Gurnah: Nobel Prize laureate toast of Kampala conference

He is author of many short stories, essays and 10 novels, including Afterlives (2020), Dottie (1990), Memory of Departure (1987), Pilgrims Way (1988), Admiring Silence (1996), and Gravel Heart (2017). 

The citation for Gurnah’s Nobel Prize for Literature stated that it was “for his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fates of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents.” His story of dislocation at a young age is a story of many African young people. His story of then is a story of today. 

While his first language is Swahili, he has used English as his literary language. There are nevertheless bits of Swahili, Arabic and German in most of his writings and his approach to cultural issues in his works places him at the centre of cultural activism. 

Gurnah says he has had to push back against publishers who continue the practice of italicising words or putting them in a glossary simply because the words are in another language. 

Organised under the theme “Celebrating the Life and Works of Abdulrazak Gurnah for the Future of African Literature” the conference was held at Kyambogo University in Kampala. It ran from November 22 to 24 under the auspices of the Uganda Women Writers’ Association (Femrite) and the Pan African Writers Association (PAWA) with support from The Ford Foundation, Aga Khan Foundation, the Swedish Embassy and Fountain Publishers. 

It attracted writers, scholars and other literary dignitaries, from within and outside Africa. It featured paper presentations, panel discussions, audio-visual screenings and book exhibitions. 

In his presentation The Ghostly Presence of Colonial Powers in Three Novels by Abdurazak Gurnah, Dr Hilmar K. Heister of St Augustine University Malimbe in Tanzania noted that Paradise, Desertion, and Afterlives feature arrival of the colonial powers, first the Germans and then the British, as a backdrop of the main narratives of protagonists escaping confined lives and embarking on dangerous journeys, intertwined with stories of love and family.

“Gurnah successfully evokes the fear and awe experienced by the population in view of the colonial occupiers, counterbalanced with the availing of educational opportunities and the vague promise of improved livelihoods, while at first the colonial framework remains vague and takes on nearly mythological properties, Gurnah entangles his characters with the lives of three characters from the colonisers: a German officer, an Englishman, and a German missionary and his family,” he observed.

Heister sized up the representations of the colonial powers through a thematic analysis as well as a commentary on narrative techniques and styles employed in their depiction. 

Rich tapestry

“Gurnah masterfully constructs the colonial powers as enigmatic and ghostly presences in the novels, even manifested in specific characters, these remain cryptic and inaccessible within the narratives and for the protagonists, serving either as catalysts for the plot or for the development of the main characters,” he proffered, adding, “Through this subtly employed method, Gurnah reflects the awkwardness of the colonial presence on the eastern coast of the African continent, without indication or judgement but with a clear eye for the disastrous imbalance of power the remains a crippling historical circumstance even until today.”

In his presentation, A Swirling Synthesis: Abdurazak Gurnah as an African, Indian Ocean, and Archipelagic Writer, Prof James Michael Hodapp of Northwestern University in Qatar observed that although Gurnah has long been a prominent Anglophone writer, his recent award of the Nobel Prize for Literature has brought his life and work unprecedented attention. 

“Moving from one island to another, Gurnah and his work constantly negotiate the archipelagic assemblages of sea, continent, and island,” Hodapp said, adding, “While the multifarious nature of Gurnah’s work has been the basis of much praise and analyses in popular and academic spaces, categorising Gurnah and his work has been more difficult than judging its quality.”

Delivering her keynote speech Prof Tina Steiner of Stellenbosch University in South Africa argued that dwelling on the linguistic and cultural palimpsests of Gurnah’s fiction ultimately leads to a fuller understanding of the richness and subtlety of the tapestry of his fictional universe. 

Kyambogo University’s Beatrice Akite  noted: “Gurnah focuses on the complexities of being home and away from home in his works in a bid to address the issues of acceptance in one’s being at the margin. Thus, the cultural crossings and connections in the texts are therefore well understood in the context of hybridity and betweenness.”

According to the Executive Director of Femrite, Hilda J Twongyeirwe, the conference was in honour of Prof Gurnah for his contribution to East African literature. She said: “Some years back, Femrite honoured Prof Ngugi wa Thiong with a certificate of recognition for his outstanding contribution to East African literature. It is good manners to give recognition where recognition is due. [Gurnah] was the first East African to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. That called for celebration. When he was awarded the prize in 2021 there were a few voices which confessed to not having read him.” 

Describing the conference as “eye-opener for some people as ordinary readers,” she predicted that bookstores would, going forward, stock his works.

Migration

Gurnah’s The Last Gift raises concern for today’s aspiring migrants. The subtleties surrounding harmless indiscretions abroad are illuminated by the study of Ayotunde Mamudu of the University of Jos (Nigeria) and Abel Ochika of the Federal Polytechnic Bauchi (Nigeria) titled Love’s Eighty-Two Silence: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Abdurazak Gurnah’s The Last Gift.
Their study foregrounds the silencing of love with not just 82 instances of ‘silence’ but silencing that stems from isolation and insulation. Abbas is happy, enjoying the rarity of Western education, but is later condemned to a metaphorical cell of silence after he is mandated to marry a girl he is accused of defiling just by peeping at her nakedness. 
The study of the two scholars also highlights how Gurnah foregrounds and amplifies true love by presenting the opposite of it as “negating has the effect of producing mental images of both the negated and the positive propositions.”
In their paper, Root Identity as A Postcolonial Authenticity in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s The Last Gift, Dr Ikechukwu Otuu Egbuta of the Federal Polytechnic, Offa (Nigeria) and Ndidi Obele (Nigeria) investigate root identity as a postcolonial identity crisis in Gurnah’s The Last Gift. 
Per the duo, African literature in the 20th and 21st centuries has been seen as containing contradictory impulses-towards acceptance or rejection. The expression of this binary has taken various forms because African fictive characters are portrayed to have emerged from colonialism and have evolved with them a double inheritance: authenticity and inauthenticity. 
They note that hybridity is a consequence of this dual heritage, creating uncertainty as to where and how root identity is to be ascertained among characters in the novels. In Gurnah’s The Last Gift, Hanna and Jamal come to a clear understanding of their root identity underwritten by the sailor’s tales, which their father, Abbas, planted in their radio tape, his metaphorical last gift. Their mother, Maryam, also returns to Exeter to find root in her own identity having suffered from root identity and its predatory effect.