Stefan Helgesson on Abdulrazk Gurnah ( automated Google translation)
Cornelius Hamelberg
This year's Nobel Laureate in Literature, Abdulrazak Gurnah, insists on the right to assert his own personal belonging in the world. Stefan Helgesson reads Gurnah's authorship and finds a voice that wants to access the difficult in human coexistence without violating the dignity of others.
In Abdulrazak Gurnah's perhaps most boldly composed novel, “Desertion” (2005), we get to follow the merchant Hassanali in a small town near Mombasa, sometime in the 1890s. Hassanali serves as a prayer euphoria, and it is from that point of view that we first get to know the place. At dawn, he routinely performs his actions. Everything is as usual.
But in the middle of the familiar, an injured stranger appears. Hassanali's family takes care of the injured, as hospitality dictates, but the situation turns the quiet society upside down: “A European, a mzungu. What would they do with a European? ”
Then Gurnah suddenly changes perspective and we end up with Frederick Turner, a British colonial official in Mombasa who hears rumors of an injured European in the area. With the same attention to detail that we took part in Hassanali's rule, we are now placed in the British Empire's imaginary world of territories to administer and populations to control.
The credibility of the change of perspective is remarkable. It happens so often when I read Gurnah's novels: I take the story for granted, insidiously enough. There are no bushy gestures here, just a context of life that I am led into, sentence by sentence. And then the carpet is pulled away from my feet.
In the penultimate novel, “Gravel heart” (2017), the change of perspective takes place almost imperceptibly. As a reader, I think I understand, for example, that the narrator Salim's father abandoned the family and that it is thanks to a successful uncle that he manages to get to London. But Salim's story of his shaky life in England is turned inside out when we finally hear his father's voice and understand what abuse of power, patriarchal abuse and betrayal are the basis of family history. The effect is striking, as the decisive twists in Salim's life take on a completely different meaning. What kind of novel is this, really? Is it the one I read, or do I have to re-imagine the story?
Crush the stereotypes! It could stand as a motto for Gurnah's writing, if he were now asked to formulate slogans. Using the novel's shifts in perspective as a tool, he exercises a stubborn opposition to the diminution and reduction of others. See man, he urges us - not the image of her.
There are no catchy tweets here that will fix the injustices in history. No easy cure for homelessness.But slogans? No, he got enough of that commodity for a lifetime in connection with the revolution on Zanzibar in 1964. It was then that the island became one of the Cold War's many game plans in the "third world". East Germany and the Soviet Union manipulated the regime in the background. Politicians made sure to sing the praises of the one-party state to maneuver out competitors.
Instead of serving up slogans, Gurnah's novels take us a long way to gain insight into the other. There are no catchy tweets here that will fix the injustices in history. No easy cure for homelessness. What is available is the opportunity for a patient listening and a readiness to constantly reconsider what you thought you knew.
Photo: Stina WirsénLike so many of Gurnah's characters, in "Gravel heart" Salim learns the impossibility of completely owning his own story. The individual is instead the sum of his relationships. And because these extend in time, they can never be nailed down, only maintained and reinterpreted. Relationship work often takes place within the family, a central and porous context at Gurnah. The Zanzibar of the novels, what Gurnah calls the "little place", is characterized by families with a strong perception of their own honor - especially the women. At the same time, family stories never match the ideal picture. The inability to deal with this gap evokes the shame that is such a fundamental driving force in the novels.
The shame can be due to illicit love arising, as in "Desertion". Or the families split up, as in "Gravel heart" and "By the Sea" (2001), and the self is insecure in exile. East Africa becomes a focal point for memory while life goes on elsewhere. Or the shame comes from the fact that the families are completely missing. But regardless of the same basic pattern: everyone's stories are, for better or worse, intertwined.
So also on a larger level, both historically and literary. "It was as if they were redoing us," Saleh writes in "By the Sea", referring to British schooling in 1950s Zanzibar: "I read in their books flattering depictions of my own history, and because they were so flattering they seem truer than the stories we told each other. ” (My translation.)
