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Conversation
Changing places and writing the postcolonial novel
Abdulrazak Gurnah*†
,
a.s.gurnah@kent.ac.uk
Andrew Hadfield‡
a.hadfield@sussex.ac.uk
Abstract
In this conversation Abdulrazak Gurnah, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature (2021), discusses the nature of his fiction and how he became a writer. He outlines the factors that made him become a writer; the themes that he explores in his writing; the nature of his writing style; his literary allusions; the importance of family and the secrets that families keep; and his conception of his reader. The conversation highlights the significance of exile in his work, the ways in which people belong in communities, how frightening isolation can be for individuals, and how people cope in adverse circumstances.
Keywords
colonialismcricketexilePostcolonial novelracismsecrecyZanzibar Abdulrazak Gurnah (b. 1948) was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 2021. He has had a long and distinguished career as a writer and postcolonial critic since the publication of his first novel in 1987. Born in Zanzibar he has spent most of his life in the UK since the 1960s and is now emeritus professor of English and Postcolonial Literature at the University of Kent.
When I last saw you, I promised, the next time we met, I would read all your books, and here we are. I have now read all of them, finishing the last one, 30 pages to go, last night, so I have had the pleasure of getting through all your novels in preparation for this, which I’ve really enjoyed. I’m not surprised you won the Nobel Prize. It’s an amazing body of work and I really admire the way you try out new things in your writing, constantly challenging yourself and the reader. You write very movingly about people. There’s a confrontational angriness and sadness at times. You get very angry, I think, at the inhumanity of man to man, which is something I want to talk about, and the banality of the evil of colonialism.
I also like the way your work often seems very straightforward. You have an extremely clear prose style and your narratives seem clear enough, but you ask all these complicated questions that constantly force the reader to think again and shift position, and I really like the ways in which you make the reader work.
What I wanted to start off by asking you about, Abdulrazak, was your first novel, Memory of Departure. It’s an incredibly accomplished work for a first novel. You weren’t all that young—you were getting on towards 40—and I wondered whether you’d always planned to be a writer, whether you’d been writing away, or whether that was something that happened to you at that point, because you were also by that time a well-established academic. Was writing always what you planned to do?
No, not really. Not at all, really. Like several people, I was writing things at school and I loved the class when the teacher would come in and say, ‘Okay, we’ve got an hour and a half. This is the subject. Write.’ Composition, they used to call it. It was free. You didn’t always have to write something discursive. You could write something like a narrative or something like that—a story. So I enjoyed that, but not because I thought I’d make a career of it. I just enjoyed doing it. There was no role model for that kind of career choice. I didn’t know anyone in Zanzibar who was a writer and wasn’t something else. So it wasn’t a thing that I thought would be a lifetime to work.
But, as I said at various places, it was really coming to England and being an 18-year-old—a teenager, really—and a stranger in a place which was not very welcoming. In any case, it was the whole experience of being a stranger at that age, without the kind of things that you would normally have around you, which would be family or familiar faces and familiar spaces. So it was really out of that and two things happening at the same time. I’m sure this is what happens to people who move, wherever it is that they move to, or wherever it is they’re moving from.
Those two things, those two pulls, those two forces and those two imaginative locations—where you are now, as a stranger trying to learn the tricks, as it were, and the place that you left and what’s left behind, which is still with you, especially if what’s left behind, if displacement is the issue, is probably troubled—are the kinds of things that I was troubled by, but also I wanted to disentangle and make sense of it.
I was writing this down, like many of us do. Sometimes writing is helpful to disentangle things and to give you the ability to find a way through it. I had no intention that this would become something anybody else would see. This was really just that kind of thing that happens when it’s a grey afternoon, the clouds are dark, the rain is falling and you’re filled with self-pity and whatever. You get something out of that in spelling it out and understanding it, especially later on, as you reflect on it and read it again, and then you correct it a little bit. There you are. You’re starting to write. So it started like that, really.
