2023-11-12 17:56:48
Sometimes he interrupts the written text of his dazzling speech, which he is writing German literary archive Marbach reads out. The 74-year-old Abdulrazak Gurnah delivers the clearly structured sentences – as in his novels – in mostly calm, serious, but not at all monotonous English.
When Gurnah looks up from the manuscript, looks at the audience gathered on the Marbacher Schillerhöhe and says that as teenagers he and his friends imitated the single file that the post-revolutionary armed forces of Zanzibar, where he was born in 1948, took over from the Soviets after 1964, it is such a thing Moment. At that age, people had no idea about the importance of military marching.
This also happens in the last third of his speech – Gurnah interrupts his speech after talking about the many deaths in German East Africa. Concern can now be heard in his voice. It’s about hundreds of thousands; they often starved to death as a result of German colonial policy.
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The atrocities against the Herero and Nama in South West Africa have recently been increasingly discussed in Germany, continues Gurnah, who came to Great Britain as a refugee in 1968. The suffering inflicted on the people of East Africa should not be trivialized or forgotten, he warns.
But, as we have just heard, this is not a situation that has to last forever, Gurnah then looks up from his manuscript. He repeats these sentences after demanding that historical responsibility for these acts must be recognized.
Gurnah refers to the greetings of the Green Party politician Petra Olschowski, Baden-Württemberg’s Minister for Science, Research and Art. She had previously not only emphasized the need for further processing of German colonial history, but also mentioned Federal President Frank Walter Steinmeier’s visit to Tanzania at the end of October, 118 years after the Maji Maji uprising. “It is important to me that we come to terms with this dark chapter, that we work through it together,” Steinmeier said after a meeting with Tanzanian President Samia Suluhu Hassan in Dar es Salaam.
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In any case, it was the political representative’s turn to draw attention to the shocking news on this Sunday morning – and also to the calendar closeness between Friedrich Schiller’s birthday on November 10th, 1759 and the so-called Reichspogromnacht from November 9th to 10th, 1938, 179 years later.
Olschowski spoke of the “terrible catastrophe” of the Hamas attack on Israel and of the “acts of war in the Middle East that continue to deeply disturb us all.” Audibly schooled in recent political past theories of “multi-perspective memory,” the minister also emphasized that conflicts of this kind cannot be understood through a “single narrative.”
Paths of history
In view of the world situation, including a Russian attack on Ukraine that some saw as a colonial war, would Abdulrazak Gurnah have given a different speech on this November day? Should Gurnah have said something about the increasingly shrill, often certainly justified criticism of postcolonial thinking, especially now, with a view to the war in Israel and the Gaza Strip?
Gurnah was honored with the Nobel Prize for having “uncompromisingly and sensitively” pointed out the consequences of colonialism, as well as the fate of refugees. Gurnah held a professorship in English and postcolonial literatures at the University of Kent in Canterbury until his retirement in 2017.
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One should have expected an explanation for the fact that Gurnah, like him also the Nobel Prize winners Annie Ernaux and Olga Tokarczuk, protested in an open letter at the Frankfurt Book Fair against the postponement of an award ceremony for a Palestinian author whose novel some critics view as anti-Israel has?
No. Criticism of not saying something that is actually expected is very popular. You hear this all too often An argument from silence, as logic knows it to be a fallacy, in turbulent times like these. This is not the only reason why it is logical that an author of Abdulrazak Gurnah’s stature stuck to his own topic, this Sunday in Schiller’s birthplace of Marbach.
With his description of how, as a teenager, he discovered Friedrich Schiller’s poems in a library financed by the GDR in Zanzibar and later came across Ralph Waldo Emerson in the library of the US diplomatic representative, who was suspected of CIA machinations, he says that speaks more about the convoluted paths of history that connect the human and the power-political than any statement about the immediate present.
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