A deep dive into Abdulrazak Gurnah's masterful writings

Those who did not know this literature genius at the time grew an interest to discover him through his works of art and those who did, understood that through his storytelling, Abdulrazak earned the famous award.

The Swedish Academy awarded the British Tanzanian-born writer, Abdulrazak Gurnah, due to his “uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism in East Africa on the lives of the uprooted and migrating individuals as well as the fates of the refugees in the gulf between cultures and continents.”

He became the first African to win that award in almost two decades. In a recent interview with The Citizen, when he visited Tanzania to launch his translated version of one of his books “Paradise” (Peponi in Swahili) by Ida Hadjavayanis, Mr Gurnah revealed how his story in writing novels unfolded.

“Writing is something I was doing throughout my early school years. However, only my family and friends would read what I wrote. After going to England in the late 1960s, I began to think about the ways I could organise my written ideas before they went public. This is partially because there was so much that was strange and difficult, both about leaving my country and being in the UK as a young person. I felt like a stranger,” he says.

He reveals that his journey in the literary world began with disentangling things and ideas at the time.

 “It took a long time for me to learn to do this and another thing that I learned over time is that it takes a long time for anyone to bother to read and listen, let alone publish what you have written,” he narrates.

Like many writers, it took him a long while before he got a publisher who took an interest in his work.

“Many writers have had to go through that experience. This is either because the climate at the time is not in their favour or they have not found the right publisher,” he explains.

He did not write fiction until he was 37 years old. Mr Gurnah has so far published 10 novels including Memory of Departure, Pilgrim’s Way, Dottie, Paradise, Admiring Silence, By the Sea, Desertion, The Last Gift, Gravel Heart and his most recent book, Afterlives was published in 2020.

Mr Gurnah’s writings capture the reflections of his own life as well as of others through most of his protagonists. He says most of the things he has written about were the realities he lived through as well as other people’s experiences that he knew about.

“Most of my books are about things I have read about or seen that made me ask questions and think about them thoroughly through my own words. My writing is about addressing those issues and questions that you cannot easily get answers to. What makes writing interesting is that you engage with a complicated idea and through your own words, you work it out,” he says.

When he was pursuing a Bachelor’s Degree in Education at Canterbury Christ Church University (formerly Christ Church College), Mr Gurnah thought of the person he would want to become in the future.

“I loved the thought of being an academic teacher at a university and also, I wanted to become a novelist. I knew these two were separate careers but I prepared myself from the beginning to wear both hats. It was only a matter of setting time to do both of them effectively,” he recalls.

His dream came true after becoming a Linguistic Professor at the University of Kent and a novelist who would work on his writing whenever he took some time off work, especially during holidays and work leave.

Without mentioning the names, he says that some of his favourite writings are by authors of an earlier period, others are contemporary authors and some of them are African authors.

“I read things all the time and this means that my list of favourite authors also evolves over time,” he says.

Being a Swahili Studies Lecturer at ASOS College, Ida Hadjivayanis began to translate Paradise to teach the book to her students in March 2021 and six months later when Abdulrazak became a Nobel laureate, she learned that the stories in this book reflected lives in the East African region and deserve to be read by the people in this particular region, in a language they know best.

The managing director of Mkuki na Nyota, Mr Mkuki Bgoya, met Gurnah at a book fair in London soon after he won the award. He approached Gurnah and talked to him about publishing Ida’s translation and was afterward connected with Abdulrazak’s agent.

“The immediate impact of this award was that I could not work for the first year after I won the Nobel Prize. Afterward, there were translations of my works into different languages. Before Christmas in the same year, new translations were getting published and this meant I had to travel to help launch them,” he recalls.

He advises aspiring writers to keep pursuing their dreams and not let challenges discourage them from making their work writing.

“I would tell them to keep writing. It’s not easy to find the right publisher and it’s not easy to get the story you are writing, right. They should not abandon the task of writing if they have something to say. Among the things that can inspire them is their understanding of how people see the world. This includes news of other things and cultures because this will stretch their minds to write the things they want to address from broadened perspectives,” he emphasizes.

Abdulrazak says that in the literary world, it is important to have diversity that sets up a more complex picture that would make society understand its reflections through the words of different writers.

“Diverse voices in the literature world are always more informative compared to having to read one writer because they tend to be more accurate as they reveal things and questions mirroring different things in the society through the questions they raise through their writings,” he explains.

He has recently completed a new book that is now in the process of getting proofread.

“These things usually take a while. It could be a year and a half depending on the publisher,” he hints.