The study offers a reading on how silence has been presented as a strategy for trauma enunciation in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s selected novels: Paradise (1994) and Desertion (2005). It also explores how migration and racial differences have led to the muteness of the characters. This is in order to fill the critical lacuna that exists in the available scholarship on the author. As of now he has written eight novels but the study has focused on two of them because of their poignant deployment of silence. The novels are considered postcolonial because of the historical period that they depict. Hence, the study uses the postcolonial theory in studying them. Besides it, semiotics is applied in the interpretation of silence. The study is based in the library. It involves intensive reading of the two primary texts. It also involved extensive reading of the historiography of East Africa, critical works on Gurnah and the two novels.
