Upending the colonial perspective
THE 2021 #NobelPrize in Literature was awarded early last week to the novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah “for his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents.”
Abdulrazak Gurnah was born in 1948 and grew up on the island of Zanzibar in the Indian Ocean but arrived in England as a refugee in the end of the 1960s.
According to the bio-bibliography published by the Nobel Prize in Literature 2021, Gurnah belonged to the victimised ethnic group and after finishing school was forced to leave his family and flee the country, by then the newly formed Republic of Tanzania. He was 18 years old. It was not until 1984 that he could return to the country of his birth and see his father, shortly before his death.
Gurnah was Professor of English and Postcolonial Literatures at the University of Kent in Canterbury until his recent retirement, where he focused largely on writers such as Wole Soyinka, Ngügï wa Thiong’o and Salman Rushdie.
The Nobel winner has published 10 novels and several short stories. The thread that runs through all of his works is of the refugee’s disruption. As a 21-year-old in exile, and even though Swahili was his first language, English became Gurnah’s literary tool. The writer is known for consciously breaking with convention and upending the colonial perspective to highlight that of the indigenous populations.
In all his work, informs the Nobel Peace Prize bio/bibliography, Gurnah has striven to avoid the ubiquitous nostalgia for a more pristine pre-colonial Africa.
His own background is a culturally diversified island in the Indian Ocean, with a history of slave trade and various forms of oppression under a number of colonial powers – Portuguese, Arab, German and British – and with trade connections with the entire world. Zanzibar was a cosmopolitan society before globalisation. Gurnah’s writing notably is from his time in exile but this relates to his relationship with the place he had left.
His itinerant characters find themselves in a hiatus between cultures and continents, between a life that was and a life emerging; an insecure state that can never be resolved.
For more information on Abduklrazak Gurnah visit https://www. nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/2021/ bio-bibliography/