ABDULRAZAK GURNAH PARADISE

THE WRITER

Novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah was born in 1948 on the island of Zanzibar off the coast of East Africa. He went to Britain as a student in 1968 and now teaches Literature at the University of Kent. He is Associate Editor of the literary journal Wasafiri (meaning ´travellers´ in Kiswahili).

His first three novels, Memory of Departure (1987), Pilgrims Way (1988) and Dottie (1990), document the immigrant experience in contemporary Britain from different perspectives. His fourth novel, Paradise (1994), is set in colonial East Africa during the First World War and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction. Admiring Silence (1996) tells the story of a young man who leaves Zanzibar and emigrates to England where he marries and becomes a teacher. A return visit to his native country 20 years later profoundly affects his attitude towards both himself and his marriage. By the Sea (2001), is narrated by Saleh Omar, an elderly asylum-seeker living in an English seaside town.

Abdulrazak Gurnah lives in Brighton, East Sussex. His most recent novel is Desertion (2005), shortlisted for a 2006 Commonwealth Writers Prize.
In 2007 he edited The Cambridge Companion to Salman Rushdie.

PARADISE

Paradise is at once the story of an African boy's coming of age, a tragic love story, and a tale of the corruption of traditional African patterns by European colonialism.
At twelve, Yusuf, the protagonist of this twentieth-century odyssey, is sold by his father to repay a debt and thrown into the complexities of pre-colonial urban East Africa - a fascinating world in which Muslim Black Africans, Christian missionaries, and Indians from the subcontinent coexist in a fragile, subtle social hierarchy. Through the eyes of Yusuf, Gurnah depicts communities at war, trading safaris gone awry, and the universal trials of adolescence. Then, just as Yusuf begins to comprehend the choices required of him, he and everyone around him must adjust to the new reality of European colonialism.
In his talks, Gurnah has emphasized how two of his major books--Paradise and Admiring Silence were written after traveling. Traveling, according to Gurnah, unlocks a kind of knowledge different from other kinds of knowledge. In Paradise, in which Gurnah wrote the ending first and then finally finished ten years (and one other novel) later, he wanted to understand what had been lost on the Swahili coast through colonialism, and how his parents' generation might have experienced it. This becomes especially pertinent to Gurnah as a Zanzibari because of the kinds of connections the Zanzibar Revolution celebrated (inter-African). The discourse consigned Zanzibar’s ‘Indian Ocean’ history (its ‘outside’ history) to forgetfulness and shame.

Gurnah, on the other hand, wants neither to celebrate the Omani presence in Zanzibar nor to set it aside, but to see it through the historical framework in which it emerged: the Indian Ocean. What was it like to be young at the end of the nineteenth/beginning of the twentieth century in East Africa? It was to be part of an Indian Ocean world. Gurnah's novel Paradise is a vivid work of historical imagination which is remarkable not only for its intimate portrait of coastal culture but for the silences it acknowledges--the characters on the caravan trail in the interior speak openly about the barbarism of those they encounter. The main character is a slave of a coastal merchant, and Gurnah writes about slavery on the coast with great subtlety.

Gurnah´s characters do not offer open resistance to their circumstances but are realistically shown negotiating with power in order to survive. Gurnah writes quietly, showing rather than telling, allowing readers to draw their own conclusions about power and powerlessness, responsibility and blame.

QUESTIONS TO THINK ABOUT WHILE READING

According to a website dedicated to African writers, ¨scholars of Kiswahili debate whether a novel like Paradise is properly an English or a Swahili novel, and this is high praise in its own way, because it shows the degree to which Gurnah is able to use English with the rhythm of Swahili, to transform English into something suiting the picture he is trying to paint.¨ Has Gurnah created his own language?
Gurna shows us child abandonment and exploitation and other consequences of poverty and exploitation. However he doesn´t try to persuade us of anything and his style is neutral. Is the novel all the more moving for its understatement? Or does the reader need to know who is responsible?