Even before the Nobel Prize in 2021, Abdulrazak Gurnah wrote his novel Nachleben, which has now been published in German.
In one of the many interviews after receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature, Abdulrazak Gurnah was asked whether he would write about his experiences. “Certainly. And at the same time no,” replied the writer, who was born in the Sultanate of Zanzibar in 1948 and came to Great Britain as a refugee at the age of 18. “What I write is not just my experience. Millions of people are in this situation, in our time, in human history, at all times.” In a world where migration is the talk of the town and postcolonial debates move the public, Abdulrazak Gurnah’s books strike a chord.
What it means to be a stranger and to be confronted with prejudice, he found out for himself at Christ Church College in Canterbury, when he walked into the classroom and saw a drawing on the blackboard meant to show him with a bone through his nose , including racist scrawl. “Such incidents happened every day,” he reports. It was students doing this, not children. Writing in English, not his native Swahili, Gurnah found a refuge to understand and think things through, “to unravel thoughts and worries,” as he said in an interview with Bayerischer Rundfunk. He graduated from college and taught English and post-colonial literatures at Bayero University in Nigeria and at the University of Kent.
His ten novels deal with displacement, uprooting and migration. Although he has lived in the UK for almost 60 years, his imagination keeps returning to Africa. This is also the case in the novel “Nachleben”, which was published in 2020, has now been translated into German by Eva Bonné, and basically picks up where “Das Lost Paradise” (1994) left off.
In it, it was the young Yusuf who was pledged to a rich merchant by his parents who were in debt and who ended up joining the “Askaris”, i.e. the protection troops who support the German colonial rulers in voluntary loyalty, so the hero in the current novel is called Hamza. He too was abducted by a trader as a child and joins the Askaris. With the Germans he crushes the uprisings of the Abushiri and the Hehe and fights against the British. When the war was over in 1918, he returned to his parents’ town as a cripple.
He laboriously builds a new life for himself and marries Afiya, whose brother Ilyas died as Askari in the war. They also name their son Ilyas in memory of him. After years of waiting and uncertainty, it turns out that the brother went to Germany and sang through bars as a singer in the 1930s. His traces are lost in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. Abdulrazak Gurnah’s moving novel, which addresses the consequences of colonial rule as well as the search for one’s own identity in post-colonial Africa, ends with a shock. The authorial narrator may seem a bit old-fashioned and the straightforward tone naive: how Gurnah tells of this world that is foreign to Europeans, describes life in the family group and reports on the resilience and will to survive of the oppressed, that is what grips you while reading.
Abdulrazak Gurnah tells of a world in upheaval that will never be the same again after it has been appropriated by the self-proclaimed “colonial masters”. The delicate balance of Indians, Arabs and Africans trading with each other is being disrupted by the Germans and British imposing a monoculture on their territories. And they’re not squeamish about it. Thousands of people were killed and mistreated by the Germans. Then the war came and killed more, hundreds of thousands of people. Like “Paradise Lost”, “Afterlife” takes place in a time when Gurnah himself was not yet born, but in the time of his father’s childhood. “History is very important because we don’t understand anything if we don’t know the stupid things that happened before our time,” says the Nobel laureate himself about his historical approach. Moralizing is foreign to him. Which is also due to the differentiated way in which he draws his characters.