Then, when you find yourself fictionalising it, it’s not really about how you’re feeling, but imagining somebody else going through an experience and trying to understand things. Then you realise that you’re writing it for somebody to read. I think those are the steps that I made towards writing—not to say, ‘I’m going to write’, but gradually, over a while, maybe a couple of years or so before. Even then, it was a secret. I couldn’t say to anybody, ‘This is what I’m doing’, because it seemed such a big thing to aspire to do. I’m always amazed by people at the age of 18 who do a creative writing course and say, ‘I’m going to become a writer.’ I think, ‘Well, it’s a big thing to want.’ Anyway, that’s how I did it.
Was Memory of Departure written quite soon before it was published, or was it something you’d been working at for a long time? Did you have other novels that you were working at, or was that something where you felt you were making a statement about all those things and about dislocation that you’ve articulated?
I started to write it pretty soon after [I arrived in England]. I suppose I was in my early twenties when I wrote the first draft. It just took a long time. Nobody wanted to publish it. Therefore, various people saw it. I kept sending it out. In those days, you had to send the typescript out. You couldn’t just send an attachment to your email or something like that. It would take a long time for it to arrive and, because I couldn’t find an agent, I had to do it the hard way—what they call the slush pile [unsolicited manuscripts sent to a publisher]. Usually, the most junior of junior people working in the publisher’s office would take it home one weekend and read a few pages, or not, and then would you get a photocopied letter, which is the rejection slip. That process would probably take three months and you’d need to start again, and so on.
But I wasn’t just doing that. I was also, at the time, teaching. I’d finished my first degree and then became a teacher while I was doing my MA part-time and converted that MA to a PhD. Then I became a full-time postgraduate student. All of this time, I was sending my book out. It would come back and I would revise and send it out again. That went on for many years after. It was published in 1987, but it was actually bought in 1985, so it took about twelve years or so before it came out. That’s why it came out when I was 37, I think, or something like that, but then I had already written Pilgrim’s Way.
Had you? I wondered whether that was an earlier novel, too. That’s one I really like, and I would like to bring us back to that throughout this conversation. Just to follow up from that, you said in your Nobel Prize lecture that writing has always been a pleasure, and you’ve already more or less explained why it is so important for you. When you write, is your identity as a writer very important to you? You said how much the dislocation and your exile from your homeland were crucial to your identity and experience: when you think of yourself as a writer, do you think of yourself as a Zanzibar writer, an African writer, or as Anglophone or postcolonial? Do you have a sense of who you are and who you’re writing for when you experience this pleasure of writing?
I have a sense of who I am, sure, but who I am as a writer is not something I try to summarise or to reduce in that way. I truly don’t think of myself as, ‘I am an African, a Zanzibari, British, displaced’, blah, blah. I don’t think of any of those things. I think about what it is that’s in my mind and how I can find a way of expressing it, moving it forward and making it interesting, possibly, for whoever might read this.
As for readers, I also don’t have a reader in mind. I think that, when I’m writing, I’m thinking that anybody who’s reading would be my reader. I’m not bothered. I’m not saying I’m writing for British people or for African people or whatever. I’m writing for everybody.
I can see that in your writing. I always find your writing very generous. It’s very open. There’s lots of different ways into it. You clearly want to be as inclusive as you can, and that’s something that you’ve articulated outside your fiction, and it’s something that happens within it. I wanted to talk a bit about style. I think it would be remiss of me to interview a major prizewinning novelist and not talk about style. Do you have any writers that have served as models or as anti-models? I know that, say, with Dottie, there are clear nods towards Dickens. You’ve used Bartleby in By the Sea. Some reviewers have picked up structural and fleeting references to the Arabian Nights. I wondered if you had a sense of any stylistic issues or any authors you wanted to be like or not to be like.
Not to be like or anything like that, because I would have thought that, as a writer, you’d want to say, ‘This is me. I speak as I see things.’ We often use the word ‘voice’, which I’m not sure is the right word for this. I would almost say it’s to have the right ear rather than the right voice to hear what you’re writing and to hear whether the balance is right or whether the pace is right and that kind of thing. You mentioned examples of writers who perhaps have an echo here and there, but you would probably, I hope, find that there is more than one in every text.
Yes.
