Abdulrazak Gurnah in conversation with Professor Nishat Zaidi and Professor Dilip Menon, moderated by Steven George, exploring migration, cosmopolitanism, memory and literary forms across the Indian Ocean world.
Introduction
Abdulrazak Gurnah is one of the most important contemporary postcolonial writers, known for his explorations of displacement and the historical connections of the Indian Ocean world. In 2021, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for his “uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee.” Alongside his academic work, including editing Essays on African Writing and The Cambridge Companion to Salman Rushdie, Gurnah is a major novelist of exile and belonging. His important novels include Memory of Departure (1987), Pilgrims Way (1988), Dottie (1990), Paradise (1994), which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Whitbread Prize, Admiring Silence (1996), By the Sea (2001), Desertion (2005), The Last Gift (2011), Gravel Heart (2017), Afterlives (2020) and Theft (2025). His fiction moves across the Swahili coast, colonial East Africa, Britain and the wider Indian Ocean world, tracing the enduring legacies of slavery, colonialism, nationalism and forced migration.
Interview
Nishat Zaidi: Both Dilip and I have been reading your novels with curiosity and admiration ever since we decided to have you in this talk. I will begin by asking you about migration and movement, which is one of the central themes that your novels engage with. In By the Sea, you write that “travellers and traders who come with their goods and their god and their way of looking at the world, their hungers and greed, and when they leave, they leave some among their numbers behind for whole lifetimes, taking what they could buy, trade, or snatch away with them.” So, when we say about your characters that they are once migrants, always migrants, your novels are filled with people who forever yearn and long for a comfortable place that they can call home. Do you think that oceanic movements have caused violence and displacement more than anything else and are directly responsible for cultures of violence, as one gets to feel through your writings? Unlike writers such as Amitav Ghosh, where medieval Indian Ocean movement is kind of celebrated as a precolonial space of exchange, in your novels you have related medieval Indian Ocean migration to colonial and postcolonial migrations in ways that are not necessarily celebratory. Would you agree with this? How do you see oceanic movements impacting the lives of littoral societies and the world at large?
Abdulrazak Gurnah: Well, when we think about the Indian Ocean, I do not know if we can generalize that for other places, though probably we can. Certainly, for the Indian Ocean there is great benefit in that oceanic interchange for the littorals of the Indian Ocean all the way around, if you like. People travelled from Malaya to Madagascar. Indians travelled all the way up and down to the Red Sea and so on. Of course, Amitav Ghosh’s book In an Antique Land shows that these links were not only ancient but continued and prospered right throughout until, I suppose, the appearance of the Europeans in the Indian Ocean with a different kind of attitude to these exchanges, an attitude of monopolistic trade, territorial conquest, and so on, which was not of much interest to many of these littoral cultures. There is a wonderful example, which I am sure you all know about, of the great armada from China that came all the way to the coast of Africa. Even today, you can still find shards of pottery of the particular form that they brought with them, and then they turned around and went back. Well, you could not imagine the Portuguese, the Dutch, or the British doing that. They went back because, for them, China was a much more interesting place than the coast of East Africa, so off they went. I think these different attitudes disrupted what had probably been, largely, a mercantile sort of exchange. Of course, one must not be nostalgic or silly about this. Not all of it was equal. Nevertheless, it was transformed into something quite different, something that involved warfare, monopoly, control, and territorial domination. I think this change is where the violence that you speak of, Nishat, really becomes inescapable and becomes the reality of Indian Ocean history. One of the things that Gulf Arabs particularly wanted from East Africa was slaves. So that old trade in human beings, kidnapping people and taking them back, was always going on in that part of Africa and elsewhere too. Slaves were wanted in the Mediterranean, in India, and in the Gulf, and Africa was where many of them came from, though they were taken from elsewhere as well. But it was really the expansion of the European plantation system in the Indian Ocean, these islands becoming plantations in themselves, which intensified this violence. So these violences that I write about, which you mentioned, reach a kind of climax with the intervention of Europeans. I am not saying it is entirely their fault, but the climax certainly arrives in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Colonialism transformed everything. It transformed everything everywhere, but it certainly transformed everything in that part of the world, and we are still living through its consequences culturally, territorially, politically, and in many other ways. I do not think I am interested in the violence of ocean travel itself. I am saying that, yes, it is wonderful to celebrate it, and I do celebrate Amitav Ghosh’s work and even Vassanji’s work, where they see a certain kind of benefit and celebration in the ways displaced people somehow manage to survive and endure. When you think of Amitav Ghosh writing about Indian people taken to Mauritius and somehow coming through, or to China and elsewhere, that is indeed powerful and moving. But there is also another thing that happened to us in East Africa, which is the disruption of an entire history and culture. Expulsions, whether by force or through economic denial and the inability to make a living, meant that Arab people, Indian people, and others left, and a culture more or less disappeared. I say “more or less” because I think it is coming back. I think there is a kind of revival going on.
