By awarding him the Nobel Prize in Literature in the fall of 2021 for the ten novels he has published since 1987, the Swedish Academy wanted to reward a work that explores in an “empathetic and uncompromising way the effects of colonialism and the fate of refugees caught between cultures and continents”.
Born in the Sultanate of Zanzibar in 1948, an archipelago in the Indian Ocean now attached to Tanzania, Abdulrazak Gurnah, from a family of Arabs who came from Yemen to Zanzibar in the 19and century, was forced to leave his island at the age of eighteen to emigrate to the United Kingdom.
The comradeship that followed the end of the British protectorate in Zanzibar led, from 1964, to a series of persecutions against citizens of Arab and Indian origin.
Having become a specialist in postcolonial studies at the University of Kent, Canterbury, now retired, Abdulrazak Gurnah became interested in writers such as Wole Soyinka, Salman Rushdie and Conrad.
His own work, since Memory of Departure, also resounds with exile and memory.
Between tradition and colonialism
This is what feeds Paradise, his fourth book (first published in French in 1995) and this is what also crosses, to another extent, Near the sea and Farewell Zanzibar (Galaade, 2006 and 2009), novels of cultural crossings, displacements and exile which had become impossible to find in bookshops. In the wake of the Nobel, the first two are now republished and new translations are in progress.
To repay a debt, 12-year-old Yusuf, the protagonist of Paradise, was sold by his father, who made him believe that he was going to stay with his uncle Aziz, a prosperous merchant. But Aziz is not his uncle and the handsome teenager is actually a captive, a victim of slavery (long practiced on the island) which does not say its name, evolving in a world in full mutation, between tradition and colonialism.
The trafficking of children, the greed of merchants, the greedy appetite of settlers, the violence suffered by women: the novel spares nothing of the East African reality of the mid-twentieth century.and century. Even religion is not left out, such as this character in Paradise who does not hide what he thinks of Islam: “Is it a religion for adults? I may not know who God is, I don’t remember his thousands of names and his millions of promises, but I know he can’t be that tyrant you worship. »
And while rumors of war between the Germans and the English on the island rise, Yusuf, who we will follow until he is 17, will gradually learn about freedom.
A bit like the Nigerian Chinua Achebe did in Everything is falling apart (1958), the Tanzanian novelist depicts his country at the dawn of profound and irreversible upheavals, showing colonialism as the accelerator of this change — and not as its cause.
gray areas
What Abdulrazak Gurnah, a formidable storyteller, suggests to us is that corruption and slavery, in these East African societies, existed long before the era of European colonization. No otherworldliness or nostalgia for the purity of origins here.
If the story he tells there is more complex and more contemporary, Close of the sea is also in a way a story of exile and debt. The narrator, Saleh Omar, is an elderly man who arrives in the UK from Zanzibar with a false passport in the name of Rajab Shaaban Mahmud, a bag of clothes and a mahogany box containing incense, the only relic of his previous life.
Claiming not to speak English, the old man applies for asylum (“These words are not simple, even if the habit of hearing them makes them appear as such”, he will say), like an open sesame that will allow him to accomplish this mysterious “rescue trip”.
He will tell us from afar the reasons for his presence in England, from this small town by the sea where the social services installed him, remembering the time of his splendor on his remote island of Zanzibar, where he was a refugee, basically, long before flying off to the West.
The son of the real Mahmud, Latif, an academic called in to serve as an interpreter, a little surprised to see his father “resurrected”, will then take charge of part of the narration. The two men, united by links that we will discover, will tell their stories, mix them, reinvent themselves, each time infusing slight variations to the truth, like two versions of a crumbling memory.
Again, nothing is quite black or white. It is one of Abdulrazak Gurnah’s great strengths to explore the gray areas from which history and human behavior emerge.