Max Callimanopulos in the Los Angeles Review of Books:
“Leaving. I’ve had years to think about that, leaving and arriving,” Latif, a Zanzibari emigre, tells us in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s 2001 novel By the Sea. The book describes the complicated friendship between two Zanzibari men living in the United Kingdom, but in these lines, Gurnah might as well be writing about himself. In 1968, Gurnah left his home—the small tropical island of Zanzibar, 20-odd miles off the coast of Tanzania—for Britain. He was seeking asylum: four years earlier, insurrectionists led by a Ugandan bricklayer named John Okello had risen up against the island’s landholding Arab minority in what would probably be called a genocide if it happened today. Okello himself boasted that some 12,000 Arabs were killed. Gurnah, whose people came from Yemen, was forced to flee Zanzibar. He was 18 years old when he arrived in England.
Gurnah has lived in the UK ever since. By all appearances, he gets on quite well there. He earned his doctorate at the University of Kent and has taught English and postcolonial literature there since the early 1980s. In 1987, he published his debut novel, Memory of Departure, and since then has pushed out a book every few years, to modest sales and good reviews. In 2021, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. “I thought it was a prank,” he told The Guardian, reacting to his win. In the speeches and interviews he gives, Gurnah comes across as a thoughtful, well-spoken, sensible man.
But to read four or five of his novels in succession is to realize that this is a writer still wracked by his decision, made 57 years ago, to leave Zanzibar.
More here.
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