Abdulrazak Gurnah |
Abdulrazak Gurnah: Out of Africa
Displacement and colonial scars inform the novels of the new Nobel laureate in literature
ABDULRAZAK GURNAH TICKS many of the boxes that the top literature prize might seek to fulfil in 2021. Born in 1948, he could be labelled a Zanzibari writer, an East African writer, an African writer, a British writer. While he defies easy classification, his themes are always displacement, abandonment, identity and home. He is the first Black African writer in 35 years to win after Wole Soyinka’s 1986 glory.
He is originally from Zanzibar and fled his country of origin as an 18-year-old. In the early 1960s, massacres were carried out on people of Arabic origin. Gurnah belonged to the “victimised ethnic group” and on finishing school, fled with his family. Until his recent retirement, he was a professor of English and Postcolonial Literatures at the University of Kent in Canterbury, where he taught writers such as Wole Soyinka, Ngg wa Thiong’o and Salman Rushdie. It is the same university from where he obtained his PhD in 1982. Postcolonialism has been central to both his academia and his literature.
In his most recent novel Afterlives (2020), he looks at how colonialism affects generation after generation. Set in East Africa, from the late 19th to mid-20th century, it recounts the story of three boys. It was a time when the Germans, British, French, Belgians, Portuguese and Italians were all trying to lay claim to Africa. The book in particular details the cruelties of the German forces, even while focusing on the story of a couple Khalifa and Asha, who married in 1907. This was the time when the Maji Maji uprising (an armed rebellion of Islamic and animist Africans against German colonial rule in East Africa) was at its peak. Gurnah writes of this uprising that was crushed by the German forces: “The German command saw that the revolt could not be defeated by military means alone and proceeded to starve the people into submission. In the regions that had risen, they treated everyone as combatants. They burned villages and trampled fields and plundered food stores. African bodies were left hanging on roadside gibbets in a landscape that was scorched and terrorised. In the part of the country where Khalifa and Asha lived, they only knew of these events from hearsay.”
Gurnah talks about historical events from personal points of view, with empathy and insight. His characters seem to know that tragedy lurks around every corner, but this does not petrify them; instead, it strengthens their resolve. The Nobel Prize celebrates his “uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents.”
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