So I do quite like to be able to make these allusions, partly because I find, when I’m reading, ‘I really enjoyed that’, I think, ‘Aha, I know, this is an intertext with so-and-so’—with Dr Zhivago. For example, if you think of Dottie, you’re saying Dickens. I might say, ‘Well, also Dr Zhivago.’ In fact, some readers of Dr Zhivago might see the titles of the chapters sometimes make reference to it—‘On Horatio Street’ and all this kind of thing. There are other writers. They are various and they change with time. At a certain time, I might be really engaged by this writer or that writer, but I always think that it’s not so much the writer but probably some moment in whatever it is that I’m writing, when I think I am reminded of something else that I’ve read or that I know, and it comes back at that moment.
I’ll give you an example—something like By the Sea, when the immigration officer berates Saleh Omar, the elderly man, about ‘arriving here’ and so on and so on. He speaks a line by Claudius from Hamlet—‘that this too too solid flesh’, etc. At that moment, as I was writing that, it was about the sense of humiliation, I suppose, that that berating achieves in this elderly man. He’s asking himself, ‘Is this real?’ So I think of that Claudius moment of saying ‘that this too too solid flesh would melt, thaw and resolve itself into a dew!’
It is moments like that. It’s not so much that Shakespeare is there. It’s more like it recalls a moment elsewhere, whereas, on the other hand, something like Gravel Heart clearly, at some point, uses the story of Measure for Measure, including the title, and makes concrete reference to it. So it varies. It depends. It’s not, I don’t think, an indication of influence so much as a kind of intertext which is interesting and which opens up other meanings and other possibilities.
That’s very helpful. On the idea of the intertext, I picked up some and missed others, but I shall go back and try to find some more. In terms of your novels, people have tried to suggest various themes, and I suppose the one that I keep coming back to, having read a lot recently and having read a few earlier, is that they’re stories often of people who are caught up in forces that they can’t control. You seem very interested in questions of agency and accident and necessity and what pushes people into positions.
Another thing I like about your writing is that you’re often quite sympathetic to characters who might not seem all that sympathetic. You often have an explanation as to why they might be as they are. I think of the one in Pilgrim’s Way, where you have the character of Lloyd, who seems like an exceptionally unlikable young man, and then there’s that quite moving scene where he says, ‘Oh, come round and meet my parents.’ Daud thinks it’s because he’s going to show off, and then his father is this monster, and you can see Lloyd showing Daud and Catherine, ‘This is why I’m like I am.’ I thought that was a very moving moment, assuming I read it right, in a book that is often very funny and very angry and acerbic. I suppose I just wanted you to perhaps say a bit more about that sense of the overwhelming forces that seem to determine the lives of your characters in your books.
Clearly, I’m writing about people who have to cope with their circumstances. I’ll put it like that. Otherwise, if all is going well, they’re not interesting. I’m not interested in saying, ‘Yes, this person has gone through whatever circumstances, gone through life, succeeded at school, did this and became a bank manager’, or whatever it is. No one is like that. Everybody is troubled in some way or another, or if they’re not, then quite possibly they have either learned not to observe or see what’s going on, or they’re peculiarly unseeing. I don’t think you have to select and accentuate the struggle. Struggles come in various forms.
I’m interested in really rather small people with small problems, most of the time, rather than heroic encounters, although I’m interested in those as well. But mostly, I think the people I write about are not heroic. They’re heroic in the way in which they cope with the circumstances that befall them. Accidents befall all of us, all the time, and how we cope with them, I suppose, depends on our ability, in our different ways, to survive and to get sympathetic assistance or relationships, if one can call it that. Hardly anybody in my writing ever does this on their own. That is to say, it is usually as a result of the sympathy, the understanding or the love of others that makes it possible to encounter and to somehow move on in life.
What would you say then about a novel like Dottie, which has a resilient heroine who interacts well with other people and has her flaws, but is an incredibly impressive character? Isn’t she someone who, in the end, is largely an agent of her good fortune? Everything that happens well seems to be as a result of her labours, doesn’t it, or am I exaggerating?
No. I would say just not entirely. There are people who make it possible for her to keep her head above water, as it were—the figure of Mr Butler, for example, who, in his own way, understands the situation that she’s in and makes a comparison, if you like, with the situation of other people who have been marginalised or worse. There is also the journalist who she then ends up with, and there’s the library, and books. Sure, the idea is to say, ‘Here is a survivor’, but surviving is not all that she achieves. She also achieves a measure of calm, if you like.
