Swagger for Survival

The theft​ in Theft isn’t a theft at all. Badar, working as a servant boy in a house in Dar es Salaam in the 1990s, is accused of adding groceries to the household’s weekly bill and selling them to accomplices. Nothing about Badar suggests he’d be capable of such a crime, and Haji and Raya, his affable master and mistress (terms they reject: ‘What is this Bwana business? Call me Haji’), think the grocer must be cheating them. But Uncle Othman, the owner of the house, has never liked Badar and insists that he be sacked. Badar is rescued by Karim, Raya’s son from a previous marriage, who offers him a room in his flat in Zanzibar and secures him a job in a hotel.

A simple enough resolution, it seems. But little in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s fiction is simple. Uncle Othman, it turns out, isn’t just grumpy and wrong-headed but harbours an ancient grudge against Badar’s absent father, whom he’d taken in as a child but who then stole money from him and ran off. Behind the fictional theft is a real theft committed years before (‘he would not have that dog’s child in his house’). Until his expulsion Badar knows nothing of this; he doesn’t even know why he was removed from school and brought to work for strangers. He had been living with relatives since infancy after his mother died and his father abandoned him. At thirteen the relatives handed him over: ‘He had been cast adrift by the only people he knew.’

There are further thefts in the novel: a woman in Karim’s team at work forges expense claims; a sum of money goes missing from the flat where an English volunteer worker is staying. But it’s other sorts of theft that resonate here and elsewhere in Gurnah’s fiction. Stolen childhoods. Confiscated buildings. Pilfered resources. Loss of dignity, security, identity and freedom. There are also the expropriations of colonialism and what Gurnah has called ‘the completely destructive narratives of Europe, many of them related to an advance of European imperialism’, which demean the countries Europe colonised. ‘I think these accounts, which have been with us for three or so centuries, have progressively made beasts and subhumans of the rest of the world.’

Gurnah’s fiction attends to those beasts and subhumans. His subjects are people off the literary map: traders, shopkeepers, clerks, cleaners, fishermen, farmers, fugitives, men and women doing whatever it takes to get by. Theft features three of them: along with Badar (‘an ex-houseboy turned flunky in a small hotel’) and Karim (a ‘lanky, soft-spoken, self-possessed’ civil servant) there’s Karim’s wife, Fauzia (a ‘composed and tranquil’ teacher and ‘book rat’). For a time, after the non-theft episode, the trio live together. Their struggles are those common to many young people: how to make a living; how to balance duty to others with independence; how to cope with a crying baby. In contrast to Gurnah’s previous novel, Afterlives (2020), which takes place during the early 20th century against a backdrop of German warmongering, the scope is modest and the setting domestic – a reminder that he’s more than the earnest anti-colonialist ambassador that interviews sometimes suggest.

When Gurnah won the Nobel Prize in 2021, the first Black African to do so since Wole Soyinka three decades earlier, the awards committee cited ‘his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents’. It’s a fair characterisation of the stories he has told, ambitiously but unshowily, over eleven novels. His fiction often depicts the homesickness and alienation of refugees. Take Memory of Departure (1987): ‘I feel such pain about leaving that place. Who would have thought it? I never thought that I would miss that land.’ And here’s Admiring Silence (1996): ‘I was astonished by the sudden surge of loneliness and terror I felt when I realised how stranded I was in this hostile place … and that I could not return from where I came.’ Then there’s Gravel Heart (2017): ‘I felt as if [London] despised me, as if I were a tiresome and timorous child who had wandered unwelcome out of the dust and rubble of his puny island shanty into this place where boldness and greed and swagger were required for survival.’

But alienation is more complex than it appears. ‘I am a refugee, an asylum seeker,’ Saleh Omar, the narrator of By the Sea (2001), announces, adding: ‘These are not simple words, even if habit of hearing them makes them seem so.’ On arrival at a British airport with a dodgy passport, he’s interviewed by a customs official who, despite being the son of Romanian refugees, is unsympathetic: ‘You don’t belong here, you don’t value any of the things we value, you haven’t paid for them through generations, and we don’t want you here.’ So far, so predictable: the interrogation and Omar’s ensuing spell in a detention centre are as you’d expect. But he fits none of the refugee stereotypes: he’s old, world-wise and highly sophisticated, and though he affects not to know English he speaks it perfectly. For Gurnah the real interest isn’t Omar’s arrival but the tangled circumstances of what came before.

His characters are almost always caught between two places but sometimes, as in Theft, the in-betweenness is far from global. Young people are plunged into urban life, as Badar is. Or shuttle between Zanzibar and Dar es Salaam, as Karim does. Or are separated from parents and brought up by someone else, as happens to both of them. Beyond Gurnah’s postcolonial perspective is an understanding of the trauma all people suffer when they’re sundered from what they know. His own uprooting came at the age of eighteen, when he flew with his brother from Zanzibar to the UK on a tourist visa and, in due course, made his home here, not returning to visit Zanzibar for seventeen years. He has played down the flight to England as relatively trouble-free, which isn’t to deny the ‘profound chaos’ he left behind. Away from the turmoil that followed independence (‘detentions, executions, expulsions and endless small and large indignities and oppressions’) and the colonialist cruelties that preceded it, he began to reflect on the history he’d left behind – and on what he describes in his essay collection Map Reading (2022) as ‘this sense of seeing oneself through the eyes of another culture, and one which is used to despising you’. An in-betweener already, educated both at a British colonial school and a Quran school, he became even more of one in the UK, subject to suspicion and racist abuse.

