ABDULRAZAK GURNAH (Tanzania)

 

 

By I. M Soqaga

 

Every time when the Nobel Prize winner in literature would be announced the news will invariably arouse great interest to literary pundits and literary aficionados.  Consequentially, in Africa news of the Nobel Prize winner in literature is welcome with an ambivalent feeling.  For the fact that this year 2021 Nobel Prize in literature has been awarded to an African writer from Tanzania, Abdulrazak Gurnah, certainly Africa is very ecstatic about the news.

 

Abdulrazak Gurnah whose indigenous language is Swahili evaded the soil of Africa when he was a teen and opted to live in England.  He essentially writes in English and his proverbial writings are generally popular abroad where he lives.  Although he had been writing for many years now and his first novel, Memory of Departure (1987), would give a conspicuously picturesque that Professor Gurnah is indeed a well-established writer.

 

Nevertheless, he is a known Zanzibar refugee whose current home is England, after receiving the prestigious Nobel Prize in literature he described the winning of the award as ‘truly remarkable’, and said that it was a great honour for him to be given an award that had been given to so many talented writers worldwide.

 

The Nobel Committee lauded Gurnah: "for his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fates of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents''

Fundamentally to the surprise of African critics and literary pundits, the Nobel Prize Committee in literature remains in essence a Western Political committee whose discretion on selections for the ultimate winner remains questionable.  Over the years and even this year 2021 outstanding African wordsmiths like Kenyan Ngugi waThiong’o and Somalia’s Nuruddin Farah were shrugged off when there was an explicit prospect that surely, they should be the recipients of the prestigious Nobel Prize.  Moreover, Wole Soyinka himself emphasised on receiving the Nobel Prize in 1986 that “he would not to accept the prize on a personal level... but as a tribute to the heritage of African literature, which is very little known in the West.'

Indeed, a robust Nigerian critic, Chinweizu has already ridiculed the Nobel Prize when he strongly expounded that “the conceit that a gaggle of Swedes, all by themselves, should pronounce on intellectual excellence for the whole wide world.  The Nobel Prize, is neither a world prize rather it is a Western European reward for those rendering a specific kind of service to Western power and Western global hegemony… A Nobel award to any African, therefore, is not a matter for rejoicing.’

Nevertheless Gurnah is a top notch writer whose works over the years include:

Memory of Departure (1987)

Pilgrims Way (1988)

Dottie (1990)

Paradise (1994)

Admiring Silence (1996)

By the Sea (2001)

Desertion (2005)

The Last Gift (2011)

Gravel Heart (2017)

Afterlives (2020)

Yet one must point out that Africa has many great veritable writers who even write in indigenous languages.  It is a fact that Africans whose literary lives are basically in Europe and America will to some certain be recognized and adored by the Western Institutions like the Swedes famous Western Europe control Nobel Prize. But let us still congratulate the polished man of Letters, Gurnah!!