Is that one of your more optimistic books? I wanted to get round, eventually, to talking about the endings and conclusions and so on. I sometimes find your books end on a note of hope with the prospect of reunions and people building on things they have overcome and things they have achieved. I find Admiring Silence perhaps your saddest book. I found it quite a bleak book—although it’s one of the ones I like most, whereas Dottie seems to end on quite a hopeful note. Do you have a sense of trying to balance different types of stories in the way that you construct your novels?
As I’ve said, one of my interests in these dramas, as well as in these stories, is to see how you get out of this now. Of course, I put these people there in the first place, but then how do you get out of this? How do you work your way? How do you survive? How do you reconstruct something out of this mess? The mess can either be handed to you, or it could be like Dottie, for example, where you have no choice. This is how life finds you. It may be a result of a mistake, an error or a misunderstanding, or something like that.
I think you’re asking about optimism or not, because I don’t think of it as optimism or not. After all, if you are setting up this situation of somebody who has to work their way, I believe we do and can do so very often. I believe that one of our best qualities as humans is our capacity to do so and to be responsible enough to come out of situations, but how to do so and what is the nature of those situations?
Of course, many of the people I write about are people who are already marginalised or dislocated or something like this, or strangers. I prefer that because the other words already suggest a broken something, whereas I think the real pressure or difficulty is that you are a stranger and you don’t have the usual things that enable you to both understand and cope with being in a different place. Then there is also, as I said, what’s left behind, which still remains in the mind. It’s not gone.
The optimism, if that’s the right word, is that, yes, there is a way of somehow finding some means of calmness, moving on or coping or whatever. Most of my novels don’t have a, ‘So then, dear reader, they were wedded’ or something like that, but I do often leave the ending with the possibility of a direction towards perhaps a resolution or even happiness.
By the Sea ends on a nicely ambiguous note, where there’s a possibility of things going forward. At the end of Memory of Departure, it’s not clear what will happen to the two young people, Hassan and Salma.
Yes. I think it’s very unlikely that it will turn out that they end up together, but what is likely there is that he is writing that letter at the end, and is taking stock in a way that suggests, here’s somebody who is going to be able to reflect on his circumstances. So the optimism there is that, here’s somebody who has learned to think and cope about his circumstances, and then we leave him. Let’s see what happens to him.
I thought that was a very nice way of ending the novel, that it leads you to reflect as a reader on the possibilities and how things have worked out so far and how they may work out in the future. Hassan could well have a decent future, having escaped from some pretty traumatic events.
What about Admiring Silence? I don’t want to single that out as very different from your other novels, but that seemed to be one that was terribly sad when it ended, and there was less of that poised moment of possibility. If I read this correctly, the protagonist’s going back to Africa, his need to incorporate, escape from and make sense of the past wrecks his present, and he’s left with everything having gone wrong and left in perhaps a fairly bleak place at the end of the novel. Is that the right way of reading that work?
It is a bleak place, but it is not impossible, because, when we first meet him and the way he tells and narrates his story, his whole tone is one of angry mockery of everything and everybody—well, not everybody, because there is Emma. But when he goes back, it’s all deflated. He learns other stories. That tone goes. He can’t act like that anymore, because here is the reality of what he had been fabricating while in England.
He then returns to find that, in fact, even what little he has been constructing in England has actually fallen to pieces anyway and he is now on his own. But he has learned something. He has understood the real situation he’s in now, which is not one of fantasising. Not that he believed in his own fantasies—he was intelligent enough not to do that—but anger and mockery and so on, I suppose, displaced a thoughtful assessment of where he is.
So the biggest thing that he has learned is that his future is in England. It’s not there anymore, because he has now grown into this place. There, he would not be able to cope with all of those tangled and mangled histories that he has just returned from. So that’s why, at the end, he says, ‘It’s not home anymore, because, if anything, moving forward now, I have to make this home.’
