Abdulrazak Gurnah

Tanzanian-born British novelist

• Born: December 20, 1948
• Place of Birth: Zanzibar (now part of Tanzania, Africa)

Biography

Abdulrazak Gurnah was born in 1948 in Zanzibar, an island nation in the Indian Ocean off Africa’s east coast, a former British possession that, following a bloody internal political insurgency in 1964, became part of the United Republic of Tanzania. Educated in British public schools in Zanzibar (his first language was Kiswahili), Gurnah immigrated to England when he was eighteen to pursue his education, uncertain over Zanzibar’s political instabilities. Earning his doctorate in literature at Rutherford College at the University of Kent, Canterbury, Gurnah accepted a teaching position there in 1985. He initially pursued academic writing and did not publish his first novel until he was almost forty years old.

Perhaps inevitably, when Gurnah turned to fiction, his thematic interest would be how misfit people were caught in the postcolonial struggle for identity. His books examine how the concept of home was more memory than reality for people who have emigrated from their native lands, and how the clash of cultures ultimately makes the pressure of assimilation inevitable. Although his first three novels were well received, Paradise (1994), short-listed for that year’s Booker Prize, established Gurnah’s international reputation. A coming-of-age narrative set in precolonial Africa shortly before World War I, lyrically written and enhanced with symbols drawn from African folk traditions, it tells of a resilient African boy sold to an Arab merchant by his own father and compelled to undertake dangerous trading expeditions into the African interior.

In By the Sea (2001), Gurnah explores the construction of self through the vehicle of memory and storytelling. The novel relates the narrative of an undocumented immigrant from East Africa who shows up mysteriously in England claiming political refugee status. The novel interweaves two stories: the immigrant’s hesitant recounting of his history, a complicated story of seduction and treachery set amid Tanzania’s political revolutions, is interspersed with the experiences of a sympathetic social worker at a detention center. In the course of the novel, the immigrant must confront a nemesis from his past, now a university lecturer. In Desertion (2005), Gurnah measures the conflicted identity of postcolonial people by examining forbidden passion. A British writer traveling through East Africa during the height of the British colonial empire in 1899 takes ill and, helped by a Muslim man, falls in love with his caretaker’s sister. The narrative allows Gurnah to examine the role of women in Eastern and Western cultures, the precarious influence of family when cultures collide, and the problematic complexity of love itself. Gurnah's subsequent work includes The Last Gift (2011), Gravel Heart (2017), and Afterlives (2020), and each interacts with the legacy of colonialism in varying ways. The Last Gift, praised for both its scope and well-written characters, centers on an East African immigrant in England who reflects on his life after he experiences a stroke. Gravel Heart, which examines the relationship between a young man who is forced to leave Zanzibar for the United Kingdom and his parents, also received favorable reviews from critics, who particularly praised Gurnah's prose. Afterlives examines twentieth century life under German colonial rule on the Swahili coast through several different characters that are each affected by colonialism in varying ways. Like his previous work, Gurnah received praise for the way in which Afterlives takes an unflinching look at the implications of colonialism and its effect on identity.

In his novels, Gurnah, himself a product of a culture that survived both colonial occupation and then civil unrest, explores the struggle to define the self alienated from, and yet drawn toward, cultural identity. In poignant narratives of exile and alienation, memory and dislocation, Gurnah has emerged as a dominant voice in postcolonial literature, arguing that distance enhances rather than distorts cultural identity, that being an outsider endows the sensibility with critical insight into identity itself.

Gurnah was named a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2006. Gurnah later won the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature for his life's work, particularly in regard to the way in which his writing interacts with the legacy of colonialism and the reality of postcolonialism.

Author Works

Long Fiction

Memory of Departure, 1987

Pilgrim's Way, 1988

Dottie, 1990

Paradise, 1994

Admiring Silence, 1996

By the Sea, 2001

Desertion, 2005

The Last Gift, 2011

Gravel Heart, 2017

Afterlives, 2020

Edited Texts

Essays in African Literature: A Re-evaluation, 1993

The Cambridge Companion to Salman Rushdie, 2007

Bibliography

"Abdulrazak Gurnah." Encyclopedia of Afro-European Studies, www.encyclopediaofafroeuropeanstudies.eu/encyclopedia/abdulrazak-gurnah/. Accessed 11 Oct. 2017.

Alter, Alexandra, and Alex Marshall. "Abdulrazak Gurnah Is Awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature."The New York Times, 7 Oct. 2021, www.nytimes.com/2021/10/07/books/nobel-prize-literature-abdulrazak-gurnah.html. Accessed 17 Oct. 2024.

Gurnah, Abdulrazak. "Learning to Read." Matatu: Journal for African Culture and Society, vol. 46, Apr. 2015, pp. 23–32.

Gurnah, Abdulrazak. "Writing and Place." World Literature Today, vol. 78, no. 2, 2004, pp. 26–28.

Marshall, Alex. "Abdulrazak Gurnah Refuses to Be Boxed In: ‘I Represent Me’." The New York Times, 24 Aug. 2022, www.nytimes.com/2022/08/21/books/abdulrazak-gurnah-nobel-book.html. Accessed 17 Oct. 2024.

Whyte, Philip. "Heritage as Nightmare: The Novels of Abdulrazak Gurnah." Commonwealth Essays and Studies, vol. 27, no. 1 (2004), pp 11–18.