Author's name: Abdul Razzaq Gurnah

In his novel, The Last Gift, British novelist Abdulrazaq Salim Gurnah, born to Hadrami parents on the island of Zanzibar in 1948, addresses themes of identity, the unspoken, and the secrets associated with family origins that parents may conceal from their children. He also delves deeply into the components of that identity, such as the self, the family home, migration, and exile, through the detailed life of the couple, Abbas and Maryam, who met in a factory in the British city of Exeter around 1974. She was seventeen years old, while he was thirty-four. He was a sailor from an unnamed African country. As an infant, her family abandoned her and left him at the hospital gate. She was passed from one adoptive family to another until she was taken in by an Indian couple whose apparent kindness masked their cruel treatment of her. For this reason, she didn't hesitate to run away with Abbas when he said to her, "Oh God [sic], let us go!" Abbas did not tell Maryam anything about his origins, nor did his son Jamal, nor his daughter Hanaa, who was born and raised in Britain and feels completely British, which is why she removed the letter “ha” from her name and became “Anna”!

At first, Abbas refused to tell his wife anything about his past or origins, and he remained careful not to delve into his early life and to keep it a secret. However, when he suffered one of the strokes he suffered, he was forced to reveal to his wife, little by little, how he came from Zanzibar on the coast of East Africa and settled in Britain. “She wants me to talk,” he says. “She tells me it will do me good. She says I should talk so the children will know the things I haven’t told them. She says they’re afraid of my secrets. I tell her that parents always have secrets to hide from their children. Don’t they? And how did they know I had secrets to be afraid of? My father was poor as a child, but when I knew him, he was tough and scary. He was a short man who never stopped giving orders. I don’t think I cared what he didn’t tell me about his life. Even if I had, I wouldn’t have known how to ask him to tell me anything. And even if I had and asked him to tell me, he wouldn’t have told me anything just because I cared. And I never heard my mother talk about her childhood or her past… Everyone has stories.”
Likewise, his daughter Hana/Anna, who also wanted to be free from the “miserable tragedies of immigrants” and to be able to accept some of the unaccountable elements of her family’s origins, asked her parents to reveal the truth about their origins, and says that “instead, they live with a constant sense of schizophrenia and shame.”