So in a way, you can see that it’s not really as bleak and dark as it looks, because it’s a realisation that, ‘Now I have this work to do. I have to learn to live here.’ And obviously, he’ll meet somebody else and find that kind of connection that I’ve mentioned, or will meet other people who will then enable him to, or at least one hopes. That’s where we leave it, that he’s come to a realisation that he can’t keep talking about ‘there’ in a way that is really a fabrication and a mockery of this place. He’s got to learn to live.
That’s very helpful and leads me on to other things that I want to ask you about. I think you write very powerfully and very interestingly about anger, and the different ways in which anger both disables and enables people. Certainly in your early novels, there’s quite a lot of representation of different forms of anger. Again, perhaps I’m wrong, but I found many parts of Pilgrim’s Way quite funny at times with some of the encounters between people, shocking as they often are. Memory of Departure is full of a hurt anger, as are other novels. Is that something you’re conscious of thinking about in the novels, that you think about how people deal with anger as a particular emotion and whether you need to get over it or whether you need to channel it?
I think it would have to be fairly specific. In Memory of Departure, I was trying to understand many things about, like I said, what was left behind and why there was so much unkindness, I suppose. It is not because there was something uniquely unkind about the place I had come from, but I was really interested in that place, and not in other places.
One of the things that I remember very much, not necessarily because of personal experience—that is to say, not because it happened to me—is the way that younger people were often so brutally treated by their parents, particularly by their fathers, the violence in the home or at school by the teachers, and all this kind of thing. I suppose that’s one of the things that you see a lot of. There is usually the anger of the patriarch that is somehow of out of control. That’s a very specific kind of anger that I wanted to show, and how it has the potential to traumatise, and perhaps, in a way, to train the child into becoming another patriarch in his own good time.
In Pilgrim’s Way, it was actually the opposite, so you’re not wrong at all in seeing that it was funny. It was actually intended as a kind of comedy, in a dark way—as a way of dealing with this shocking, in the unexpected sense, experience of hostility that this young man and a lot of people like him are facing. I made it take place in Canterbury, although I don’t name it. There are enough hints there to say that it’s Canterbury Cathedral, etc, and even the names of some of the streets, if you know Canterbury. I didn’t want it to be somebody in a big city, because, in a big city, there would be company. There would be other people like him. There would be capacity for some kind of solidarity with others.
I wanted this isolated experience of hostility, if you like. How does somebody cope with that? I thought he would cope with it by reading things, and somehow using that as a way of displacing the encounters that he has, as if they were encounters from elsewhere that somebody else is going through, to look at people and somehow imagine them differently from the way they possibly imagined themselves, but certainly from the way they looked.
So the anger there is deliberately turned into a kind of comedy. He makes comedy, which he only says to himself. It’s narrated by him. He writes his letters that are imagined, etc. So it’s a way of saying this is how he copes. It is another experience of coping with this reality by laughing at it as much as he can.
I did also enjoy the joke about one of the ways he deals with things when they get a bit tense with his girlfriend. You get a sense that this is complicated, but that there’s hope for the future for them. I like the way that, when things get a bit too hot, he talks to her about the test match, even though she’s not very interested in cricket. I thought that was quite a nice touch, and she tolerates him doing that. I thought that was a good joke, along with his own fantasies.
Also the cricket was another thing that kept him going, in those days of those fantastic West Indian teams. So he’s not on his own, after all, even though he is, because he had these guys who gave him such pleasure.
Yes, of course. Anyone who liked cricket and lived through that era cannot forget those amazing tours when the West Indies were absolutely unbeatable. It was astonishing to watch them, really.
But also the rage with which they played. It is also one of the ways in which he displaces his frustration by seeing that, and that rage. There’s that description of the test match, and Edrich and Close. At the end of the day, the light is gloomy. Holding and Roberts are coming in and bowling bouncer after bouncer, and Close just kept turning his shoulders and taking it. I remember the editor saying something like, ‘This is like a bombardment.’ The colonised were bombarding. So cricket is another way in which he finds comfort from seeing the English cricket team being beaten.
It was a very notable of series of events. I want to lead on to a couple of other questions from that as well. Obviously, there are bits of your novels that are based on your own experiences. I’m sure every novelist does that. I’ve read an interview with you where you said, ‘Why bother making stuff up when I can use my own experiences?’ Do your own experiences structure particular novels, or are there just bits that you bring in for certain scenes?
