By Sankar Ray
Decades after Franz Fanon, perceptive readers’ community the world over will queue at bookstands for books of Zanzibari fiction writer Abdulrazak Gurnah, the Nobel laureate for literature in 2021. From his debut novel ‘Memory of Departure’ (1987) to Afterlives (2020), one is acquainted with the plight of coastal Muslim communities and their confrontation with European imperialism. They were never abandoned by Muslim empire.
Born in a culturally diversified island in what he called “Western Indian Ocean” with a past history of slave trade and oppression by Portuguese, Indian, Arab, German and British colonial regimes, Gurnah, is unflinchingly committed to critiquing colonialist, militarist and capitalist modernity and taking up cudgels for Swahili transmodernity. He uses Swahili words forcefully.
His Memory of Departure – nostalgic to me having read it in 1990, is a narrative on a failed uprising. The central character, Hassan Omar, is a gifted young protagonist who longs for a disengagement from the social blight of the coast.
These east African subalterns in Gurnah’s novels are ignored by subaltern historians. Gurnah thinks culturally, never racially. Gurnah’s East African characters, mostly oppressed Muslims, are pushed aside by the English society, distinguishable also from their non-Muslim, tree-worshiping neighbours. Islam has a role in their lives of his characters reflecting their rootless identity filially unlikely the Talban way of dividing Muslim, the main feature of hypocrisy of ‘Political Islam’.
Paradise (1994), shortlisted for Booker is about a boy, Yusuf. Exceptionally handsome and a very sensitive observer, he grows into manhood in a provincial town in the East African interior. Son of a poor hotel owner who mortgaged Yusuf to repay his deepening debt to a man whom Yusuf addresses as Uncle Aziz, and accompanies to the coast, where he befriends Khalil, another debt-slave. Yusuf undergoes extensive historical changes with the integrity of the man-child protagonist. But he feels forced to abandon Amina, the woman he loves, to join the German army that he previously despised.
Gurnah’s itinerant characters are located in a hiatus between cultures and continents, between the past and the emerging reality – pushing into a state, too insecure to be resolved. Take his seventh novel, Desertion (2005, a passionate read with a backdrop of vast cultural differences in the colony shared between the British Kenya and the German Tanganyika.
Afterlives (2020), is a transitional form of Paradise ,in the early 20th century, prior to the end of German colonisation of East Africa in 1919 – a narrative of three characters, interlinked. Restless but ambitious Ilyas is stolen from his parents by the Schutzruppe askari – German colonial troops. When he returns to his village after years, his parents were gone and his sister Afiya given away. Hamza, another character was sold, not stolen.
Emeritus professor of postcolonial studies in the department of English in the University of Kent, UK, Gurnah’s novels recoil from stereotypical descriptions and open readers’ gaze to a culturally diversified East Africa unfamiliar to the rest the world. His characters speak to complex identities, aside from the cultural influence of benign Islam, ethnicity in a setting of trauma of colonialism and dislocation to the West. (IPA)
