Nobel Prize for Literature for Abdulrazak Gurnah: The Unknown Prize Winner

Status: 07.10.2021 5:50 p.m.

The Nobel Prize for Literature for Abdulrazak Gurnah came as a surprise to many. The writer, who was born in today’s Tanzania and lives in Great Britain, deals in his work with migration experiences and colonialism.

From Zanzibar to Dresden: For Latif Mahmud, protagonist in Abdulrazak Gunrah’s novel “Ferne Gestade”, this journey becomes a reality. Mahmud had to flee from the dictatorship on Zanzibar. But everyday life in the gray student residence quickly arouses homesickness in him: “In Dresden-Neustadt I missed my island,” writes Gurnah, “but as much as I wanted to leave East Germany, I had so little hope of ever seeing Zanzibar again.”

From Zanzibar to Europe: This is also Gurnah’s own story. Born as the son of a Yemeni-Kenyan couple, he grew up listening to stories of the struggles for self-determination – an experience that he processed in his latest novel “Afterlives”.

As a young man, shortly after its independence, Gurnah left the island out of fear. Because Muslims like him were persecuted in Zanzibar, which is now part of Tanzania. More than 10,000 Arabs are said to have been killed in the turmoil of the change of power.

Writing in English

In Kent, England, Gurnah found a new home – and a new language. From the beginning he did not write in Swahili, his mother tongue, but in English. “When I was ten or eleven I didn’t think about becoming a writer,” he said in an interview. “I only started when I was 20 when I was in England and had some problems. And it was clear to me that English was the language for me because it was the language I read books in.”

In “Black on White”, his second novel, Gurnah talks about the problems that could have been. Daoud, a young man of Indian descent, flees to England. But there, in a small town, he encounters racism and exclusion. And he cannot shed the experience of colonialism. In every Englishman he meets, he sees the former masters of his country of origin: “For him, the grin of the old man was exactly that smile that had once conquered a world empire. The smile of a pickpocket, full of ulterior motives and only looking to become the innocent victim to distract and appease while the thief fought over the valuables. ” It is only when Daoud meets Catherine, a young woman who is really interested in him, that he begins to change his image of England and to build a new life for himself.

Jan Ehlert, NDR, on the Nobel Prize for Literature Abdulrazak Gurnah

tagesschau24 3:00 p.m., 7.10.2021

Inner turmoil in emigration

This being torn back and forth between cultures, the compulsion to invent a new identity when the old one can no longer be reconciled with life in the new world, these are the themes that Abdulrazak Gurnah talks about.

He finds a wonderful metaphor for this in “Thundering Silence”: “A broken heart” is diagnosed to its nameless protagonist. And only when he admits this broken heart does he gain the courage to travel back to his homeland. The broken heart cannot be healed through this – just as the conflict never ends for emigrants.

“I sometimes had the feeling that my whole life was a story, and I played my part in events that I could not influence,” it says in “Thundering Silence”. That these stories are told anyway, without anger, but compassionately, always close to his characters, that is the power of the novels by Abdulrazak Gurnah.

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