Djinn & tonic

The one thing that strikes you on reading the Tanzanian writer Abdulrazak Gurnah -- from some of his earliest short stories like “The Retaining Wall” that appeared in Granta in the nineties to “Afterlives”, his 2020 novel -- is the “Englishness”. Not just the prose style, which is conspicuously formal, but also the sensibility, which seems to be always on the cusp of claustrophobia.
Gurnah has won the 2021 Nobel for literature, and the awards committee in its citation, spoke of his “uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee”.For a writer of this kind who habitually dwells on “the gulf between cultures and continents, between the life left behind and the life to come”, fabulism or magical realism or, at least, a prose riddled with patois (cue Soyinka and Achebe to Chimamanda Adichie and David Diop) would, you would imagine, be the ideal style. Not so, for Gurnah, however.
To be sure, most of his characters inhabit a half-way house between identities. Take Khalifa Qassim in “Afterlives”, for instance, a third-generation Gujarati in Zanzibar during the early 20th century, who doesn’t really fit in with the influential Indian community there because he looks more like his Black African mother. Unlike Saleh Omar in “By The Sea”, Gurnah's 2001 novel, Khalifa is not a refugee, but both are deeply divided souls. “I am a refugee, an asylum-seeker; these are not simple words, even if the habit of hearing them makes them seem so”, Saleh says at the beginning of the novel and Gurnah’s story goes on to show how complex and fraught these words can be.
Most of Gurnah’s stories are set at the crossroads of a plethora of imaginary worlds— Arab, British, Indian, Persian and, of course, East African (specifically Zanzibar, in Arabic, “the country of the blacks”) -- all of them to varying degrees a mix of modern aspirations and ancient prejudices. There is obviously a lot of colour, a lot that is exotic, especially to Western eyes, and this aspect of Gurnah’s work, already highlighted in the Anglo Saxon world, will get even more exaggerated following his Nobel recognition. Consider this unalloyed praise by a critic reviewing “By The Sea”: “We are the Sultan before Scheherazade asking for more stories, like a vital need, a question of life and death. A sudden change in the course of the narrative brings in new characters, multiplying suddenly and with bravado performance the perspectives of the original story....Each character could become a character in her own tale, a contemporary “Arabian Nights” rendered post-exotic by its political relevance in modern times”. Partly true, but such views also miss the point of Gurnah’s real legacy, which is to debunk Orientalist constructions of former colonies of the current global south and east.
The evidence of this is Gurnah’s prose and it seems an anomaly at first -- how, it is always so well groomed, never casual or outlandish, as consciously “regulation style” as the land he took refuge in after leaving his native Zanzibar at the age of 18. Gurnah’s subversion lies in what his prose is eventually employed for -- a mind holding a distorting mirror to itself, catching it in the most unflattering angles, exposing how premeditated we mostly are, revelations that come from a certain asymmetry and, last but not least, the prevailing leitmotif that nothing is unworthy of our attention.
There is a Naipaul-like, or even Hemingwaylike, insistence on banal details in Gurnah’s stories as though he is establishing familiar landmarks on a map, not because a surprise snowstorm may erase them but because one’s bearings, like one’s place in the world, should not be forgotten. Along with the external problems that refugees face -- housing, jobs or rather their lack, racism, scorn etc -- that Gurnah describes memorably, his actual focus is on how the refugee experience (exile in fact) profoundly rearranges what goes on in their minds. As Saleh Omar explains his attempt to reconcile what he has left behind and what he must adapt to: “I marvel how the hours of darkness have come to be so precious to me, how night silences have turned out so full of mumbles and whispers when before they had been so terrifyingly still, so tense with the uncanny noiselessness that hovered above words”.