Well, I use experience. For me, experience is not what happened to me. My experience is not necessarily something that happened to me. My experience could be a story somebody has told me, or a story I’ve heard, or a story I’ve read, or a piece of whatever. All of this is part of experience to me. So I don’t, as it were, structure a novel because of what happened to me. I was also working as a hospital theatre orderly for almost two and a half years. I was an orderly in an operating theatre in Canterbury, so that world was not unknown to me, but those things are not what happened to me. If they are, they’re only in order to make the narrative plausible.
I know this because I know it can happen, because I was there when it happened, so in that way. In terms of Memory of Departure, I didn’t have a father like that at all, nor did I live in a small house like that, etc, but I did make a journey on the train from Dar es Salaam all the way to Nairobi, so I know that journey and the landscape, as it were, etc. So it’s in that way that it’s my experience, but I didn’t meet on that train somebody who was reading Mine Boy [the novel by the South African writer Peter Abrahams published in 1946], for example, and talking the way that man does.
But as you say, there’s a certain kind of writing which relies on what you know. I write about what I know, as I keep saying, but what I know is not restricted by what happened to me. What I know can be something I can look up, or I find out accidentally, as it were, as I’m writing something, and I think, ‘This reminds me of such and such.’ I loved the novel Dr Zhivago, for example. I have read it several times over the years. So when I was writing Dottie, I could see certain moments with a woman on her own, like Lara in Dr Zhivago. I can see certain things at times, and I think that’s one way of thinking about it.
I don’t want to say it’s not based on some of the things that happened to me, but it’s not about me. Well, it’s about me, of course, because I’m writing it, but it’s not about me. It’s about the situations that I’m also interested in exploring, like with Gravel Heart, in which the breakup of the relationship between the mother and the father was of prime interest to me. As the novel progresses, and the way of telling or revising the novel, Salem comes to be the one who’s the interlocutor, as it were. But the idea originally was the failure of love, if you like, and how love is defeated by the intervention of a powerful man. So it’s also about power.
I thought the way that that plot developed was very moving. I can see that you’re using Measure for Measure, which is one of Shakespeare’s best plays, I think, but you’re also thinking about the colonial legacy and the way that postcolonial societies often have these imbalances shadowed within them that are very hard to get over. I thought that was a very powerful cluster of terrible circumstances that nobody would find it easy to overcome.
Secrets are very important in your novels. Is that something you’re conscious of trying to deploy? The idea of the way in which a secret is deforming in so many ways or has a series of influences that affect not only the person keeping the secret but the people around them often seems to be a key thing in your novels. The Last Gift is one that I was particularly thinking of, and a secret that pervades and disintegrates a family, really. Is that something you were conscious of wanting to write about?
Well, it’s because I’m interested in families, and it seems to me that a lot of families have secrets. The magnitude of them might differ—or shall we say the impact of the secrets might differ. But in my wanderings, when I meet readers or whatever, quite often they volunteer a secret or something going on in their families, not because they’re disclosing something to me, but saying, ‘Yes, it’s true, because this is what happened in my family. We found out such and such’ or, ‘It turned out to be such and such.’ So it’s not a strange or exceptional thing for secrets to be percolating in family situations.
Partly, as in the case of The Last Gift, although that’s a big secret, the secret is suppressed for various reasons, some of which are very benign and have to do with keeping difficult things out of sight or not upsetting, say, children by talking about something that had happened to the mother or the father. Sometimes they are destructive, because, as you said, I think secrets really corrupt relationships if they’re not, in due course, brought out into the open.
There are a number of times when people have said to me, including just two or three days ago, how it took almost a lifetime to confess even to a partner. When I say ‘secrets’, it doesn’t have to be something like a treachery or betrayal. It can take other forms. In some cases, it’s not discovered. I spoke to an Australian journalist, whose name I can’t remember, when The Last Gift was published. She said that she and her siblings, after their mother died and they were viewing her body, I suppose, saw that she had a number on her wrists. She must have been an inmate of the camp, but why did she not say? Was there something to hide? Was she, in fact, one of those who became a collaborator or something like that? That is a lifetime. It was only at her death that they found out this information. So I’m interested in that, because, in a way, that’s also how many families operate.
