‘Literature shows human experience is shared’: Nobel laureate Abdulrazak Gurnah

When Abdulrazak Gurnah, the 2021 Nobel Prize winner for Literature, appears on the screen, there is an air of slight impatience about him as he waits for the interview to begin. After accepting apologies for the technical glitches that caused a delay in connection, he suggests diving straight into the discussion, citing a tight schedule.

The celebrated author, a key speaker at the upcoming Emirates Airline Festival of Literature that starts on January 29 and is on until February 3, 2025, is seated behind a table in a book-filled room. The 70-something writer, who was born in Zanzibar and moved to the UK where he is now based, has a distinguished air about him. Widely recognised and respected as one of the most powerful post-colonial writers, his novels Paradise, Afterlives, and Desertion explore themes of displacement, exile, identity, and belonging, facets the Nobel Academy underscored in their citation, referring to “his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents”.

Gurnah perhaps knows those feelings only too well. He grew up in Zanzibar, for centuries a major hub of trade and a fabulous melting pot, and later a British Protectorate. It became independent in December 1963, but a revolution a month later led to many people fleeing Zanzibar. In the turmoil, Gurnah and his brother moved to Britain.

Do themes such as displacement, migration, and belonging in his works reflect his personal journey? And how does he see them resonating in today’s global landscape?

“It’s not necessarily to do with my individual experiences but the experience of many millions of people around the world,” says Gurnah, who was until a few years ago a professor at the University of Kent. “That has been part of human experience altogether; it’s not anything new. I guess what is new, or relatively new, now is the direction which this movement is taking, which is mainly from the formerly colonised territories to more prosperous parts of the world. But we had the reverse of that, of course, for centuries. That is to say, people leaving Europe to go and, you know, find a better life in other people’s territories, countries, sometimes displacing people.”

So, does he see it resonating in the global landscape these days?

“Why are millions of people on the move in the Americas, in Africa, and Asia? That has been the case for a while is what I’m trying to say. It’s not just a new phenomenon. What is relatively new is the panic that is spreading across various parts of Europe and North America,” says the writer.

Gurnah left Zanzibar several decades ago, but themes of birthplace, family separations, loss and heartbreak, frequently figure in his works. If his The Desertion explores love’s fragility across three generations and sweeping political and cultural displacements, Last Gift unveils a profound secret that is revealed only at death, while Paradise, arguably Gurnah’s best-known work, stands out for its rich historical and cultural depth.

Keen to know more about the influence of Zanzibar’s history and oral traditions in his writing, I ask him how he balances honouring those traditions with the need to innovate and engage with a modern global audience.

“I just write about how things are; it’s not a matter of balancing something with that or other things that are kind of dissonant or something. It’s how things are. That part of the world is this part of the world. And the worlds kind of overlap.

Books are educational

“It’s surprising that we can read, that’s the thing. But what we learn from literature is that we can read about societies and places and times, indeed, that we are not very knowledgeable about or familiar with. And then we see that, in fact, they’re just like us, wherever it is that we read. Because indeed, what literature shows is that human experience is shared. Experience is not peculiar to one place or one time.’’

And experience is what Gurnah speaks and writes from. In an interview with a UN body a couple of years ago, he recalled how his emergence as a novelist was born from a desire “to make something… as opposed to just writing things down”. And although he has written more than 10 novels and a number of short stories, beginning his writing career as a 21-year-old in UK, it was the Nobel Prize that made him pretty much a household name across the world.

Anders Olsson, Chairman of the Nobel Committee, summed it up best when he explained why the writer deserved the Nobel: “Gurnah’s dedication to truth and his aversion to simplification are striking. This can make him bleak and uncompromising, at the same time as he follows the fates of individuals with great compassion and unbending commitment. His novels recoil from stereotypical descriptions and open our gaze to a culturally diversified East Africa unfamiliar to many in other parts of the world…. An unending exploration driven by intellectual passion is present in all his books, and equally prominent now… as when he began writing as a 21-year-old refugee.”

How has winning the Nobel impacted his life, and his writing? I ask.

“How has it impacted my life?” he repeats. “Well, for a start, of course, any writer would be delighted to be singled out in this way. It kind of endorses what you have been doing for a long time. Usually, the prize is not given for one or two books; it’s given for a lifetime. So to be awarded is to say, ‘Yep, you’ve done all right. Done okay.’ So it’s very endorsing that way.

“But in a more practical way, it means a lot of people want to know about your work, want to know about you. So new editions, translations, visits to places, and all these kinds of ways in which people want to get closer.”

Underscoring the Nobel Prize’s “global impact”, he says, it helps disseminate one’s work. “And it’s what any writer would hope for; that it’s not just read by a small group of people, but many people want to know about it. And then finally, they can engage with it.

“They can engage with it and say ‘it’s not just news about another place, but it’s also something I understand or identify with’. And this is always reassuring — to say that human societies have these shared experiences that they recognise, even if they know nothing about it. Wherever it is that I might be writing about, they still see themselves in this. And that’s reassuring in a different way, both as a writer but also as a person living in the world.”

Same old process

And has the prize impacted his work?

“It definitely hasn’t. I’m still like, here, sitting at my desk. I’m looking at the screen and trying to organise what’s going on in my head to put it there. I can’t tell the computer, ‘Hey, listen, do you know who I am?’ It won’t obey. I still have to write and do the work and do the thinking. So, no, it hasn’t. The work remains the same, and the labour of it remains the same.”

Gurnah’s writing process is pretty straightforward. “It’s at this table,” he says, patting the table in front of him. “It’s just an ordinary table. Nothing special. There is no mysterious fragrance burning around here. It’s just a computer desk. Is the chair comfortable? Yes, that counts.”