Dilip Menon: Actually, may I pick up on two things that you said? You mentioned the Chinese armada under Zheng He, the admiral who made his way to Africa. Our first author, whom we interviewed, Yvonne Owuor, in her novel The Dragonfly Sea, actually deals with the descendants of the Chinese admiral and takes up the contemporary period where China is reforging those connections and reviving the idea of Admiral Zheng He all over again. The other thing that interested me was your point about the introduction of a certain kind of structural violence on the ocean. The ocean was never a pacifist space. There were pirates, buccaneers, and so on. But the structural violence introduced by the Europeans has left a lasting legacy on lives, families, and societies. In one sense, when one reads Amitav Ghosh’s novels alongside yours, there emerges a more composite picture of the ocean, both its possibilities and its constraints. But thinking about your novels, one of the things that strikes me is that migration seems to leave a scar that never truly heals. Your characters migrate to leave behind squalor, secrets, and deep violence, but they carry their wounds inside them. So Hannah in The Last Gift tells her mother, in a rather cruel burst of rage, “Ah, these wild immigrant tragedies,” which is a very scarring sentence in the book.The migrants remain suspended within their own lives. They are unable to belong, unable to love, seemingly incapable of the trust that love requires. So it feels very dystopian in that sense. Of course, perhaps I am reading it differently from how you intended it, but there is something about what migration does to the psyche. There seems to be no escape, no redemption. Perhaps this is also related to the fact that when you left Zanzibar and went to England, you moved from the frying pan into the fire, into the rhetoric of Enoch Powell and so on. This idea of migration as a scar that one carries is something I find deeply disturbing in your novels.
Abdulrazak Gurnah: Well, I am not sure that I would completely agree with that. To begin with, yes, I think migration, particularly when it is not into a community, can be tragic. If an entire family migrates together, they may still go through difficulties and unhappiness, but at least they have one another and a network of support. Alternatively, if people migrate into an existing community, for example if you move from Zanzibar to Paris and there is already a small Zanzibari community there, then you are drawn into that network. You learn the ropes of being a foreigner and a stranger with the help and support of others. Age matters as well. If you are older, you may cope differently because you have more experience and are more prepared. All these things may have contributed to the problematic way in which I encountered England because my brother and I left together, but we did not go to a community. We went to a small town in southern England where there was nobody like us, and we lived through various difficulties of that time. But I am not trying to make too much of that. What I am saying is that these experiences contributed to my sense that there is a tragic dimension to migration. Especially now, when you see so many young people, mostly young men, taking terrible risks to arrive somewhere like here, only to end up doing horrible menial jobs, or sometimes no jobs at all, or even being detained, everything about their experience is painful. So initially I wanted to write about that problematic dimension of migration. Migration is not simply exchanging one thing for another because you also carry everything in your head, your experiences, your desertions, your guilt, and so on. But where I disagree with you is in the suggestion that there is no redemption. If that were true, then people would simply give up entirely, perhaps even commit suicide, but they do not. They struggle through and make something out of their experiences. I try to leave hints that perhaps something else might still happen in the future, maybe a new relationship or a new way of thinking. For example, in The Last Gift, the brother and sister ask, “Shall we go to Zanzibar?” and then dismiss the idea. We do not know whether they will go or not, but the possibility itself remains there. They have at least imagined a way out of what once seemed like an impasse. That is perhaps the best I can do. I cannot give everybody a happy life, but I can suggest the possibility that something may still be worked out.