In this particular case, sometimes secrets don’t matter very much. It’s really just that there was a gypsy ancestor or something like that, and they don’t want to confess to that. But in this case, there is a secret of a kind that we normally find really abhorrent, and he left and ran away. Incidentally, I don’t know if you saw that there is a connection between The Last Gift and Admiring Silence.
I missed that. Do enlighten me.
When the narrator of Admiring Silence went back and was talking to his mother, he discovered that the person that he thought was his father was really his stepfather, and that his real father had left one day. He was gone. The stepfather—sorry, the uncle or whoever it is—is the one who then helped the mother and the child. In The Last Gift, the man escaped. In The Last Gift, he explains why, whereas, in Admiring Silence, it’s not clear why he would have done such a thing. What the mother keeps saying is, ‘I don’t know why he did that. I don’t know why he did that. I don’t know why he did that. He just left.’ But in The Last Gift, the man, in the end, tells his story. That’s the gift that he leaves to his children—the story of why it was that he abandoned his family.
I hadn’t connected the two.
There are only a few reasons to connect it. You would have to be a fairly close reader to see. There is one incident in Admiring Silence, when he goes up to the terrace, and he looks across and sees a woman in a house opposite, who pulls up her dress and is cleaning herself. The same incident also appears in The Last Gift, where he talks about standing there and looking, but, in this case, it turns out that that’s how he ends up with that woman—that he’s married to that woman, or he’s forced into a marriage with that woman—whom he sees like that. There are moments like that that perhaps would make you say, ‘I wonder’. In fact, one of my readers, who is a very close reader, because she writes about my work, asked, ‘Is there a connection?’ She saw it immediately.
But anyway, secrets are different. There are many kinds of secrets. I’m interested in how they can become ways of reflecting on a narrative and how people then have to learn and to cope. Do you remember the poem in Afterlives that Hamza translates to Afiya? Do you remember that she asked him to translate a German poem?
Yes.
You remember the title of the poem?
No.
It is The Secret, by Schiller. I like the placing of clues in novels. I always find that something that’s enjoyable. Obviously, they can be read without one necessarily seeing it.
I do it because I enjoy it. I enjoy it when I come across something. I’m reading and I’ll think, ‘Aha, I can see this.’ But in this case, Schiller is in that novel, in one way or another, and there are also secrets there too, of course, which is Ilyas [the boy who was kidnapped as a child in German East Africa, educated in a German mission school, who sings at Nazi propaganda events and eventually dies in a concentration camp.]
I see. I could have selected Afterlives as another novel that’s centred on secrets and their impact. That’s really helpful. We’re drawing to a close, but I wanted to ask: you represent England in the 60s to 80s, when you were first over here—you came in the 60s, didn’t you?—as an often unkind place in which it wasn’t very difficult to activate racist attitudes. These vary from hostile attacks to people just not being terribly imaginative and being unsympathetic to immigrants, some finding that they haven’t thought carefully about what it’s like to be in somebody else’s shoes.
So there’s a whole panoply of things, but was that your experience of coming to England and moving to a provincial town, was it something that was just one aspect among many, or was it something that you felt pervaded everything?
I think it was a surprise. It was unexpected. It was a shock. It was the casual hostility, most of the time, that somebody like me—and I don’t think it was just me—encountered in a provincial town. Maybe to some extent, the attitudes stemmed from a lack of awareness. That is to say that there was a certain condescending, patronising sense of self-importance and smug complacency and so on, which was unexamined. But it was informed by a narrative of superiority and inferiority. It was informed by a sense of something that is the opposite of coeval and the opposite of ‘we live in a shared world’, but that you are, in some way or another, an intrusion into this thing that is well balanced. Your presence somehow brings a disturbance into this.
On reflection—and I wouldn’t have known to speak about it like that—I would only have sensed an unwelcomingness, a hostility and a pointing at you. In Pilgrim’s Way, even the bus conductor, when you get on the bus, somehow looks at you like, ‘Are you sure? Have you got the money?’ That kind of attitude still remains. You turn up at a place and somebody says, ‘You want to go down there’, to economy class or something like that. I think this is informed by, as I said, a narrative of self-importance. You could call it racism, but I don’t want to use the word because it’s become so easy to describe such a variety of different kinds of issues, some of them quite cruel and quite violent, and some of them condescending and patronising in this way that I’m talking about.
