Author and former professor, Abdulrazak Gurnah, scheduled to speak at the 2024 Nelson Mandela Annual Lecture at Wits University in South Africa, elaborates on the significance of leaving his home country when he was a teenager, and the importance of kindness and a shared humanity.
Abdulrazak Gurnah places his pen on the table as he finishes signing the last book in the orderly stack next to him. Then, settling on a deep-seated burned orange chair at the Nelson Mandela Foundation’s center in the leafy suburb of Houghton in Johannesburg, he relays his writing process.
“It’s not like you sit there and then, ‘I know what I will do’. These are usually long running ideas or preoccupations. It takes a while of reflection, making a few notes and thinking things through,” Gurnah, a Nobel Prize Laureate in Literature, tells FORBES AFRICA.
“I guess, at that time, when I was thinking about it, I didn’t really know enough to write a book like Afterlives. I did, instead, actually write Paradise, which ends with a recruiting drive as the conflict is beginning. Inspiration is – here’s a story I’m hearing, about other people. I don’t know very much about it. I think about it, I read, move on, do other things, and so on. And then a time arrives when I think, yeah, I think I know enough now to be able to write about this.”
Gurnah, born in 1948 in the Sultanate of Zanzibar, has written more than 10 books, including titles like Gravel Heart (2017), Desertion (2005), Pilgrims Way (1988) and Memory of Departure – his first book, published in 1987.
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It’s about 15-year-old Hassan, who has sought to escape the violence and poverty he’s experienced in the small village he lives in, and told from his perspective. He goes to live with a relative in Kenya but doesn’t find what he hoped for.
According to The Nobel Prize, he was recognized as the 2021 laureate due to his “uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents”.
A former professor of English at the University of Kent, he left the island of Zanzibar in the late 1960s, with Britannica citing that “when Gurnah was a teenager, a coup in 1964 overthrew the Arab rulers on Zanzibar and led to political upheaval and the persecution of Arab citizens in the following years”.
He credits this move to a different place as one of the most significant moments in his career.
“There’s more than one, but I suppose leaving my home country… It’s a transforming moment. I’m a stranger in a place, and I had not been a stranger before. So it then required a rearrangement of my mind, my life, my future, etc. Everything was different,” Gurnah explains.
“I can’t tell how it would have been if I hadn’t made that move, of course, but making that move feels, in retrospect, to have been a moment of great change. Also because of what followed – several years of living away from a place you know, getting to learn about a new place, new ways, a new language; I could hardly speak English.”
Gurnah is scheduled to speak at the Nelson Mandela Annual Lecture Series on September 28, 2024, and elaborates on this year’s theme, Realising Our Shared Humanity.
“It’s an everyday thing. We recognize others. We recognize them, either by acts of kindness or by sympathy or understanding what’s happening to them and sharing something of their pain or their happiness – all of these ways. But there are several obstructions in the way of these things.”
“This might be to do with race, to do with intolerances that we can’t get rid of, and perhaps just to do with unkindness, to do with nastiness. There are barriers to what sounds like the thing that we do every day. We are kind to this one, but not kind to that one. So, how do we move on from this? How do we get to understand others enough so that we don’t obstruct our humanity as a human response to others?”
He explains further that there are different levels in which to say that we need to be kinder but we need to continue saying it, while his advice to the next generation seems to equally and perfectly surmise his work ethos – “Whatever it is that you choose to do, work hard at it.”
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