Nishat Zaidi: Dilip mentioned scars and you mentioned pain. I really like the way your novels, almost all of them, speak about how the forces of history impact the lives of ordinary people, people who have no control over those forces. Their lives are shaped by these larger historical movements. Dilip also mentioned reading your novels alongside Amitav Ghosh’s novels. In fact, I happened to read your work alongside Vassanji’s novels. I read Desertion immediately after The Gunny Sack, and afterwards I told Dilip that I felt as though I knew that entire neighbourhood. It felt as though you knew all the neighbours. So my question is actually about the cosmopolitan dispositions of littoral society that you present in your work. This cosmopolitanism is also often presented as a threat to certain notions of “being African.” How does engagement with coastal lives complicate our understanding of nationalist politics? When I speak of coastal lives, I think of them as a hinge between land and sea, interior and exterior, memory and the present. On the one hand, in novels like Paradise and Afterlives, you focus on the violence embedded within imperialism and, to some extent, the collusion of Christianity within it. But in Memory of Departure, you describe the atmosphere of intrigue, revenge, and politics brought about by the independent government. Nationalist politics seems to deny the intricate negotiations and entanglements embedded within littoral societies. Would you agree with this? How, in your view, have the processes of decolonization impacted the cosmopolitan moorings of coastal societies?
Abdulrazak Gurnah: Yes, certainly. But I would actually go one step further back and say that it begins with colonialism itself. The establishment of colonial territories was the first break, the first pressure placed upon that coastal culture. Think of East Africa stretching from southern Somalia to northern Mozambique. Almost all those people spoke Swahili, or used to. Most were Muslims. They were connected culturally and historically. But that culture only extended perhaps thirty or forty miles into the interior. Beyond that, it was something else entirely. Then colonialism arrived. Colonial powers drew maps. They did not want merely little strips of coastline. They wanted the vast hinterlands as well. So suddenly this once unified coastal culture became divided into Kenya, Tanzania, Mozambique, and so on, alongside millions of people in the interior who shared none of the same language, religion, or cultural history. Colonialism in East Africa was not actually very old. Kenya only became a colony around 1903 or 1904, so colonial rule lasted barely sixty years, unlike India, where colonialism lasted for centuries. Zanzibar became a protectorate in 1896. So this entire transformation occurred over a relatively short period. By the time decolonization arrived, what existed was a very small minority of coastal people and a large majority of inland populations who did not share their religion, language, or culture. Once those colonial borders had been drawn, it became almost inevitable that these coastal cultures would lose their distinctiveness, and that is indeed what happened.
Zanzibar was slightly different because it was an island. Although there was migration from the mainland, which partly explains the later revolution, the imbalance was not quite the same as in Kenya. Still, the violence that accompanied the Zanzibar Revolution remains incomprehensible to me even now. I still ask myself why it was necessary. My conviction is that the Afro-Shirazi Party would probably have won the elections eventually anyway, perhaps even the very next election. So why did it have to become so violent? I think some kind of madness overtook the process, and this was linked to the racialization of politics during decolonization. As independence approached, society became polarized between those who called themselves Africans and those who called themselves nationalists, meaning those open to more mixed identities. Once the British departed, that polarization turned violent. One side won and the other lost, and there was no mercy in that situation. Of course, similar forms of violence occurred elsewhere in East Africa, for example between the Luos and the Kikuyus in Kenya, or within Uganda itself. I do not write much about those because I do not know them through lived experience. But I do know very well how petty and oppressive a state can become in its exercise of authority.
Dilip Menon: There is something very profound in this because decolonization has been accompanied by violence in almost every part of the world. One thinks of Partition in India, Burma, Malaya, and elsewhere. Zanzibar too becomes part of that larger history. Under colonialism, groups related vertically to colonial authority, but very few horizontal relationships developed between them. As you said, there was the thin crust of the coast and the vast hinterland behind it. But I want to move away from these broader questions and ask something more intimate. Like the earlier question about migration as a scar, I want to ask about the family. The family is usually imagined as a space of domesticity, refuge, and belonging. One is reminded of Tolstoy’s famous line in Anna Karenina: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” One feature of migration, indenture, and slavery is that families become unstable. They are constantly disrupted, remade, and unmade. People take one another in and become family. This recurs frequently in your novels, where people enter and leave households in fluid ways. So I wonder to what extent migration, both colonial and postcolonial, makes it impossible to reproduce conventional forms of bourgeois domesticity. Most novels are about stable families, whereas your novels depict families constituted in deeply transitory ways.
