'Why struggle?' - the Tanzanian-born writer who can't help writing about his childhood home
Abdulrazak Gurnah - a Nobel laureate who moved to the UK at 18 - continues to explore the immigrant experience in his new novel Theft.
Four years after retiring as a full-time academic, Abdulrazak Gurnah was looking forward to kicking back in the garden.
Then he received a "very important endorsement" - the 2021 Nobel Prize for Literature.
"It has this kind of global impact [to say] that you're okay, you're all right, you're not bad' and that's very good, I think. Any writer would love to hear that." he tells Saturday Morning.
The cover of Abdulrazak Gurnah's latest book, Theft.
Bloomsbury
Gurnah has published ten books, including Afterlives, which the New York Times, Washington Post and TIME magazine named the best book of 2020.
When he won the Nobel Prize, he was working on his new novelTheft, which, like many of his previous novels, is set in his childhood home of Zanzibar.
"I regularly, at the completion of a book, will say, 'Okay, the next book is going to be about whatever something else … it's not going to be about Zanzibar. ' But somehow, sooner or later, that's where I end up. Why struggle? I give in."
Theft is a coming-of-age story centred on three young men struggling "just to keep their heads above water, just to be respected" in an era of transition between colonisation, independence and post-independence.
The original idea for the book was a young servant stealing "something really pathetic like a packet of biscuits or sugar" or something like that, and then being expelled and dishonoured.
"I thought, how does somebody pick themselves up from that? I was thinking like this because I actually had an experience of somebody like that when I was also growing up."
Books by Tanzanian-born novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah are on display at the Swedish Academy in Stockholm after the author was announced as the winner of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature, on 7 October, 2021.
AFP / Jonathan Nackstrand
Gurnah says he didn't fully understand the ramifications of leaving Zanzibar at 18 with his brother and illegally entering the United Kingdom to study.
"You have to learn things. You have to struggle, by which time you are also changed, and it's not possible to just simply then switch the other way and say, okay, I'm now going somewhere else to do something else, to be free from what I've found here, which is that I'm not welcome.
"There is also colonialism, coming from a colonised place to a place where it’s kind of like the headquarters, as it were, and to learn how you are understood and described and narrated and whatever, which I didn't know, to learn how to cope with this, to learn how to understand it, to learn how to move on from it, to learn how to write about it, as it turned out, because I didn't know that's what I would end up doing."
While Gurnah's own journey influences his writing, he says his own thoughts and experiences reflect the contemporary phenomenon of post-colonialism and immigration, which affects millions of people.
"Going to England was a revelation. So the dislocation, if you like, sounds like it's a tragedy, and indeed in many respects it is for a lot of people, or for all people, especially if it's not out of choice.
"I'm sure there are a lot of people in New Zealand who have this notion of home ... All these places are home, they're home in different ways. So it's not like home is the place you owe complete allegiance to.
"The home could be a place where you're from in the sense that that's where you were born and that's where all your early connections are. But then you also affiliate yourself to some other players for whatever reason, without losing the other one.
"For a writer, it seems to me that there's a kind of dynamism that comes out of that possibility. It's not a debilitating thing. It's not a thing that weakens you, it’s something that gives you strength. That you have this knowledge of more than just one kind of experience or one way of seeing the world."
