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On October 7 The Swedish Academy awarded Abdulrazak Gurnah, a Tanzanian writer based in Britain, the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature for “his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the plight of the refugee in the chasm between cultures and peoples. continents ”. He became the first black African writer to win this honor since Wole Soyinka, a Nigerian novelist and playwright, in 1986.
Before the announcement, bookmakers had preferred the odds of Ngugi wa Thiong’o, a Kenyan writer arrested and jailed in 1977 for his ruthless portrayals of his country. Mr. Ngugi has given up writing in English for his native Gikuyu, a Bantu language, and his decision, taken almost 60 years ago, has made him a hero of the decolonization movement around the world and a favorite of long-standing Nobel Prize winner. But Mr. Gurnah’s writing is just as political, albeit in a different and calmer way.
His novels and short stories are populated by characters shaken by history, conflicts, family conflicts and community upheavals. Anders Olsson, chairman of the awarding committee, said the characters in Mr. Gurnah’s tales are caught “between the life left behind and the life to come, confronting racism and prejudice, but also forcing themselves to silence the truth or reinvent the biography to avoid conflict with reality ”.
Mr. Gurnah was born in 1948 on the island of Zanzibar, which over the centuries has been a center of the Indian Ocean slave trade, a warehouse for the global export of cloves and a starting point for colonial expansion across East Africa, both British and German. In 1964, the Sultan of Zanzibar was overthrown and the island was politically attached to its neighbor, Tanganyika, to become Tanzania. A few years later, Mr. Gurnah, fearing persecution because of his Arab origin, was forced to flee. (He was not allowed to return to the island until 1984, shortly before his father’s death.) He traveled to Britain to study and became a professor of English at the University of Kent , where he supervised projects on the writings of Salman Rushdie, VS Naipaul, Joseph Conrad and Jamaica Kincaid.
His exile made him aware of the challenges faced by people forced to leave their homes and create a new life for themselves. He has been a mentor to generations of young writers, including Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor, a Kenyan author now based in Berlin, and Nadifa Mohamed, an Anglo-Somali writer whose novel, “The Fortune Men”, is on the shortlist. of this year. Booker’s price.
His two best-known works are “Paradise” (1994), the decisive novel in the Nobel committee’s decision, and “Afterlives”, published last year, which picks up where “Paradise” left off. “Paradise” tells the story of Yusuf, a young Tanzanian boy at the turn of the 20th century who is pawned by his father to an Arab merchant to whom he owes money. A nod to Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness”, Yusuf joins the merchant’s caravan and goes to the Congo, before returning to East Africa where the German army forces young Africans to fight alongside him during the war. World War I. “Afterlives” is the story of what happens to these young, battle-weary soldiers as they try to get back to their old lives after the war is over.
In Mr. Gurnah’s literary world, Mr. Olsson explained, “everything is changing – the memories, the names, the identities.” He avoids simplification, caricature and cliché. His books are full of the hustle and bustle of conflict and suffering; yet, for all that, they are imbued with a deep humanity that stays with the reader long after the last page. ■
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