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Abdulrazak Gurnah
Abdulrazak Gurnah Photography © Mark Pringle
Tanzanian novelist wins Nobel Prize in literature
Congratulations to Abdulrazak Gurnah, who in October became the first Tanzanian to win the prestigious literary award. The writer left Zanzibar when he was 18 and exile and escape have been recurring themes in his work. Jahazi takes a closer look at the career of the now US$ 1,150,000 richer author.
On October 11, when Zanzibar-born author Abdulrazak Gurnah first got the call informing him he had won the Nobel prize in literature, he assumed someone was playing a joke. It was only after he put the phone down and it immediately rang again, heralding a succession of calls from the world’s media desperate for an interview that it began to sink in.
The Nobel prize in literature is the world’s most famous literary award with a roll-call of laureates that goes back to 1901 and which includes luminaries such as Ernest Hemingway, Toni Morrison and Bob Dylan. Gurnah’s place on that list is a landmark with the writer not only becoming the first Tanzanian to win but also the first black African recipient since Nigeria’s Wole Soyinka in 1986.
Leaving Zanzibar
While Gurnah may have met the news with incredulity, there are many in the literary world who have long thought the 73-year-old author was overdue such global recognition. Since starting writing seriously in his early 20s, he has published 10 highly acclaimed novels and a number of short stories. His fourth novel, ‘Paradise’, was shortlisted for the UK’s Booker Prize in 1994, while his most recent release, ‘Afterlives’, was among the six nominated novels for this year’s Orwell Prize for Political Fiction – another UK award.
Gurnah left Zanzibar in 1966 when he was 18 years old. The aftermath of the revolution in 1964, when the Sultan of Zanzibar and his mainly Arab government were overthrown, was still being keenly felt by the islands’ Muslims and the young Gurnah was forced to leave his family behind and flee to the UK as a refugee.
The country has become his adopted home. He now lives in Canterbury, in the south-east of England, where he continues to write and was until his recent retirement the emeritus professor of English at Kent University. Still his East African roots and the indelible sense of dislocation that stemmed from being wrenched from his homeland never left him and became predominant themes in his fiction.
While memories of his early years in Zanzibar remained strong, he looked even further back as a writer, detailing the African experience – in the intimate spaces created by families, companions and friendships – during the warring British and German colonial control in the late 19th century.
African lives
Novelist Maaza Mengiste, writing for UK newspaper The Guardian, says these sensitive portrayals of ordinary African lives in extraordinary circumstances create a fresh understanding of history. “Each of Gurnah’s novels focus on the stories of those whose stories might not have made it into the archives or who lack the documents that would make them memorable to the larger world. But these shopkeepers, homemakers, askaris, students and refugees all matter to him and in the course of his writing, he makes them meaningful and complicated, and reminds us that every single one is worthy of remembrance.”
These elements of Gurnah’s work were also singled out by the Nobel committee announcing the award with chair Anders Olsson praising the author’s “uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents” in a body a work that “recoils from stereotypical descriptions and opens our gaze to a culturally diversified East Africa unfamiliar to many in other parts of the world”.
New audience
Gurnah began taking his writing seriously in exile. Even though Swahili was his first language, he wrote in English and the well-read scholar makes nods to literary classics of the language such as Chaucer’s ‘The Canterbury Tales’ in his second novel, ‘Pilgrim’s Way’, and to Joseph Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’ in his most famous novel, ‘Paradise’, in which a young enslaved Tanzanian follows his merchant owner on a treacherous journey into the Congo Basin.
Despite leaving Zanzibar in his teens and not returning for close to 20 years – he was allowed to see his father shortly before he died – memories of the Swahili coast and its indigenous people remained vivid from his place of exile. He conjures a cosmopolitan region globalised by trade connections with the entire world and yet betrayed by a history of slave trading and colonial oppression – Portuguese, Arab, German and British – that challenged personal freedom. Such a shifting sense of national identity and kinship is further complicated by becoming a refugee and many of Gurnah’s characters find themselves detached from their homeland and come to question their allegiances and place in the world as a result.
The Nobel prize should bring a new audience to an author who has flown under the radar of many readers, including those in his East African homeland. It has become the world’s most famous prize for literature since being established (along with awards in the fields of physics, chemistry, medicine and peace) in the will of Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel in 1901. Gurnah joins a roll call of distinguished laureates, all of whom have in the words of Nobel been deemed “the person who shall have produced in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction”. The winner gets a medal, a diploma from the King of Sweden and prize money, which this year is worth 10 million Swedish Krona (US$ 1,150,000).
Reading Abdulrazak Gurnah
The writer has an extensive back catalogue of novels, short stories and essays, so here’s a few ideas on where to start.
MEMORY OF DEPARTURE
Gurnah’s debut novel was released in 1987 and centres on talented teen Hassan’s efforts to escape his stunted life on the East African coast for a new start in Nairobi only to be drawn back in.
PARADISE
The story of a young Tanzanian boy, Yusuf, pawned by his father to work for a powerful Arab merchant and accompany him on a treacherous trading trip into the Congo Basin. It’s part coming of age tale, part love story and paints a vivid picture of an Africa increasingly corrupted by colonialism and violence.
BY THE SEA
This tale of love and betrayal was longlisted for the 2002 Booker prize and shortlisted for the Los Angeles Times book prize in fiction. It focuses on two Zanzibari asylum seekers in the UK with an intimate shared history who struggle to truly leave their past behind.
THE STATELESS PERSON’S TALE
This affecting short work is Gurnah’s relaying of the plight of a refugee he met who has lost his identity documents and been detained in the UK for 12 years. It is included in the Refugee Tales book series released to raise awareness about the situation of many refugees and migrants in the UK.
AFTERLIVES
Gurnah’s most recent novel focuses on the people enduring German rule in East Africa at the beginning of the twentieth century, including those whose allegiances and identity are tested by signing up as askaris serving in the German Colonial Army.
