Another good article on him.
"At a time when people saw each other through cliches and stereotypes, Abdulrazak taught many the values of being open-minded and looking at the world with empathy.In a way, perhaps that was inevitable given the cosmopolitan environment he grew up in."
And about that place, a quick history:
The Zanzibar archipelago (two main islands, Unguja and Pemba, with a number of islets surrounding both), were once a playground of pirates, slave traders and assorted colonialists. They included the Portuguese, who held sway from around 1503 until their defeat by forces from the sultanate of Muscat and Oman in 1698. The Omanis had fought at the behest of local Muslim rulers, who had had enough of the cruel and vicious Portuguese. When the Portuguese were dislodged, Zanzibar became a possession of Muscat and Oman. They were ruled as a single entity and, in 1840, the sultan Seyyid Said bin Sultan moved his capital from Muscat to Zanzibar. Upon his death at sea in 1856, on a return journey from Muscat to Zanzibar, his dominions were divided, adhering to instructions in his will. One son, Thuwain bin Said, became the sultan of Muscat and Oman, while another, Majid, became the sultan of Zanzibar.
Independence, of course, was brutal:
Independence was granted on December 10, 1963, at a ceremony presided over by Prince Philip. Just over a month later, on January 12, 1964, the newly independent government and the sultanate were overthrown in a violent revolution led by the Afro-Shirazi Party, in which hundreds of Zanzibaris of Arab or Asian origin were killed. It was Africa’s second post-independence coup d‘etat after Togo’s military putsch a year earlier.
And this:
The revolution quickly turned racist, adversely affecting people of Abdulrazak’s background. His lineage can be traced to the Hadhramaut Valley in south Yemen. Many of the so-called revolutionaries fitted the Marxist description of lumpen elements – unlettered, uncouth and with a visceral hatred of those they considered privileged.
And another one.
Note that he started reading English, the language he writes in, after he turned 18 (very much in line with the greats of old like Conrad):
In a 2004 essay, “Writing and Place,” Gurnah notes, “I believe that writers come to writing through reading, that it is out of the process of accumulation and accretion, of echoes and repetition, that they fashion a register that enables them to write.” He goes on to trace the evolution of the reading that enabled his own register: his limited access, growing up in Zanzibar, to literature written in his first language, Kiswahili; the alienating British-colonial education that he received there; the Quranic learning that took place in his local mosque; and his self-directed reading in English, after he fled Zanzibar for England as a young refugee.
That's good and so is this point:
This makes it easier to forget all the other streams of influence: the Kiswahili poetry, the Islamic tales, even the fusty British-colonial schoolbooks that shaped generations of writers all across the globe.
We learn so much about ourselves in that instant in which a prize-winner is announced, and we catch ourselves thinking, Ah, it should have been X who won. And, when we’re at the Strand, jostling other readers for the last used copy of “Paradise” (or ordering a copy of “By the Sea” on Amazon, where it is now selling for nine hundred and seventy-four dollars), we can use that opportunity to grab another book or two that might deepen our appreciation of Gurnah’s register—perhaps a collection of Kiswahili poetry or travel narratives, or “The Thousand and One Nights,” or a novel by another great East African writer, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o . . . or even Shakespeare’s “Measure for Measure,” which I have to confess I’ve never read.
And finally this piece by the Guardian seems solid.
Remember he Fled violence in Zanzibar. The kind that stemmed from great inequalities, but existed nonetheless:
I am about to mention home secretary Priti Patel, currently in charge of one of the institutions doing the pushing, but he beats me to it. “The curious thing, of course, is the person presiding over this is herself somebody who would have come here, or her parents would have come here, to confront those attitudes themselves.” What would he say to her if she were here now? “I would say, ‘Maybe a little more compassion might not be a bad thing.’ But I don’t want to get into a dialogue with Priti Patel, really.”
Note that PP's family was kicked out of Uganda in a similar manner.
And Abdulrazak really had an interesting moment with how he started writing:
“Writing [came] out of the situation that I was in, which was poverty, homesickness, being unskilled, uneducated. So out of that misery you begin to write things down. It wasn’t like: I’m writing a novel. But this kept growing, this stuff. Then it started to become ‘writing’ because you have to think and construct and shape and so on.”
And he brings up something I agree with, in terms of where fiction serves humanity (bold my own):
On the other hand, he says, this is not necessarily their fault. “It’s because they don’t get told about these things. So you have on the one hand scholarship, which deeply investigates and understands all of these dimensions of influence, the consequences, the atrocities. On the other hand, you have a popular discourse that is very selective about what it will remember.” Can other kinds of storytelling fill the gap? “It seems to me that fiction is the bridge between these things, the bridge between this immense scholarship and that kind of popular perception.
Good stuff.
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