Abdulrazak Gurnah: Yes, the family is a very rich terrain to explore. Not because of my own personal experience, since I have had a happy family life myself, but because I have observed how paradoxical families can be. Families can nurture and sustain, but they can also be crushing. They can be authoritarian, not necessarily through violence, but through the demands they place upon individuals. I am interested in how people learn to cope with difficult circumstances. I often think about an individual, whether man or woman, trying to survive situations that are menacing in different ways. That menace can take the form of being orphaned or growing up in strange and uncertain conditions. It can take the form of displacement and migration. I often return to figures who are somehow threatened by circumstances and are learning how to manage. I am particularly interested in children because they are especially vulnerable. In the culture I know, younger women too often find themselves manipulated into making certain decisions. Their value becomes almost mercantile. So for all these reasons I see the family as paradoxical. It can support and give love, but it can also demand and constrain. Another aspect of the family that interests me is secrecy. Parents often keep things from their children in order to protect them, but these secrets can become sources of sorrow and conflict. So I do not have a simple picture of the family. I see it as a fertile space for exploration and contradiction.
Dilip Menon: Nishat, if I may follow up on that, because if the family is one sentimental trope, childhood is another. Reading Memory of Departure, for example, there seems to be no joy in childhood. Children experience brutality, violence, and exploitation. There is something deeply disillusioning in your representation of childhood, a dismantling of sentimental literary tropes. I wonder where that comes from.
Abdulrazak Gurnah: Well, again, I would hesitate to generalize completely. I would not say that I see all childhoods as tragic. But I am aware that tragedy often lurks nearby. If you think of Dottie, for instance, Dottie survives and grows, though her sister and brother do not. So I am not eliminating all possibilities of happiness. I am simply saying that danger is always close by. One has to remain alert, to keep one’s eyes open, and to learn through experience. The same might be said about Paradise. There are many dangers there too, and yet somehow the character comes through relatively unharmed.
Dilip Menon: Right.
Abdulrazak Gurnah: So, I mean, there have been one or two people who have remarked on the fact that this boy somehow survives when you do not think he would. You would have thought something terrible would happen to him, but he survives. So I am saying that this kind of good fortune also happens alongside bad luck. It is not simply individual resourcefulness that makes survival possible. Sometimes it is just luck.
Nishat Zaidi: So, speaking of families, most families in your novels are practising Muslims, not all, but most of them are. The idea of Islam, being Muslim, and the problematic associated with it dominate many of your writings and your practices of word-making and world-making. How do you view the role of Islam in the Indian Ocean region in general and, of course, East Africa in particular?
Abdulrazak Gurnah: Yes, well, I think it probably played a very significant role in some parts of the Indian Ocean littoral. I am thinking particularly of southern Arabia, the Arabian Peninsula, Somalia, East Africa, and the Comoros. Most learned scholars of Islam in Swahili, for example, come from the Comoros. So, certainly, Islam played a major part. But another equally important aspect is that Islamic culture in East Africa was not just religion. It also included stories, fiction, poetry, and literary figures such as Abu Nuwas. I do not know if you are familiar with him, but he is a kind of trickster figure in Arabic literature. You hear stories of Abu Nuwas in Palestine and Iraq, but you also hear them in Zanzibar. The same is true of many stories from The Arabian Nights, or One Thousand and One Nights. Many of those stories were current, certainly during my childhood in Zanzibar. Various myths that were part of the wider Islamic world were also part of our world. So this is what I think of as a kind of cosmopolitanism in itself, a network of cultural ideas, myths, and practices that are not necessarily global but belong to a connected cultural space. It seems to me that the notion of cosmopolitanism as a universal phenomenon is just another Eurocentric idea. In reality, there are many cosmopolitanisms located within specific territorial or cultural spaces. Sometimes religion acts as the cohesive force, sometimes ethnicity, and sometimes something else altogether. When I think about Islam in this way, I think of it not simply as a religion but as a connected cultural phenomenon, involving language as well. Swahili vocabulary, for example, draws heavily from Arabic, Hindi, and of course Bantu languages, with a smaller contribution from European languages. But words do not come alone. They come with inflections, meanings, histories, and the presence of the people who brought them. Hindi words suggest the presence of Hindi speakers. Arabic words imply Arabic speakers. They bring themselves, their cultures, and what is valuable to them into our understanding of the world. So yes, I see Islam as a complicated, syncretic, cosmopolitan phenomenon. But if you were standing somewhere else, say in Kerala, you might place emphasis differently, although I suspect there would still be overlaps. Much of this in the Indian Ocean world has to do with the ocean itself, with the monsoon winds that bring people and carry them back again. Kerala experiences this from a different angle, but it is still part of those Muslim routes that extend all the way to Indonesia and beyond.
