Nobel Prize in Literature 2021: Who is Abdulrazak Gurnah and what does his victory represent?

“I have not returned to collect data, I have returned to bite the dust again“, said. Then he plugged in his old word processor and began writing a terrible story set in a beautiful location. That is to say, like the series of paradoxes that had crossed his existence, he chose the extraordinary beauty of a place rich in ivory, cinnamon, pepper and nutmeg as a backdrop for the dramatic future of a boy from Tanzania, Yusuf, sold as slave to a merchant who is presented as his uncle. Intertextually built on Surah 12 of the Qur’an — where the Prophet Joseph is torn from his loving father and driven into slavery — the novel had such an impact that it was a finalist for the 1994 Whitbread Award and Booker Prize.

And, of course, it would throw the first lights on its author, an African immigrant who in 1968 had decided to leave his country plagued by internal wars, racism and Muslim persecution: his name was Abdulrazak Gurnah and he was born in 1948 in the beautiful city from Zanzibar, famous for appearing in a Jules Verne novel and also being the birthplace of Freddie Mercury. But he had to flee to Great Britain. He finished studying at the University of London before earning a living as a professor of literature at the University of Kent, where he received his doctorate in 1982. In 1990 he returned to his country to bite the dust and write “Paraíso”, which would be translated and edited in Spanish in 1997.

Journey to the seed

The following year “Precarious Silence” will appear in our language, a novel that revolves once again about a university professor from Zanzibar who in twenty years finds a home, a job and a wife in England. In this transit he will discover both the adopted country and the world from which it comes, in an identity clash that goes beyond the articulation of the aesthetic principles of the literary apparatus: under the unfolding of metaphors and the persistent mixture of myths and realities, the African author will do his best to interrogate the western world about the fate of those who left and later decide to return to their land. Will that meeting take place? How will it happen? What place will that be?

“Like all my life, I live in a small city by the sea, but most of it has passed on the shores of a great green ocean, very far from here.”: This is how“ En la Shore ”(2003) begins, the third and last book in the language of Cervantes, the unknown African author until a few hours ago. It refers, again, to Zanzibar. And he relates, of course, the afternoon that his alter ego landed at London Gatwick airport carrying a mahogany box full of incense for all his luggage. It will be that fragrant and aromatic, religious and therapeutic smoke that leads its silent steps through a country that, without being completely alien, will never end up making its own.

This nihilistic and disenchanted patina will run through his entire work written entirely in English: “Memory of Departure” (1987), “Pilgrims Way” (1988), “Dottie” (1990), “Paradise” (1994), “Admiring Silence (1996) ) ”,“ By the Sea ”(2001),“ Desertion ”(2005),“ The Last Gift ”(2011),“ Gravel Heart ”(2017) and“ Afterlives ”(2020). Arab fortresses, colorful mosques, Persian warriors, Omani sultans, perfume merchants and elephantine ivory tusks like the decoration of an inside procession: Tanzania never ceased to be the nucleus of a powerful African slave-owning pocket in historical triangulation with Europe and India. The trigger for the hazardous displacement of their children scattered around the world.

My africa

The matter is certainly fully established in the British literary tradition. And find such renowned authors as Sam Selvon, Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, Salman Rushdie, Hanif Kureishi or Zadie Smith. Perhaps also thinking of them, the Academy has decided to consecrate Gurnah “for her uncompromising and compassionate understanding of the effects of colonialism and the fate of refugees in the gap between cultures and continents.” Moreover, it was the same Nobel 2021 who would auscultate the matter in other contemporary postcolonial writers such as Naipaul, Rushdie, Zoë Wicomb, GV Desani, Anthony Burgess, Joseph Conrad, George Lamming and Jamaica Kincaid.

Owner of a cultivated anonymity carved out on the basis of discretion and a trail of discontinued titles in English and Spanish, the world begins to discover a man who began to think about one of the varieties of the Bantu language that is spoken in Cameroon, Gabon and the Congo to end up making history with Shakespeare’s.

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