Why I left Zanzibar at 18, how it impacted my writing career – Gurnah, winner 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature

Professor Abdulrazak Gurnah, the winner of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature

Professor Abdulrazak Gurnah, the winner of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature

By Nehru Odeh

Professor Abdulrazak Gurnah, the winner of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature is indeed a study in passion, commitment and determination. Not only did he leave his country Zanzibar at 18 to follow his dreams, at a time it (his country) was passing through turbulent times, that decision shaped his life and he has made a success of it. 

Made a success of it? Sure. Gurnah is not just a distinguished academic, he is also an accomplished writer. In a remarkable career spanning five decades, he has written bestselling novels such as Memory of Departure, Pilgrims Way, Admiring Silence, By the Sea, and Afterlives.

A year after winning the Nobel Prize in Literature, Gurnah, who was once a lecturer at Bayero University Kano, but now a Professor of English at the University of Kent, opened up in a book chat on 26 November on why he left his country Zanzibar, relocating to the United Kingdom, where he has spent a substantial part of his life.

Gurnah made this disclosure in a conversation with Mr Kunle Ajibade, journalist, writer and Executive Editor, TheNEWS/PMNEWS at the Ake Arts and Book Festival, which held between 20 and 26 November, 2022 in Ikoyi, Lagos, Nigeria. Writers. Journalists and academics from across the globe were in Lagos for the week-long festival to celebrate literature and the arts. The theme of this year’s festival was: Homecoming. 

It was indeed an afternoon of discourse, of memory and of laughter. It was also an afternoon of nostalgia and fun. And just as Ajibade described the event, it was a life-time experience. In a hall that was filled to capacity and which had the distinguished presence of another Nobel Laureate Professor Wole Soyinka, winner of the 1986 Nobel Prize in Literature, Gurnah, displaying an uncommon brilliance spiced with humour, responded to questions asked about his homeland, his relocation to the United kingdom as a teenager and how it impacted his writing career. He also spoke on other tropes such as colonization, decolonization, exile, memory, history and what indeed is home.

Asked why he left Zanzibar at 18, Gurnah said he had to leave because he found his country at the time constricting and wanted to find a life for himself, to fulfill self.

“I didn’t flee the violence so much as I left because the new government in his chaotic and rather terror methods decided to close the schools. And so when I was 18 or 17 and half or so, I can’t remember exactly, we were all rounded up in a sense, not literarily.

“We were more or less forced into various kinds of national service, which sounds good except that it was also the precursor of that was to remove people from jobs and instead put us 16 years old, 17 years old straight out of schools into those jobs. So people lost jobs, teachers, various kinds of civil servants …So I said No I don’t want to be imprisoned here. I want to go and do something, fulfill myself, study. So I left.

“I didn’t see myself as somebody going into exile. Exile is not a word I would use for what I did. Exile is what I think of as a noble condition, of somebody doing something from a principled position, either because of politics or because of pursuing a greater goal.”

Gurnah also said he started writing at 21 as a response to the new environment he found himself as a stranger in the United Kingdom. According to him, writing at the time was not just therapeutic, it was also a catharsis and it disentangled the mesh in which he found himself at the time.

“I started writing because of the experience of being a stranger. I explained what was in my mind when I left Zanzibar… I didn’t think anything about what I was leaving behind. I was heading that way. And in any case I didn’t know anything about what I was going to really. I thought I knew but I didn’t. 

“So the experience of being a stranger in Europe at 18 without family, without friends without money was a complicated one, complicated in both ways; complicated because of the difficulty of being a stranger anywhere and also because of now suddenly realizing what has been lost, what you have given up recklessly.

 “And I think it was in trying to understand that for myself that I started to write, not because at that time I was thinking anybody would see what I was writing but simply because sometimes writing can be helpful in just sort of disentangling things, particularly if it is miserable, sad things, it makes you feel better when you sit down and write them down and so on.

“So that is how I started really. But as time passed I found myself actually fictionalizing some of those experiences. And it just sort of went on. But it was long before I guess, was even to say to myself I am going to write or I am going to be a writer.