Dilip Menon: It is wonderful that you bring up the idea of cosmopolitanisms because that is really a growth area in historical scholarship right now. Many important works are emerging on the Indian Ocean and Islam. There is, for instance, the magisterial work of the Malay historian Engseng Ho on the Hadhrami Yemeni diaspora that stretches from Yemen to Africa, South Asia, and Southeast Asia. There is also Ronit Ricci’s work on the Arab cosmopolis between India and the western Indian Ocean. For historians trying to capture the texture of lived experience, one often has to turn to imaginative works such as yours because historical archives can only reveal so much. But the larger question concerns the sense of rage in your novels, particularly rage at the betrayals of the postcolonial elite and the state. In Admiring Silence, for example, the protagonist invents absurdly exaggerated stories for his wife’s parents about the benefits of colonial rule, and these stories are measured against the reality of corruption and decay. Dirty toilets and lack of sanitation become potent metaphors for the postcolonial condition. Similarly, in By the Sea, the migrant’s return is tinged with sense of unbridgeable distance, which reminds me strongly of Naipaul. So is it impossible for the migrant to return? Regardless of the racism, alienation, and lack of belonging they may suffer abroad, can they emotionally or physically return to the places they left behind? The postcolony often seems to appear as the ultimate dystopia in your novels, where idealism has gone terribly wrong. In that sense, your writing reminds me very strongly of Naipaul’s sense of disillusionment with India.
Abdulrazak Gurnah: No, I do not think I share the sort of contemptuous disregard that Naipaul had for almost everything he wrote about except England and, later, the United States. What I am trying to write about, especially in those two examples, is something different. In Admiring Silence, for instance, the experience of migration has transformed the protagonist so completely that all the struggling, lying, and reinvention become almost inevitable consequences of loneliness and isolation. When he meets the woman who becomes his partner, he begins telling her stories that are not exactly true, but close enough to the truth and flattering to himself. That kind of lying is easy to fall into if there is nobody around to contradict you. Why would you tell unpleasant stories about yourself when you can tell better ones? The stories he tells her parents are really meant to mock them. He has already learned from his partner that they are conservative people with fixed ideas, so he gives them what he thinks they want while quietly laughing at them at the same time. But while all this seems like a form of coping and managing, there is another reality that he is not confronting. When he returns home, that reality overwhelms him. He has forgotten what living there is actually like, and he must relearn how difficult those circumstances are. I do not exaggerate much about the reality he encounters because, in metaphorical terms, it is not very far from my own experience. I myself could not return to Zanzibar for seventeen years because I had left illegally. Returning would have meant facing the consequences of breaking the law, and I did not know what those consequences might be. Then, in 1984, there was a political change. The new leader released many political prisoners and granted amnesty to people like me who had left without authorization, so I finally returned. By then, seventeen years had passed. I was married, had children, and was working in London. When I returned, I was terrified of rejection. I worried people would ask, “Who are you? Where have you been? You are not one of us anymore?” I also felt guilty because I knew how difficult life had been there. What I did not expect, however, were the blocked toilets. That detail is not exaggerated at all. I did not expect the sheer depth of hardship people were enduring. I already knew about the authoritarian state and the security apparatus, but the everyday realities shocked me. Soon afterwards, economic liberalization began. Tourism increased because foreign exchange became available. Suddenly tourists started arriving and, of course, you cannot have blocked toilets if you want tourists. Tourism brought many new problems, but it also brought improvements. You see some of this in Gravel Heart. What happens to the people I write about is that they themselves become transformed by migration. It is no longer possible for them simply to say, “I am home now.” They cannot leave behind the lives they built elsewhere, but neither can they fully return. So where is home now? That confusion, I think, is what emerges from those experiences.
Nishat Zaidi: My next question takes us to your writing practice, Gurnah. Literary writing does not merely represent interconnections between places. It itself becomes a passage between South Asia, East Africa, Europe, and North America. I am thinking here particularly of Afterlives. It takes a while for the novel to settle into a centre of gravity because everyone seems to have a story, and we are never entirely sure who is in the foreground and who is in the background. Similarly, your writing contains a great deal of intertextuality. Paradise has often been described as a reversal or revision of Heart of Darkness, while Gravel Heart takes its title from Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure. So, as a writer engaged with the historical and cultural experiences of the western Indian Ocean coast, how much agency do you think the Indian Ocean itself has in altering notions of selfhood and identity? To what extent does the paradigm of oceanic circulation inform the structure of writing itself, and how does the novel replicate this oceanic mode of thinking?
