Abdulrazak Gurnah’s novel Far Shores – Culture

The only thing that refugees from their countries of origin always bring with them when they seek asylum elsewhere is their legend. There has to be a legend, but it doesn’t have to be true. And sometimes the name isn’t right either.

In Abdulrazak Gurnah’s 2001 novel “By the Sea”, which is now being republished under the German title “Ferne Gestade” for Nobel Prize reasons, the hero is an old man, a refugee from Zanzibar, who lived in London in the mid-1990s Appeals for British asylum at Gatwick Airport – with a fake name in a fake passport, but devoid of any legend. He seeks refuge with his former colonial power, which hastily released Zanzibar into chaotic freedom in 1964, but does not want to reveal anything about himself. He pretends that he doesn’t know a word of English apart from “refugee” and “asylum”.

His stubborn silence gives him strength and stature. It allows him to maintain his self-respect in a sense of secret superiority. With sarcastic politeness, but adamantly, he rejects offers of help from his refugee helper. His mantra, when he finally does agree to speak English, is the famous phrase of Herman Melville’s inexplicably stubborn scribe Bartleby: “I’d rather not.” The fact that his English helper doesn’t even recognize the quote fills him with quiet satisfaction.

Instead of a legend, the recalcitrant asylum seeker has brought his most precious possession with him: a small mahogany box containing a remnant of Cambodian incense, which he bought decades ago in Zanzibar from a Persian trader from Bahrain. This deliciously scented Ud-al-qamari stands for everything that has always characterized the ancient culture of this East African coastal region.

The scent of incense is a symbol of the wealth refined by trade in the multi-ethnic world on the shores of the Indian Ocean, open to any exchange of goods, ideas and people, before it was ruined by changing colonial powers and the bloody racial politics of post-colonial island despots. It goes without saying that the precious box is immediately taken away from the refugee and confiscated by the immigration officer at the airport. In doing so, he symbolically robs the refugee of what constitutes his very own individuality: the historical dignity of his homeland.

It’s not that the man who calls himself Mr. Shaaban, but his real name is Saleh Omar, doesn’t have a legend. On the contrary. What he has to say about his life in Zanzibar fills most of the 400 pages of this novel. However, he only wants to tell his life to one certain person – the literature professor Latif Mahmud from London, who has been assigned to him as an interpreter.

The two protagonists come from deeply feuding families

Latif is a fellow countryman, he also comes from Zanzibar: Thirty years ago he fled to England as a student via what was then East Germany. And as the unlikely coincidence with which Abdulrazak Gurnah fires up the narrative engine of his novel, Latif and Saleh Omar are not only somehow related, but also entangled in a bitter family feud in their old homeland.

Latif Mahmud is the son of Saleh Omar’s mortal enemy, the man whose identity he stole for his fake passport. The novel is about how it came about that he appropriated the name of his nemesis for his escape. An infinitely complicated legal battle unfolds over a house in Zanzibar, which ultimately ruined both families.

They’ve worn each other down with decades of meanness and petty, vengeful meanness. The dispute broke up Latif’s family and ruined Saleh Omar’s life. It cost him his thriving furniture and antiques business, all his fortune, his wife and child, imprisoned him for eleven years and ultimately drove him out of the country, making him a refugee and asylum seeker in his old age.

The stories of his parents do not stand up, certainties dissolve

And this is how the novel presents itself on the present level: Two migrants, who lead the lonely and joyless “half-life of strangers” in inhospitable England without a secure place in the world, recapitulate long-established inheritances of hatred from far away while walking along the beach on the cold shore of a small eastern English coastal town Shores of the island of Zanzibar, which they dragged on to English exile, where they are now festering. In long conversations they seek reconciliation with each other and with their history. Saleh Omar, tormented by guilt, wants to obtain late absolution from Latif through an unreserved confession. “I want you to forgive me,” he pleads with his enemy’s son.

For his part, Latif struggles to reconcile his own childhood memories and the toxic family legends of Saleh Omar’s alleged nefariousness, wickedness and cruelty instilled in him from an early age with the very different version of events he is now being told by his melancholic interlocutor hear. The image that Latif has of his parents can no longer stand up to this, and all his old certainties about his life begin to falter.

It is not least the conversation about Bartleby, the writer, that brings the two adversaries closer together. What unites the professional reader Latif and the wild reader Saleh Omar is a love of literature, inherited from their Western-indoctrinated British colonial upbringing. They ponder Bartleby’s mysteriousness, talk shop about “the impassive force in this man’s downfall, the noble futility of his life.”

Gurnah gives a voice to a region of the world that has hitherto been largely silent in terms of literature

You wonder whether “Bartleby’s self-mutilating retreat” is heroic and admirable or cruel and dangerous. It is becoming increasingly clear that Bartleby is to be understood as Saleh Omar’s literary avatar. The novel suggests that the hero saw himself “as a kind of Bartleby, someone with a secret and oppressive past who sought to atone for it through silence”.

Last year, the Nobel Prize was awarded to Abdulrazak Gurnah, the Zanzibar-born professor emeritus for English and postcolonial literature at the University of Kent, not least because this author tells colonial history strictly from the perspective of the subjugated Africans and the world region, which has hitherto been largely silent in terms of literature on the East African coast lends a whole idiosyncratic voice, soft but unflinching in its quiet rebelliousness.

In the novel “Ferne Gestade” Gurnah’s themes in life add up to a multi-layered master story. A hidden picture is drawn of the everyday life of this busy coastal region with its petty traders, day labourers, peddlers and opaque merchants from the Gulf. The ranks and subtle ethnic differences of this Muslim male world are precisely outlined, with their carefully balanced formulas of politeness and respect, their rigid clan structures and age-old enmities, while the women banished to the house unfold a female counter-world without men.

Impressive how Gurnah weaves his East-West readings into his novels

Gurnah’s narrative cosmos is permeated by the ethnic diversity of this region, in which everything is jumbled together – cultures, traditions, tribal rites, religions, archaic and modern, persistent local beliefs in ancestors and spirits and imported ways of life and ways of thinking from far away, from the more distant shores of the Indian Ocean.

Portuguese, Arab conquerors from the Gulf, Germans and British have left their colonial traces of rule here; Indians, Persians, Khmers and Africans from elsewhere, all merchant peoples, have left their mark on the region – a powerless region with no control over its own destiny.

In addition, as in this novel, Gurnah is always concerned with the migrant world experience of alienation, with the double uprooting and loss of identity of migrants who commute between two different kinds of strangers, who do not belong and are unwanted here and there. The reconciliation of unrelated cultural worlds can only succeed in literature, not in political reality. It is impressive how the well-read author weaves his diverse East-Western readings into his novels, sprinkled with quotations from “The Arabian Nights” and the Koran to Shakespeare and the classics of Western modernity. This is how Abdulrazak Gurnah inscribes his work in world literature.