<p>This article offers a psychoanalytic exploration of Yusuf, the protagonist of Abdulrazak Gurnah’s novel <i>Paradise</i>, tracing how his Bildungsroman-like journey from childhood separation to enslavement and conscription by German soldiers reflects the entanglement of trauma, memory, and the psyche. It challenges linear conceptions of memory by showing that Yusuf’s traumatic recollections, non-linear, resistant to temporal resolution, and often unspeakable, emerge in both declarative and non-declarative forms, leaving somatic and behavioural imprints, which also highlights the narrative craft of Gurnah. Situated within East Africa’s colonial order, Yusuf’s cumulative traumas like early separation from parents, coercive servitude, sexual menace, and the internalisation of subjugation, fracture his psyche, producing anxiety, nightmares, and hallucinatory “dog dreams” that mark psychic movement rather than static pathology. Drawing on Freud’s concepts of repression and symptom formation alongside Dori Laub’s and Judith Alpert’s insights into witnessing, childhood trauma, and dream recurrence, the paper situates Yusuf not simply as an archetypal neurotic subject but as a colonized male negotiating psychic survival under domination. By reading his evolving dreams, silences, and mourning as partial survival strategies, the study highlights how individual and collective sociohistorical traumas shape the formation of subjectivity, revealing <i>Paradise</i> as a text where personal psychic fragmentation resonates with the region’s shared transgenerational trauma narratives.</p>