On October 7, 2021, Abdulrazak Gurnah got a call from the Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy 15 minutes before the announcement of the Nobel Prize for Literature was made. He half-thought he was being pranked. Gurnah was convinced only when he saw the news flashing that he has won the most prestigious literary prize for his “uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fates of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents.”
Born in Zanzibar, an island off the coast of Tanzania, in 1948, Gurnah grew up looking at the docks from the window of his bedroom. He saw sailors and traders from Gujarat, Oman and Yemen make merry and money — “it was impossible not to know you were part of a wider world with its own centre of gravity,” he says.
After the brutal revolution of 1964 in Zanzibar that led to the overthrow of the Arab government, the harbours became empty. Soon after, Gurnah left for England to study, and later, to teach as a professor of post-colonial literature at the University of Canterbury. He never traced back that journey.
Today, he lives in Canterbury with a British passport. But his novels keep transcribing the distance between one home and the other, filled as they are with yearning for a place where one can feel free, even if one necessarily isn’t. In a Zoom interview, Gurnah talks about the guilt and gumption of being a post-colonial writer.
In your Nobel lecture, you spoke of how you began writing in your schooldays — “I wrote because I was instructed to write, and because I found such pleasure in the exercise.” Over the decades, as your relationship with writing changed, what has it done to the pleasure and innocence of the act?
In my childhood I did not think what writing was for. It was the teacher asking us to tell something, and everybody would just sit quietly for an hour and see what comes. Always, something came. But when you are writing fiction, you are making something up, intended for someone you don’t know. You are speaking to the world, an unspecified audience, and so you’re crafting something that will, hopefully, be read forever.
As to pleasure, I remember there was a time, not so long ago, when we would write long letters, intended just for one person. When you are writing or reading a letter, it is almost like that person is in front of you. You might laugh or smile at the jokes. There is something very intimate about that.
Writing fiction, you are much more self-conscious about what it is that the words are doing and what you want them to do. The pleasure in writing fiction is in having an approach or an idea, and actually delivering it, conveying it with beauty — though not always successfully.
Your sentences are spare. You don’t succumb to emotions easily. Is this a conscious choice?
In Afterlives I wrote short sentences, but elsewhere I have written very long sentences. It depends on the kind of voice you are trying to generate, particularly if the voice is in the first person — whether the characters wants to speak directly or in a fuller, more mellifluous, poetic way. I think about my sentences, for sure, but I don’t necessarily torture them too much.
Your books read like testimonies. What is the relationship between testimony and literature? When does testimony become literature?
There is a genre called testimony — mostly a Latin American form which is used for polemics.
But there is another way of giving testimony, which is what I am interested in — to tell your story, something that has been suppressed, which needs to be revealed. I used this form in The Last Gift and Gravel Heart, where a father tries to explain to his son the meaning of certain events in the past. Here, it is not inviting judgement. It is a gesture, sometimes a gift, an attempt at explaining. This has a different tone. I am interested in how families are secretive about certain things — usually for what they think are good reasons. Sometimes these are quite big things, and they create something sad and sorrowful among family members.
I remember a journalist talking to me about The Last Gift — where the father and mother keep their secrets from their children. She said that only when her mother died, she found out that she had one of those tattoos stamped on inmates of concentration camps. That is the kind of thing I am talking about.
You quoted D.H. Lawrence’s poem in your Nobel acceptance speech. Poetry is interspersed with your prose too. Why do you keep reaching out to poetry?
I don’t always recognise the border between prose and poetry, to be honest. Sometimes, poetry is useful as a way of being intertextual — bringing in another text which enables a swift and complex connection, enlarging the idea you want to explore. It is a way of expressing how a person’s imagination works.
There are often Indian-origin characters in your novels. What is your sense of India?
My sense of India has always been comprehensive. The part of Zanzibar I grew up in had a large population of Indians — Hindus, Ismailis, Ithna’asharis, Bohras. They were shopkeepers, traders, builders and contractors. So I grew up with Indian boys, played hockey and cricket together, visited each other’s houses. This mixing wasn’t odd or exceptional — there were marriages sometimes, but not very often because of religious and other considerations that communities used to closed themselves in.
After the revolution of 1964, there was panic because it targeted business and moneyed people. There was a great exodus of Indians. Many of those who didn’t leave were targeted. If you go to Zanzibar now you will find only a handful of Indians and empty streets where they used to live. Their influence, however, is still there in the architecture, in the food, in the Swahili that folded in various Hindi and Indian-language words. But the people themselves are not there any more.
You have often spoken about the “miserliness” of European culture vis-à-vis the refugees it refuses to accept. Yet this is the culture you chose to live in. Your novels also have this uneasy relationship between the home you were born in and the home you later make for yourself. Is this tension something your characters inherited from you?
I would say it is one of the subjects I am deeply interested in. Partly because it is my experience. But what makes it so interesting is that it is the phenomenon of our times, where millions of people are in the same situation as I am in — not living in the same place one started from. Both these places — the absent and the actual one — have a vitality and a compelling engagement. As a subject, it is rich, full of possibilities. But of course, there is something tragic as well because of what a person loses in the process of being separated from people, or memories, or just the conviviality of a people who would understand you more fully than those in the place you are living.
Is there guilt then, in writing about a culture you no longer physically inhabit?
You mean, is there guilt about living away from your home? Of course, there is guilt. The guilt is to do with the people you have left behind, and how they are coping, and whether you are doing enough to help them. Perhaps the guilt is also that you are living among people who don’t need you. With time, you learn to live with it.
Have you been able to read and write through this haze of fame?
Since the announcement of the Nobel, I haven’t been doing anything other than talking to people like you (laughs).
Is that a good or a bad thing?
Well, for a while, it is unavoidable. It is global. It is wonderful. And if people want to know you or and hear you, that’s fine too.
The writer is a critic with a weekly online newsletter titled prathyush.substack.com