What children suffer when uprooted is a recurrent theme. ‘Your people did not want you,’ Badar is told in Theft, which echoes the opening of Gravel Heart: ‘My father did not want me. I came to that knowledge when I was quite young.’ In Afterlives young Hamza joins the German troops in East Africa, after his father ‘gave me away to a merchant to cover his debts’. A similar transaction takes place in Paradise (1994), where the handsome Yusuf is handed over to ‘Uncle Aziz’ as payment for his father’s debt. Such uncles are often not uncles at all, but hard-nosed merchants. It’s as bad for girls, if not worse. Orphaned Afiya in Afterlives is cruelly beaten by the uncle she has been placed with when he discovers she can read and write: ‘Why does a girl need to write? So she can write to a pimp?’

For Fauzia in Theft there’s no such prejudice to combat. Bright and motivated, she is loved by her parents. (Perhaps too much by her mother, who is overbearing and fears the ‘falling sickness’ she had in childhood will recur.) Fauzia flourishes at school, becomes a teacher and marries Karim. After giving birth to a daughter who cries a lot (‘she is having a seizure, Fauzia said in a panic. No, she is not, Karim shouted at her. She is just yelling’), she suffers from postpartum depression. Karim is impatient; the marriage comes under strain. When Badar, now living on his own, calls round to see them he can sense trouble.

The difficulties are compounded by the arrival at Badar’s hotel of a clarinet-playing young English woman called Jerry Bruno who is volunteering at an EU-funded relief agency. She befriends Badar and suggests they go for dinner in town, an invitation he finds exciting. Stuck at work, he misses out and Karim, no less infatuated by Jerry’s ‘glowing beauty’, goes instead. The two begin to see a lot of each other, in secret. This is another kind of theft, that of a lovestruck husband. ‘There is nothing to keep you here,’ Jerry urges Karim. ‘You have to live your life and I don’t think you’ll find it here.’ Badar wonders where her sense of entitlement comes from: ‘Does beauty like hers make its own rules, disregarding responsibilities and duties?’ Fauzia’s mother takes a different view:

What do these people want with us? Why do they come here? They come here with their filth and their money and they interfere with us and ruin our lives for their pleasure, and it seems that we cannot resist their wealth and their filthy ways … Volunteer! You see them in their big new cars, bringing us their goodwill. They should stay in their own country and do their goodwill there.

Jerry is only 21, a young woman having fun, but there have been warning signs: her condescension, though she isn’t a reader herself, about the books (left behind by guests) that Badar reads; her pitying look when he tells her he looks at pictures of London on his computer; her flirtatious goodbye just before she leaves (‘I really thought we might get it together, you and I … There’s still time if you’re free’). Still, the greater blame lies with Karim, whose ‘growing self-absorption’ has been apparent for some time (‘there was no point being modest when it was his due, he told himself’) and whose treatment of his baby daughter, Nasra, whom he angrily picks up by the head on one occasion, borders on violence. His haranguing of Badar is violent too: ‘You are an ungrateful idiot … That’s right, an idiot, a weakling … Look at you, skivvying in that derelict hotel … you have no self-respect.’ Reader sympathies are manipulated, with only two of the main players remaining likeable: the equilateral triangle becomes an isosceles. Still, if nuance is lost, the momentum is satisfying – the slow burn to a climax, where three lives take a surprising turn.

Gurnah’s prose style has become plainer over the years, less insistently sensory. He’s scrupulous in situating his characters so that we know the precise layout of their rooms, the food they eat, the lines on their faces, the shape of their hand gestures. But beneath the naturalistic surface he borrows from non-Western legends and folk tales as well as the Quran. His plots also draw on Western literature: in By the Sea it’s Melville’s ‘Bartleby, the Scrivener’ and in Gravel Heart, where a brother can be saved from execution if his sister sleeps with the official detaining him, it’s Measure for Measure. In Theft Badar listens to the poet Hafiz on the radio, Karim reads Tolstoy, and Fauzia, to Jerry’s amazement, has books by Dante, Shakespeare and Plato on her shelves (‘Are these yours? Do you understand them?’).

Where a character’s non-Englishness is marked through conversational phrases in Kiswahili, Gurnah sticks with commonplace roman rather than exoticising italics. He’s relaxed about incorporating snatches of his native language, and the idiom – its meaning usually clear from the context – is relaxed too, composed as it is of courtesies or endearments: ‘mzee wangu’ (my old man), ‘mpenzi wangu’ (my love), ‘utaniarifu baadaye’ (let me know later), ‘asante sana’ (thank you very much). However melancholy the subject matter of Gurnah’s fiction, the dialogue is animated and sometimes comic. In Admiring Silence the Zanzibari narrator tells his racist English father-in-law outrageous lies about the dark continent. The joke’s also on him, though: he’s so spineless he can’t admit to his mother back home that he has been living with an English woman for twenty years and they have a daughter. In Theft the humour is more sparing but there’s a lightness of touch, especially in Fauzia’s banter with her friend Hawa, who despises school and goes off to work in a travel agency (‘There’s no adventure in you, Hawa liked to tell her. There’s enough in you for both of us, Fauzia told her’).

A Nobel brings rewards, but also an expectation of spokesmanship. Gurnah has carried out his prize commitments dutifully without selling his fiction short. ‘The idea that a writer represents, I resist,’ he has said. ‘I represent me. I represent me in terms of what I think and what I am, what concerns me, what I want to write about.’ Afterlives, his last novel before winning the Nobel, could have been a hefty historical epic, but instead Gurnah concentrates on the minutiae of individual lives, as when Hamza finds himself in a claustrophobic, eroticised relationship with his Oberleutnant, who teaches him the poetry of Schiller. In the new novel there’s still a political undercurrent, to do with servitude, gender, economic hardship and the persistence of white privilege. But the tone is quieter and even more intimate: no melodrama, no excess, a story of three people trying to make the best of it.