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Abstract
This article examines plumbing and water in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Admiring Silence through the blue humanities. Although criticism has largely approached the novel through migration, silence, and diaspora, its insistent imagery of blocked toilets, broken pipes, sewers, irregular supply, and the later “water of memory” and “water of oblivion” has rarely been treated as a recurrent and uneven watery pattern. Using qualitative textual analysis, the study attends to the novel’s water as storied matter that is at once literal and figurative, and follows how that water fails to sustain the forms of life it should carry. The argument shows that plumbing first narrates the breakdown of domestic and civic circulation, then carries the loss of the past inward, and finally returns as the narrator’s wish to study plumbing and restore water’s interrupted flow. Plumbing therefore becomes the storied point at which damaged habitation, threatened memory, and the desire for return are brought together, offering a water-centred account of Gurnah’s fiction.
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