By Dr Ratan Bhattacharjee
‘Abdulrazak Gurnah’s dedication to truth and his aversion to simplification are striking’ said the Nobel Committee after conferring him with the 2021 Nobel Prize for Literature. His novels grapple with the subjects of the immigrant experience, displacement, memory and colonialismwhich are the areas of transnational and the trauma narrative drawing everyone’s attention. Shaped by his own personal life’s experiences, Gurnah was a prime mover in this respect. So, it doesn’t surprise many that he won the Nobel Prize. However, accepting the prize in sheer humbleness, Gurnah’s words were “it was just great –its just a big prize and such a huge list of wonderful writers – I am still taking it in.” His long time editor Alexandra Pringle at Bloomsbury, says “Gurnah’s win was most deserved”.
Gurnah is as important a writer as Chinua Achebe and his writing is particularly beautiful and grave as well as humourous, kind and sensitive. His Paradise published in 1994 tells the story of a boy growing up in Tanzania in the early 20th century and was nominated for both the Booker Prize and the Whitbread Prize for Fiction, which was a breakthrough for him as a novelist. In all his novels, it is evident how he recoiled from stereotypical descriptions and opened our gaze to a culturally diversified Eastern Africa; unfamiliar to many in other parts of the world. His characters find themselves in a hiatus between culture and continents, between a life that was and a life that is emerging. Most appealing is the description of the ‘insecure state that can never be resolved.’In an interview given in 2016 he did not fully agree that he is a writer of post colonial or world literature,” I would not use any of the those words, I wouldn’t call myself a something writer of any kind’. His talent recognised by the Nobel Committee, makes him the fifth African writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, after Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka (1986), Egyptian Naguib Mahfouz (1988), and South African writers Nadine Gordimer (1991) and John M Coetzee (2003).
In his Paradise there are obvious references to Josheph Conrad in its portrayal of the innocent young hero Yusuf’s journey to the heart of darkness. His most recent work, Afterlives, Gurnah tells the story of Ilyas who was stolen from his parents by German colonial troops as a boy and then later returns to his village after years of fighting in a war against his own people. The Guardian described this work as ‘a compelling novel’.
In Gurnah’s literary universe everything is shifting – memories, names and identities because nothing is resolved and nothing takes a definite shape in reality. Writing for him is an unending exploration. Maya Jaggi, an eminent critic and winner of 2021 Costa Prize Judge gave a huge encomium for Gurnah in his interview for the Guardian, saying “He is a powerful and nuanced writer whose elliptical lyricism counters the lies of imperial history imposed when he was a child in East Africa. His subtle oeuvre is as robust about the brutal flaws of the mercantile culture he left of the atrocities of British and German colonialism.” His fictional debut Memory of Departure published in 1987 started this fictional journey and then onwards, novel after novel he uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world’. His depiction of the haunting image of man as we get in the first novel published by Bloomsbury By the Sea concentrates on one single word ‘Asylum’ and this is the essence of his writing. There he wrote, “Sometimes I think it is my fate to live in the wreckage and confusion of crumbling houses.”
Well known for salient ideas, elegant writing and ethical commitment, Gurnah, 73 today, was born in Zanzibar, survived bloody aftermath as Zanzibar became the United Republic of Tanzania, Arabs and other minorities were ruthlessly persecuted. He later moved to United Kingdom in 1968 at the age of 20 in search of a safe haven. Author of ten novels including his masterpiece Paradise and Desertion in which the Chair of the Nobel Committee, Anders Olsson, comments, “the uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism.”
Dr Ratan Bhattacharjee Associate Professor and Head PG Dept of English Dum Dum Motijheel College, International Visiting Faculty USA