Abdulrazak Gurnah: That is a difficult question. I am not sure that I regularly use metaphors of the ocean structurally, although the monsoon winds certainly appear in many of my books. What interests me there is not just the physical phenomenon itself but what it signifies, the movement of goods, people, stories, and ideas. I do quite like that image. In By the Sea, perhaps I make more of the ocean than elsewhere because I describe the stories surrounding it. But I am not sure I would go as far as to say that there is an oceanic structure underlying the novels themselves.
Dilip Menon: Actually, this relates to another question I wanted to ask. In your novels, migration, slavery, race, and colonialism create entire maps of movement through trade, labour, and empire. Yet I often feel, and perhaps I am wrong, that there is never really a spirit of adventure in these journeys. People cross the ocean because necessity compels them to do so. That differs from Amitav Ghosh, for example, where the sea often becomes a space of adventure and liberation. The second part of my question concerns Afterlives, which is one of my favourite novels of yours because of the richness of its writing. The relationship between Hamza and the German lieutenant seems almost like a parable of racial relations under colonialism. Even where some kind of relationship between black and white becomes possible, whether friendship, intimacy, or affection, there seems to remain a lack of synchrony. Amidst the fluidity of the ocean, race remains hard and immovable. How would you nuance that?
Abdulrazak Gurnah: Well, because it is fundamentally an unequal relationship. At least in the situations I write about, those relationships cannot really be anything other than domineering on one side and apprehensive or confused on the other. The larger issue that interested me is that Europeans arrived in Africa already carrying ideological assumptions about the people they encountered. They came with beliefs in racial superiority, cultural superiority, and a sense of entitlement to rule and command others. That explains much of the violence, condescension, and patronizing behaviour. But at the same time, they remain human beings. Because of that humanity, there are moments when ideology becomes harder to sustain completely. I wanted the German officer in Afterlives to represent something like this. For whatever reason, he becomes drawn to Hamza. Some connection emerges that he himself perhaps does not fully understand or acknowledge. What exactly this feeling is remains uncertain. It could be affection, desire, memory, or something else entirely. He explains it to himself through the idea of a brother, but that may not be the real explanation. Perhaps it is simply his way of coping with feelings he cannot fully recognize or admit. So what interested me was not the idea that racists cannot feel human emotions. Rather, I wanted to show that something human emerges in the officer, but he does not know how to deal with it because of the ideological framework he already carries within him, the belief that showing affection or tenderness somehow diminishes his status as a German officer.
Dilip Menon: To return to the beginning, when Nishat mentioned your move from Zanzibar to Britain, you arrived at a time when Britain was grappling with imperial decline and rising racism. Even in contemporary multicultural societies, immigrants are not truly empowered in any meaningful sense. So if one were to think about the contemporary immigrant experience, how would you write about race now? In your novels, relationships between immigrants and white women often fail. Something prevents them from fully coming together. I wonder how race continues to shape relationships in the contemporary world as well.
Abdulrazak Gurnah: Yes, those relationships do often end badly. In something like Admiring Silence, for example, the relationship cannot flourish because it is built upon falsehoods and self-serving constructions. The narrator presents himself in a carefully managed way. Only later, after returning home, does he begin to understand things more clearly and perhaps wish to explain to his partner what his life is really like. But by then it is already too late because she has moved on into another relationship. That is simply life. I am not saying such relationships are impossible, only that misunderstandings and vulnerabilities are part of being a stranger. You are always vulnerable to misjudgment and misunderstanding. Of course, things have worked out for me personally, so I am certainly not saying that such relationships cannot succeed.
Nishat Zaidi: Yes, and things have worked out very well in terms of your writing practice and style too. You have managed to communicate what you wanted to communicate very successfully. In fact, my final question is also linked to your writing practice. Edouard Glissant suggests that Creole languages produce an “internal necessity,” which is the obligation to remake oneself repeatedly through acts of forgetting. Language and memory also play a central role in your novels. So my question is this: can narratives recuperate those acts of forgetting? We have been speaking about colonialism and its afterlives. How can African perspectives be recovered within world history when colonialism deliberately excluded them from the archive? You have spoken about this in interviews as well. Can literary writing recuperate such lost archives? And how do your linguistic and stylistic choices help represent the movement of people, goods, and ideas across the Indian Ocean, East Africa, and beyond?