At the former slave market in Stonetown, Zanzibar, the Swedish sculptor Clara Sorna has erected a sculpture in memory of the victims. Photo: Dan Herrick / Alamy Stock PhotoIn the essay "Learning to read" (2015), Gurnah explains that he has strong convictions regarding Europe's "completely destructive stories", that is, the racistly coded image of the world that was built up during the era of imperialism. This is the crux of "postcolonial literature". And that's really just what writers from, say, Martinique, Nigeria and India have in common. In all other respects - as Gurnah reminds us - the differences are enormous.
It is a matter of fact that Gurnah has pursued an independent line in relation to the postcolonial literature he devoted to his academic activities. In the essay "An idea of the past" from 2002, he directs carefully balanced criticism against the two colleagues Wole Soyinka and Ngugi wa Thiong'o. It should be read as a refusal to lock in the identity of simplified pan-African appeals.
He describes how at school in Zanzibar he was expected to read Chinua Achebe's "Everything Breaks" (1958) as if it depicted his own experience of colonialism. Which it did not do at all. The history of Zanzibar had completely different coordinates. It faced the Indian Ocean, saw itself as part of the universal Muslim community, and lived with the memory of many centuries of trade between Africa, India and the Middle East.
Zanzibar's sultan with his court arrives in London in January 1964 as refugees from the revolt. Photo: Keystone Press / Alamy Stock PhotoAgainst this background , one can understand that the image of "Africa" as an obvious entity - neither with positive nor negative signs - rubbed against Gurnah. This is also how one can understand the passage in "Desertions" contemporary episodes where the narrator Rashid describes the devastating alienation he experiences in England after the Zanzibar revolution in 1964:
“This alienation eventually became an emblem of indefinite origin. I soon began to talk about black people and white people, just like everyone else, and I uttered the lie with increasing ease as I agreed on the similarities of the differences and a soul-destroying vision of a racist world. ” (My translation.)
As always with Gurnah's sharpened sentences, this wording can be twisted and turned over several times. It makes us understand both the necessity to talk about "whites" and "blacks" and how that vocabulary is based on forgeries that throughout history have served "simple lust for power and pathological self-assertion".
Gurnah's reading can only be described as world literature, as he moves freely between African, Caribbean, Arabic, British, Persian and Indian literature.But the fascinating thing is that his writing is nevertheless wide open to the world's literary cultures, including Western European. Gurnah's reading can only be described as world literature, as he moves freely between African, Caribbean, Arabic, British, Persian and Indian literature. The title "Gravel heart" is taken from Shakespeare's "Like for Like". The novel "Paradise" (1994) has features of the Qur'an and the Bible story of Yusuf / Joseph. "A Thousand and One Nights" serves as an intertext in "By the sea" and "Gravel heart".
In "Learning to read", he says that it was the multilingual upbringing on Zanzibar in combination with studies in English that made this web of allusions possible. Despite the cultural authority of the English, "nothing was lost", he writes. It is astonishingly comforting and possibly a sign of his own privileged position. Like Derek Walcott and Léopold Senghor, two of the authors he is in dialogue with, he sings the praises of creolization. But, as Senghor once wrote, everyone must be mixed in their own way - and Gurnah claims with great confidence the right to process the cultural constellation that has become his.
Here we sense how his low-key temperament can also be uncompromising. Gurnah not only sings in the choir, but stands firmly on the opportunity to think longer and differently. At the bottom is an unwavering belief in human dignity and the ability to rise above their circumstances. This belief is expressed secularly but obviously has a foundation in the Muslim world of life where many of the figures move. At the same time, the novels are driven by an insight into how fragile human dignity is in an unequal world.
In "Gravel heart" there is a piece that highlights this fragility in an unexpected way. It is when Salim is studying at an English university in the early 90's that he marvels at the British students' commitment to injustices in the world. They support gay rights in the Caribbean and protest against female circumcision, NATO's presence in Bosnia and the persecution of Roma. From Salim's perspective, the students are "lucky people who also wanted to own the suffering of others." His own experience is that the difficulties in people's lives emerge and become understandable only after a long time. Suffering is something extremely intimate that cannot be signposted.
But if so, how do we approach the suffering of the other? Perhaps, in fact, novel fiction is the most advanced invention we have at our disposal to access the difficult without violating the dignity of others. It is a belief that is strengthened in me in my dealings with Gurnah's authorship.
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