LAHORE: Nobel laureate Abdulrazak Gurnah says that in the 1980s, most of the writers were not writing about the world he lived in.

“It was the world I recognised but not the world I knew. There was a certain misconception about Africa or its image. It was a part of an impulse to write about the world, which was not in literature. The story of the European encounter with his part of the world was misrepresented. There was something there to write about,” he said while speaking at the LLF session, Across Centuries and Continent, moderated by publisher Alexandra Pringle.

Gurnah said the first thing that he read was the Quran by the age of five.

“The first things that I learnt were the short Surahs of the Quran. By the age of seven, we were sent to the government school established by the colonial government and there were no leaves from the schools. In the government schools up to the primary level, all the teachers were like us. After that, all education was in English. It was quite a difficult transition because English was very limited and suddenly you were required to understand what the teachers were saying.”

Gurnah said all secondary schoolteachers were Europeans – English and Scottish – because the government thought that the teaching material was too difficult for the native teachers to teach. He said the students would suddenly find strange looking people speaking a strange language which was hard to understand.

To the question how the Zanzibar Revolution in 1964 affected his life, Gurnah said it was quite an upheaval. “I was a teen and it was a bigger evil for the people of my parents’ generation. There was a lot of terror, people were being imprisoned, people were being killed. The politics of decolonisation had become seriously racialised so the victims of this revolution for the people who were identified as Arabs or Indians or something like that. There was an element of fantasy in this terror as schools were shut.”

Gurnah was 18 when he moved to England and a question was asked whether he identified with the protagonist in his first novel, Memory of Departure, in which a teenager travelled abroad. He said, “When I went to England, there was a degree of hostility and a degree of loneliness, particularly for a young person”.

He said he was also thinking about what he had left behind.

“I think this happens with the people relocated for whatever reasons because what you have left behind does not leave you. It’s not like you go from one life to another and make a new life. The old life still goes on.” He said he was familiar with that experience which influenced the novel too.

As the time passed, Gurnah gradually came to realise that England was his home as he could not go back because of the way he left his native country by breaking the law. He called it a time of unusual hostility and panic. He said the hostility was still there but only the targets change, including the Pakistanis, South Asians or refugees.

Gurnah pointed out the dilemma that England found itself in by offering the sanctuary as well as having xenophobia seemed to be going on for centuries and it’s still going on.

About the question of writing, he said while crossing the element of pleasure, one reached a realization that somebody else would read it and be critical about it. At this point, the writer would try to make sure that he made the reader want to read more about his subject. “There is a difference between writing for yourself and writing to be read by somebody else,” he added.

DAMON GALGUT: Damon Galgut, the Booker Prize winner of 2021, in South Africa, so much money had been stolen and many state institutions had been hollowed out while so much time has been lost.

“At this time all South Africans are feeling despair. The only consolation is that the rest of the world is in an appalling state too,” he said this about the situation in South Africa while talking to Syima Aslam of the Bradford Literature Festival on a session, ‘The Political Cycles of South Africa”.

When asked what he would do to change the situation, he said he would reshape the budget. “Why has so much money gone to the military? The real reason is that because it’s really easy to skim. I think a lot of the reason for the money going to the institutions like the military is that it’s very easy to skim off the top of those kinds of deals compared to useful social projects.”

Galgut said he would reconstitute the budget and put more money into housing and education and the pressing human needs rather than abstract state needs.

The Booker Prize winner said though he was writing about white South Africans, he wanted to convey to the readers a sense of how invisible their black counterparts were. He said he decided not leave it to his imagination to pass a certain threshold, which was essentially the point that white South Africans were not prepared to imagine–the lives of other South Africans.

“I wanted to make the readers aware and as uncomfortable as possible about ourselves. I wanted the silence (of black South Africans) to be eloquent”.

“It really gives me no pleasure to say that I am not really hurtful about the South Africa at the moment. There was a sense in the 1990s when we had the first democratic election. There was a kind of delirious feeling in the air that everything was possible and we could absolutely rewrite the future. That seems quaint and naïve in retrospect. There a kind of goodwill on the part not only of black South Africans but also on the part of white South Africans.”

He said later a socialist organisation following socialist principles came to power and the decision was made to follow neoliberal capitalism with the hope that money would trickle down to the poor which it never did. In the 1990s, we were asked to pay wealth tax to educate the poor a lot of us would have given it but that’s no longer true at this point, 30 years into democracy.

“If since the 1990s we would have put money into education and housing, we would have been in a very good position now,” the novelist added.

Published in Dawn, February 26th, 2023