The Alienation of The Other: A Study of Animal Metaphors in Gurnah’s Paradi

Tanzanian-British author Abdulrazak Gurnah is the Nobel Prize in Literature laureate of 2021. To date, he has published ten novels, including Paradise (1994), By the Sea (2002), and Afterlives (2020), which primarily depict the living conditions of people in African colonies, focusing on issues such as identity, gender oppression, and racial conflict. His representative work Paradise, through the coming-of-age journey of a debt slave boy from German East Africa, just portrays the plight of The Other under the intertwined influences of tradition, patriarchy, and colonial systems. This study takes Gurnah's Paradise as the research object, combining Sartre's theory of The Other with the perspective of animal metaphors. Through close textual analysis, it ultimately selects three pairs of highly symbolic animal images, which are “wolf and wolf-people”, “crocodile and goat”, and “pigeon and dog”, to systematically analyze their metaphorical connections with the individual, gender, and race Other. Further investigation reveals that commodity trade and slavery serves as primary causes for the physical and spiritual alienation of these Others. Within the macro-historical context of colonialism, the colonized were traded as commodities and tamed like livestock, ultimately losing freedom and dignity, thereby being transformed from humans into objects and beasts. This study thus aims to enrich the current academic research in interpreting animal metaphors in Paradise, offering fresh perspectives for examining social discrimination rooted in gender and race and so on. By prompting readers to reflect on related real-world issues, it advocates for the construction of a more diverse and inclusive society.