One morning in 1899, in a small town in East Africa “lost on the edge of civilization”, a kind of ghost appeared, his face and hands covered in cuts and traces of insect bites.
The man, a mzungu (a “white”, in Swahili), is collected in extremis by Hassanali, a small shopkeeper of Indian origin, who, like every morning, had risen early to open the mosque and call the first prayer of the day. Without knowing it yet, he had an appointment with fate and with legend.
“That’s how the Englishman Pearce had arrived, arousing emotion and causing a drama of which he was never fully aware. He had been robbed and abandoned in the middle of nowhere by his guides on his return from an “unbearable” hunting trip to Abyssinia.
Ignoring the prohibitions of local society and what his compatriots might think, this civil servant in transit after having been posted for a few years in Egypt, more open and curious than the average of his fellows, will become the lover of the sister Hassanali’s eldest, Rehana, abandoned by her husband. By telling us the story of this improbable encounter, full of holes and rumours, the narrator maintains that “the imagination is a form of truth”.
The second part ofFarewell Zanzibarthe seventh novel byAbdulrazak Gurnahplunges us fifty years later, during the 1950s, when the British colonial Empire begins to crumble.
The tangled and twisted threads of fate will come together when Amin, the narrator’s younger brother, has a passionate (and heartbreaking) love affair with Jamila, granddaughter of Rehana and Pearce. As if history repeated itself, carrying with it the same curses.
The third and last part is told to us from the mixed points of view of Amin and Rashid, the narrator of the novel, evoking his installation in London and his discovery of imperialism, as well as his relations with his family who remained in Zanzibar, while the “enslaved world” is rising and the old balances are upset.
The author of Heaven and of Near the sea (published in 2006 and republished by Denöel in 2021), Nobel Prize for Literature 2021, recounts with finesse these love stories and these turbulent times which are “between the end of one era and the beginning of another”.
Born in 1948 in the sultanate of Zanzibar, this archipelago in the Indian Ocean which today belongs to Tanzania, Abdulrazak Gurnah has, like the character of Rashid in Farewell Zanzibaralso left his native island at the age of 18 to study in the United Kingdom, becoming a university professor and specialist in postcolonial studies.
In Farewell Zanzibarthe farewell is twofold, nourished both by the guilt of having abandoned one’s world and one’s family — Desertionthe original title of this book published in 2005, is more eloquent — and of the heartbreaking impossibility of going back.