PUBLISHING BOOKS literature such as Gurnah ’ s — stories about seismic political , economic , romantic events that uproot people and send them across oceans — will eventually find their way .
Gurnah had strong support from other writers , including Bloomsbury ’ s Aminatta Forna and Kamila Shamsie . I treasured that support , but could not understand why he wasn ’ t acclaimed as one of today ’ s finest novelists and a great African writer .
When I took on By the Sea , I was not to know that the concerns of that novel , the plight of refugees , would not recede , but grow and grow with a series of humanitarian crises worldwide , forcing people to risk everything in search of new lives .
The power of fiction
Fiction is one of the most powerful ways to absorb and understand world events , and Gurnah has for decades been writing such stories . Twenty years after publishing By the Sea , a new manuscript arrived , of Gurnah ’ s latest , Afterlives . In May last year , just months before its publication , the
Black Lives Matter protests happened . I thought this is it , his moment has come . I was sure Gurnah would be included in the Booker list — this was an important and timely new novel from one of Africa ’ s greatest living writers , at this moment in history . Surely it would be included ?
But it wasn ’ t . Neither did it make the Costa Prize list . It was longlisted for the Walter Scott Prize for historical fiction and shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for political fiction . And that was it . I had to face the fact
Abdulrazak Gurnah – invoking ubiquitous nostalgia for pre-colonial Africa
ANDERS OLSSON
The Nobel Prize in Literature for
2021 is awarded to the novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah , born in Zanzibar and active in England , “ for his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents .”
Abdulrazak Gurnah was born in 1948 and grew up on the island of Zanzibar in the Indian Ocean but arrived in England as a refugee in the end of the 1960s . After the peaceful liberation from British colonial rule in December 1963 , Zanzibar went through a revolution which , under president Abeid Karume ’ s regime , led to oppression and persecution of citizens of Arab origin ; massacres occurred . Gurnah belonged to the victimized ethnic group and after finishing school was forced to leave his family and flee the country , by then the newly formed Republic of Tanzania . He was eighteen years old . Not until 1984 was it possible for him to return to Zanzibar , allowing him to see his father shortly before the father ’ s death . Gurnah has until his recent retirement been Professor of English and Postcolonial Literatures at the University of Kent in Canterbury , focusing principally on writers such as Wole Soyinka , Ng g wa Thiong ’ o , and Salman Rushdie .
Gurnah has published ten novels and a number of short stories . The
theme of the refugee ’ s disruption runs throughout his work . He began writing as a 21-year-old in English exile , and even though Swahili was his first language , English became his literary tool . He has said that in Zanzibar , his access to literature in Swahili was virtually nil and his earliest writing could not strictly be counted as literature . Arabic and Persian poetry , especially The Arabian Nights , were an early and significant wellspring for him , as were the Quran ’ s surahs . But the Englishlanguage tradition , from Shakespeare to V . S . Naipaul , would especially mark his work . That said , it must be stressed that he consciously breaks with convention , upending the colonial perspective to highlight that of the indigenous populations . Thus , his novel Desertion ( 2005 ) about a love affair becomes a blunt contradiction to what he has called “ the imperial romance ”, where a conventionally European hero returns home from romantic escapades abroad , upon which the story reaches its inevitable , tragic resolution . In Gurnah , the tale continues on African soil and never actually ends .
In all his work , Gurnah has striven to avoid the ubiquitous nostalgia for a more pristine pre-colonial Africa . His own background is a culturally diversified island in the Indian Ocean , with a history of slave trade and various forms of oppression under a number of colonial powers – Portuguese , Arab , German and British – and with trade connections with the entire world . Zanzibar was a cosmopolitan society before globalization .
Gurnah ’ s dedication to truth and his aversion to simplification are striking . This can make him bleak and uncompromising , at the same time as he follows the fates of individuals with great compassion and unbending commitment . His novels recoil from stereotypical descriptions and open our gaze to a culturally diversified East Africa unfamiliar to many in other parts of the world . In Gurnah ’ s literary universe , everything is shifting – memories , names , identities . This is probably because his project cannot reach completion in any definitive sense .
Anders Olsson is the chairman of the Nobel Committee , The Swedish Academy
Indian Printer & Publisher | 1 November 2021
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