Also, I was unused to it, so I didn’t know for a year or so and I didn’t always know quite how to deal with it, how to respond to it so that you can disarm it, or how to respond to it so that you can intimidate back if you’re being intimidated. Rather, I was intimidated. So the experiences I write about in those early years are a way of remembering that sense of being pushed to the margin and being laughed at on TV, in the classroom, by another teacher or by the children you teach, etc.
But that wasn’t the only thing that was going on at the time. I was also meeting kindnesses, which were totally unexpected. I was meeting people who helped me in a very practical way, like a landlord who would say, ‘Okay, fine. We’ll forget the rent until you earn some money’, or people who helped me in my career to study, to get a scholarship, and to get this and that. So it’s not just a simple, straightforward, generalised experience of hostility and so on. It’s both. It’s both meeting unreflecting cruelties, but also meeting unexpected kindnesses.
Yes, and I think that’s something your novels deal with very well. You sometimes get characters who are unimaginative and a bit patronising, but, actually, when it comes down to it, they’re not so terrible. I think you portray a world that I certainly remember growing up in, although not, obviously, quite in the same way that you would have experienced it. I can certainly think back to those days and remember it being exactly like that. And of course, that still continues.
Abdulrazak, this has been such a pleasure. I think you have really explained why your work matters to you so much, the trajectory of your writing career, and what lies behind so much of your artful and profound writing. You’ve elaborated so many complicated contexts and explained the different forces and cross-currents that inform your writing. Thank you very much.
Partial bibliography
Admiring Silence (1996) (New York, The New Press).
By the Sea (2001) (London, Bloomsbury Publishing).
Dottie (1990) (London, Jonathan Cape).
Gravel Heart (2017) (London, Bloomsbury Publishing).
Memory of Departure (1987) (London, Jonathan Cape).
Pilgrim’s Way (1988) (London, Jonathan Cape).
The Last Gift (2011) (London, Bloomsbury Publishing).
Cite
DOI: 10.5871/jba/012.a45
Published on: 9 December 2024
Volume: 12
Issue: Issue 4
Article view count: 147
Article download count: 16
Copyright statement
© The author(s) 2024. This is an open access article licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International LicenseCite this article
Gurnah, A. with Hadfield, A. (2024), ‘Changing Places and Writing the Postcolonial Novel’, Journal of the British Academy, 12(4): a45 https://doi.org/10.5871/jba/012.a45Crossref
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Received
October 2022
Accepted
May 2023
Published
July 2023
From the ‘culture wars’ to reparative histories Gurminder K. Bhambra, Elizabeth Edwards, Margot Finn, Fiona Williams
The ‘culture wars’ that dominate public discourse in the UK turn, very often, on the significance accorded to histories of empire, slavery, and colonialism. What seems to be primarily of concern is the place of such histories in the telling of our national story. In this section, the articles explore different ways in which we could think about the relationship of the past with the present. Specifically, the articles collected here use the frame of ‘reparative histories’ as a potentially more effective way of engaging with complex and contested pasts. They address the idea of a reparatory sociology, colonial photography, representation and indigenous spaces, the gendering of reparative histories, and the need to rethink the welfare state from such a perspective.
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‘Coming to terms with racial capitalism’ brings together three scholars from the disciplines of History, Geography, and Sociology to open up consideration of this increasingly popular concept. This is done by engaging the idea of ‘racial capitalism’ with the historical role of colonialism in Jamaica, Latin America, and Ireland. Each author draws on the resources of their discipline to locate the concept within debates such as Black Marxism and to consider it in relation to discussions about Indigenous rights and questions of racism. Catherine Hall offers a case study of one temporal and spatial instance of racial capitalism in the mid-18th-century Atlantic world. Sarah A. Radcliffe examines the place of Indigenous peoples in the racial colonial capitalism of Latin America. The final paper by Gurminder K. Bhambra argues for the significance of colonialism to understandings of capitalism through an examination of Irish colonial history.
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