Abdulrazak Gurnah: Sure, you do ask good questions. I think it is possible to open a space for people to think again about things they think they know or, in some cases, like with Afterlives, for example, it may be that people only have a vague notion of this historical moment. I mean people in Tanzania and Zanzibar and possibly other parts of East Africa do, of course, know about this, but I also want to say there’s a lot that you don’t know, let alone for people in the UK or India who might know something, but not enough. So in that space, that’s what I mean when I say “open space.” So it’s not that you’re telling people things they know nothing about, although that may be the case now and then. Maybe with Paradise it might have been a way of thinking about that time that many people would not have considered, but in any case, both there and with something like Afterlives, and perhaps some of the other books as well, it is to say, “Here’s a way of opening up that understanding. Think some more about it.” In this respect, I don’t think it matters who the reader is. These days, with email, there is no escape. I do get an email from somebody who says, “I know what you’re talking about, it’s such and such and such and this, isn’t it?” So in this way it’s not so much telling, you know, instructing, but it’s a way of saying think again. There are dimensions of this that are worth reflecting on, including, of course, the horror of the actual experience, the casualties, the deaths, the disruptions.
Nishat Zaidi: Well, that inspires me to ask a question which was asked to Amitav Ghosh by someone from the audience, whether writing is therapeutic for you?
Abdulrazak Gurnah: No, not anymore. I guess that’s how it began for me, but when I say I stumbled into writing, I quoted that thing. What I meant was, when I started to write it was necessary to do it at the time as a way of trying to understand what was going on, trying to remember what I left behind, that kind of thing. But no, by this time it’s work, actually, but it’s work and pleasure.
Dilip Menon: It’s interesting that you responded in that fashion because, at some point in the conversation with Amitav Ghosh, we asked this question and he said, “No, it’s not therapeutic,” which, I must say, gave me a warm glow in my heart that I’m glad I chose to be an academic, which I do see as very therapeutic considering the changes that are happening in India. But a final question, and then we’ll open it up to the audience. To go back to the oceanic question Nishat had raised now, when you speak about the ocean, we are constantly in this world of vastness, circulation, a space beyond the narrow provincialisms of land and so on. What does it mean for you to be from Zanzibar and now in England, an act of island hopping as it were, from one small island to another small island? So do you, like Abbas says in The Last Gift, feel that “people cannot understand how tiny the place he came from was, how tiny their lives felt, that he was frightened of the world, that was what he was frightened of”? So when we think and write with the ocean, there is also this sense of terror before its vastness, the fact of coming from small places. How does it change the way in which you think about the world, relate to the world, and write about the world?
Abdulrazak Gurnah: Yes, I think it probably did play, and does play, a big part. I have this sense of coming from a small place all the time, and it was certainly the experience of arriving in England. You’re saying from one small island to another, but it didn’t seem like that to me at all. I was coming from a small island, all right, but it didn’t feel to me when I came to England that I was coming to a small place. It seemed huge to me. It seemed an enormous, rather scary place to be, with so much to know and so much to sort out. So I guess, in many ways, it’s not an experience I’ve left behind. I still have this sense. Then I lived most of my life in Canterbury, which is a small town, so I do have a sense of living in small places and I quite like it. I only lived in London briefly, for about three years or so, and I can truthfully say I didn’t like it. I found it quite bewildering, quite huge. Many people love that, so I think that coming from a small place is part of my consciousness. That’s probably why I like Stellenbosch as well. So it’s not a problem, but it does give you a way of thinking as well, of course, a way of thinking small, if you like, and thinking of that experience as circumscribed. But on the other hand, having said I come from a small place and I have a sense of that smallness, I also have another sense of being part of a big world, like I mentioned in an earlier question about Islam. I’ve felt it even as I was growing up, and certainly I still feel now that I’m connected to various places around the Indian Ocean. I know about them even though I haven’t been there, but I know about them, I hear about them, I read about them. Vassanji grew up in Dar es Salaam, was born in Islam, grew up in Nairobi, and is now in Canada. Look how many years he spends just writing about those experiences of growing up in those places, and then just recently he’s discovered that he’s an Indian. When he visited India, they realized, “Oh boy, this is home.” So yes, I think it plays a big part in understanding, but I suppose your question is also about the ocean. The ocean is like, I don’t have to see its hugeness. Somehow its hugeness is part of the way I think of these places. The really curious thing about being part of that littoral of the Indian Ocean is that I feel myself, and I think we all grew up, feeling more connected to places like Somalia, Aden, Kerala, and indeed Bombay, as it used to be in those days, than, say, somewhere like Madagascar, which is just across the road there, or Mauritius. These were unheard-of places to us. We had nothing to do with them because they’re not part of the historical network and because the winds and the currents did not take us there, but they did take us back and forth to these other places. So the ocean is peculiarly both huge and also kind of manageable as well.
