and expected to accept these facts of existence with 
existential equanimity, which is where authenticity comes in. 
Hanna's realisation that she will perpetually bear immigrant status 
in Nick's family opens her eyes to find root into her own identity. 
Her real self that would now prefer to be called Hanna—with Mr. 
Agbo voice, instead of the soft and easy British name, Anna, 
begins to surge up. 

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her brother Jamal, African migrant characters should trace and 
re/locate their root for them to actually have a well-defined 
understanding of themselves. It is time Africans moved and 
owned their authentic selves both in writing and in action. 
Rediscovery and reassertion are the key functional relations the 
African migrant characters, and of course, in the life-world, 
should aim at and become intentional with. The good news is that 
no time is too late to call the self out from the “they life world” and 
affirm the self. In other words, the “they” life experience is just a 
stroll away which can be reversed the moment one realizes oneself 
and takes a firm and resolute decision towards self-retrieval. This 
is possible because what is lost in the “they” life is not a permanent 
state of being. Therefore, the existential call for self-retrieval from 
the “they” world is what Heidegger understands as authenticity, 
“When Da-sein thus brings itself back from the 'they,' the they-self 
is modified in all existential manner so that it becomes authentic 
Being-one's self” (313). The effort so far made in this paper is 
targeted at exposing Da-sein's potentiality to transcend its 
“throwness,” “fallenness” in order to actualize its individuality, 
“mineness” of being.

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	 The interrogation of “root identity as a Postcolonial 
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to the observation of crisis of filiation and exposes the challenges 
migrant characters face as it affects their growth and maturation. 
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perpetually lost. It is the conclusion and recommendation of this 
paper that African migrant characters and to a very large extent, 
the narrative life-world should portray characters that stand tall to 
what is essentially authentic “mineness” to them. Like Hanna and 

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Authenticity Crisis in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s The Last Gift

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