Abdulrazak Gurnah: Nobel prize honours a self-effacing and unassuming talent: Not many knew of the unheralded Zanzibari author who has steadily produced 10 novels
With grace, delicacy and a keen sense of observation, Gurnah fictionalises the autobiographical in the coming-of-age/rite-of-passage story told by his début novel“My mother was in the backyard, starting the fire. Snatches of the prayer she was chanting reached me before I went out. I found her with her head lowered over the brazier, blowing gently to coax the charcoal into flames. The saucepan of water was ready by her feet.
Gurnah extends or widens the imaginative scope of his inquiry into the human condition, and of the compassionate intelligence and range of perspectives he brings to bear on the plight of the dispossessed and disinherited. His work offers important insights into exile and diaspora, identity and uprootedness, migration and displacement, alienation and belonging, memory and loss.
He saw two Europeans on the railway platform at that time, the first he had ever seen. He was not frightened, not at first. He went to the station often, to watch the trains come noisily and gracefully in, and then to wait for them to haul themselves out again, marshalled by the scowling Indian signalman with his pennants and whistle. Often Yusuf waited hours for a train to arrive.
Gurnah himself is neither Arab nor Asian but a Kiswahili-speaking black African. Nevertheless, disillusioned with the new dispensation in Zanzibar, he too fled, emigrating to the UK at 18 in 1967. As he recalls inin 2001, “When I came to England in the late 60s, Sergeant Pepper was ruling the land, de Gaulle was the Great Satan and it was only months before Enoch Powell made his classical allusion to the Tiber. […]. I arrived in Britain at around the same time, although I wasn’t Asian.
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