At noon on October 7, Abdulrazak Gurnah’s phone rang. The permanent spokesman for the Swedish Academy, Mats Malm, came forward to warn the writer that he was about to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. “I thought someone was playing a prank on me,” Gurnah later recalled. No wonder, because since Wole Soyinka 1986 no African author has received the most important literary award in the world. Gurnah gets it now “for his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gap between cultures and continents,” it said in the explanation.
Two months later, people are still shaking their heads in disbelief that this author was almost unknown here. Hardly any other work is so directly connected to the dark chapter of German colonial history as that of the novelist, who was born in Zanzibar in 1948. The fact that hardly anyone was familiar casts a spotlight on the suppression of bloody German history. Five of his 20 novels have so far been translated into German, and in October they were all out of print. Now at least his most successful book will be published again in time for the award ceremony.
In the novel translated by Inge Leipold Paradise lost from 1994, however, the German Empire appears only marginally as a colonial actor. History focuses on Arab-Indian imperialism in East Africa at the end of the 19th century, when the dominance of Muslims was replaced by white Europeans. The focus is on eleven-year-old Yusuf, who is given by his parents to the Arab wholesaler Aziz to work off their debts. One day he is supposed to accompany his master on a trade trip into the jungle, but the company is not a lucky star. The setting is reminiscent of Joseph Conrads Heart of darkness – Absurdities, madness, illness and death accompany the caravan. The journey ends in chaos, the paradise that everyone here dreams of in their own way remains a long way off.
Zackzag, stupid
Gurnah fled to England in 1968, where he taught English and post-colonial literature. In his work he also circles around phenomena of the post-colonial present such as flight, identity and memory. His prose is unpretentious, thoughtful, haunting. His work politically without moralizing. He shows how complex the world is and avoids simple answers. His writing does not result in the accusation of circumstances or regimes, but in observing bodies erring through time and space and encountering one another. He shows how power corrupts, why madness reigns and that racism is not a modern phenomenon.
His current novel Afterlives, which is due to appear in German in spring 2022, begins at the beginning of the 20th century when “every piece of land in these latitudes belonged to Europeans, at least on the map: British East Africa, German East Africa, África Oriental Portuguese, Congo Belge. “The empire has the African recruits of the German protection forces put down the resistance of the population with extreme violence. “In the thirty years or so since they conquered this area, the Germans have killed so many people that this land is literally littered with bones and skulls and the earth is soaked with blood.” Hamza, a boy like Yusuf , becomes a witness and victim of the mastermind, but also experiences the charity of a German missionary. The story – in the English original interspersed with German words like zackzack, stupid or parade ground – does not bend voyeuristically over the violence, but only lets it shine through the edges. The English text, mixed with Swahili, Arabic and German, linguistically reproduces the colonial experience in the ethnic “melting pot” of East Africa. This is great literature that lingers on for a long time and affects us directly.
Post-colonial literature is in great demand internationally. In Paris the Senegalese Mohamed Mbougar Sarr was recently awarded the Prix Goncourt, in London the South African Damon Galgut was awarded the Booker Prize. While on Sarr’s post-colonial literary crime thriller The most secret memory of men If you have to wait until autumn 2022, you can read Galgut’s brilliant family saga at Christmas. The promise is about the decline of a white South African dynasty. The Swarts have a curse because they do not give the black housekeeper Salome their house as promised. “A promise made is an unpaid debt,” writes Shakespeare. The novel, masterfully translated by Thomas Mohr, shows this guilt, which is a moral but also a colonial one. Galgut’s allegory of the rainbow nation tells of the unfulfilled hopes since the end of apartheid and reflects the “strange, simple fusions” that hold this country together. As if through a camera lens, one follows the gaze of the omniscient narrator, who is constantly turning the lens to capture the complex reality of South Africa.
Gurnah, Galgut, Sarr and, last but not least, Peace Prize Laureate Tsitsi Dangarembga (Friday 41/2021) – contemporary African literature is diverse and tells of German and European guilt in a differentiated and sophisticated way. Nobody has to discover them anymore. But they should read as many as possible.
Paradise lost Abdulrazak Gurnah Inge Leipold (translator), Penguin Verlag 2021, 336 pp., 25 €
The promise Damon Galgut Thomas Mohr (translator), Luchterhand Literaturverlag 2021, 368 pages, € 24
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