“It seems really an impossibly higher aspiration. So it took a while. It took several years probably. So I probably started to do it more or less within a few months or a year or so getting to England. But it took as you said when I was in my early 20s before I could actually say I am going to write a novel.”

Asked what home is in the light of the fluidity of the term, what it really means, and what with people having mixed origins and multiple identities, Gurnah said his experience as an emigrant in the United Kingdom has made him understand that home is not a fixed idea but that it means different things to different people. “One’s place of birth is only an accident. You choose your true homeland with your body and art. You love it all your life or you leave it at once.   

“I guess behind that is the question of what is home, or what is belonging. It is complicated but not impossible. Because I think what anyway my experience has persuaded me and made me understand is that in fact home means different things. It means of course wherever it is you that were born or grew up in -, your family, your connections and your language and so one. So that’s home and always remains so.   

“But then home is also a place where you choose to be or find yourself, through circumstances you end up there. I have lived in the UK for 50 years but traveling here and there of course. But my home in that sense has been there. And I have worked there happily, I mean in a fulfilling way mostly at the University of Kent. I have my family there, several grandchildren there, So that’s home. But the other home is still home in a very profound way, perhaps in a more profound way. 

“So that’s why I am saying all this idea of home has different meanings. And now especially, particularly for people like us, people who come from formerly colonized place. … The journey is so much bigger than it seems to me, the journey that many Europeans made to different parts of the world as settlers or new immigrants. Partly because you are going there in an unequal relationship to the place that you are going to.

“And secondly, because in fact there are so many big differences, you really do have to learn to be in that place in a way that movement to the other direction didn’t always require that kind of re-experiencing life in a way that I think movement to Europe, North America and other places like that does … What I am saying is that in a way it is a phenomenon of the time we live in, this idea of multiple homes, or multiple engagement as it were with place.”

Talking about his beginnings as a writer, Gurnah went down memory lane narrating a story about his experience he had had about 10 or 11 years ago with his former English teacher who also taught art and was the leader of one of the best orchestras in Zanzibar. “I think he was the first teacher who drew my attention to the fact I write well in English and we left it like that,” Gurnah recalled. 

“And in one of my visits to Zanzibar, I think it was something like about 10, 11 years ago. He was playing almost like a chamber orchestra, from his big orchestra, which has about 30, 40 people playing, fully engaged as it were. And must have had four or five of his colleagues as it were, playing on a terrace in a tourist hotel. So there he was. By this time, I had already published I think six or seven books here. Maybe more. Anyway he saw me because we went in for a coffee. And he saw me sitting there. When they stopped, when they had a break, he came over. He said, ‘hey hey hey I heard you are back. I discovered you. I said, ‘You did,’” and the hall roared with laughter.

Asked why he keeps writing about the fate of millions of refugees of various ethnic groups and nationalities, which his Nobel citation references, Gurmah said they suffer so much injustices and indignities and he felt he had to speak about that he sees in front of him. Asked again why he constantly turns histories, memories and nostalgia into art, as he weaves history into fiction and fiction into history, what is his criticism of human memory and whether history, reality, memory can actually be reconstructed, the Nobel Laureate said it was partly because history has to be re-narrated .

“I have always wanted to write about this not only because I knew some of the stories because members of my family or people I knew had been in some way involved but because of its absence in the general telling of both our history but also the history of that period, history of that episode, all of which were good reasons to write.

“There are always good reasons to write. But good reason to write since not enough is known about this. I am going to say something about this, something like that. And also because it is something important and should be known about.” 

Asked to react on the brutal attack on Salman Rushdie on 12 August in upstate New York, Gurnah condemned the attack unequivocally, saying that not only is the persecution of Rushdie made-up accusations, it’s been going on for too long. According to him, the constant persecution is unjust and intolerable. He also wondered whether his persecutors want to kill him.

“First of all, what do I think about the event. I think it is outrageous. And I think it is completely wrong. I think the whole persecution of Salman Rushdie for what really in the end are made-up ‘accusations. But nevertheless, it’s gone on long enough and you just seem to be keeping things going and persecuting this man for writing, I think that in itself is unjust and intolerable. Do you want to kill him for that?” Gurnah wondered. 

 

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