Steven George: Thank you so much, sir. I’ll ask a few questions from the audience. My first question: what is the relationship you develop in your novels with the juxtaposition of routes and roots?
Abdulrazak Gurnah: Yes, I know that formulation. Well, the relationship between routes and roots is what we’ve been discussing, isn’t it? This sort of interchange of cultures and so on, and I suppose roots meaning places of origin. Well, those places of origin are inescapable. They’re not something that you can shrug off, they stay with you. So, certainly if you spend your time reflecting on these things, not everybody does, they have better things to do and move on, but if you’re a writer you reflect on these things all the time, and so routes are kind of the hinterland of your imagination.
Steven George: The next question is by Grace Raju. She asks, as an author do you think labels like world literature, postcolonial literatures, or writings from the Global South are useful categorizations? Would you call yourself a postcolonial writer or a writer from the Global South?
Abdulrazak Gurnah: I wouldn’t call myself any of those things. I think they’re useful because I’ve also been a teacher and an academic, and so I know the use of those terms. They’re useful, both as a way of organizing material, you’re teaching certain books and so it’s a way of handling them. They are also, I suppose, useful as simply giving a name to a category. So I have no problem with the use of those words from an academic point of view, but I don’t need them for myself as a writer as well. I just write what interests me. I don’t need to call it anything.
Steven George: The next question is: novelists are constantly engaging with the question of identity, home, migration, self, and belongingness, while the dominant paradigm of the nation-state is constantly engaged in creating more rules and regulations defining the idea of citizenship, the legal human. My question is what, according to you, is the potential of the faculty of storytelling and, second, what is the potential that exists in literature for people?
Abdulrazak Gurnah: Well, it’s the very opposite of what you are describing as what the state does. It is indeed to point to detail, to distinctions, to difference. It’s not necessary, again, to give it a name like identity because that’s already to encapsulate it and make it into something manageable, but to be alert to differences, to details and so on, which obviously the state, in the creation of its laws and so on, is interested in homogenizing, in making something that will work for everybody.
Steven George: The next question is by Dr. Shuby Abidi. What is your take on Islamophobia and the politics of misrecognition?
Abdulrazak Gurnah: Yes, it’s terrible, of course, in the current world as well that we live in, where religion, particularly the encounter of certain forms of Islamic ideology with the West, has become a dominant phenomenon. You see, it’s easy to understand how a certain state or cultural or even political groups would be happy to exploit this and see that the acts of groups of people who are driven by a very violent ideology actually represent everybody. So it’s not sensible to think that a small group of violent people then represents millions or billions.
Steven George: Thank you so much, Prof. Gurnah, for answering those toiling questions by our chairs and the audience. It was really persuasive and stimulating to listen to such creative and insightful responses.
Dilip Menon: Thank you so much, Abdulrazak Gurnah. It’s been a fascinating interview because I think there is a way in which, throughout your novels, we got a sense of you as a person and now meeting you, it’s kind of confirmed that for me at least. It’s been therapeutic in the sense in which you handle vulnerabilities, the way you handle the uncertainties that lie at the heart of being a person, the fear of being misjudged, the idea of menace somehow lurking out there, and that we’re all, in some sense, trying to make ourselves feel at ease in the world and at ease with ourselves. There’s a sensitivity, an empathy, and a deep knowledge with which you write about these things which is deeply comforting.
Nishat Zaidi: You know, meeting you is a great experience. Of course, reading your writing has been a great experience and, for me, watching videos of your interviews, I could immediately connect with you. When I saw you speak to us today, it reaffirmed that sense one had already formed, so thank you.
Abdulrazak Gurnah: Thank you very much for inviting me and for all your generosity.
© Nishat Zaidi and Dilip Menon