By The Sea (Book Review)

by Nate Mathews
Reading a Gurnah novel is like savoring a delicate dish of language--each sentence is a bite of beauty and subtle flavor that you don't want to end. By The Sea is a novel of exile, of what it means to be a refugee, but it unfolds as something much more: a generational family drama of love and betrayal, set against political events on the coast and in Zanzibar: slavery, colonialism, and the Zanzibar Revolution.

The book opens with the protagonist, an elderly Zanzibari named Saleh Omar, seeking asylum in the UK. Traveling under an assumed name while pretending not to speak any English, Saleh is treated to a self-righteous lecture by an immigration official who concludes his interview by stealing Saleh's only precious possession, a carved wooden box full of Cambodian oud.

The story paints a grim portrait of a man beaten down by life, alone with his memories as he moves through detainment to asylum, and is settled in a small town on the English seaside. But from a story about exile, the novel opens into a sprawling family drama as told through the faint remembrances of Saleh and another Zanzibari who he meets in England. The two men confront the bitterness and hidden wounds of the past, seeking solace from their loneliness in the hard truths they have to tell each other.
This book tangles you in a web of family discontents, and describes with incredible sympathy and clarity the situation of Omanis and other Arabs in Zanzibar through revolution, mass-killings, detention and escape. It manages to comment ever-so-subtly on post-colonial politics and the havoc they wreaked on the Arabs of Zanzibar. For instance: "The government...rounded up whole families of people of Omani descent, especially those who lived in the country or wore beards and turbans or were related to the ousted sultan and transported them to the small island some distance off shore. There they were detained under guard, until eventually, several months later, ships chartered by the Omani government took them away in their thousands. There were so many of them that it was weeks before the ships stopped coming." (221-222)

As one other reviewer noted, the sea frames Gurnah's metaphorical language of loss and change, of connection and exile, of remembrance and forgetting. The acts of heroism in this magnificent novel are small, perhaps dwarfed by the mighty events that sweep the characters along through their tangled lives, but perhaps even more meaningful in their ordinary profundity.

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"Admiring Silence" (book review)

I asked one of Azanian Sea's readers, Anne Chappel, who is one of Abdulrazak Gurnah's biggest fans, to review one of his works. Here is her review of Admiring Silence.

Admiring Silence

Admiring Silence, published in 1996, is Abdulrazak Gurnah's fifth book. It is a story of loss. And a story of stories: of the many layers and inventions created by the unnamed story teller as he travels between Zanzibar and the UK.

We start with him in physical pain, a pain that 'reeked of loneliness and terror'. From this introduction we hear his story; of the culture shock of hisUK arrival, his successful studies, falling in love with Emma and having a child with her. He then recounts the story of his childhood in Zanzibar and the fleeing of the island after the revolution – an account that is later changed. Place and memory are of great importance as they inform us about the narrator as he struggles to find a sense of home. He is unhappy in his adopted country, which he has come to know through the woman he loves and through his gruelling teaching job. Nor is he at home in the country of his childhood where he chooses to hide the facts of his English life until it becomes a family crisis.

At one stage he says, 'As if I was not already lost and stolen and shipwrecked and mangled beyond recognition anyway'. The narrator weaves fantastical ‘colonial’ type stories around himself, both for protection and to mock the xenophobia of Emma's father. Likewise, the stories he tells Emma about his past, are twisted and fabricated.

 'I was allowed so much room, that I could only fill it with invention’. His ‘alienness’ is important to Emma (she uses it to get back at her conservative parents) and once the baby comes his only way to get attention from her is to act the fool.  The stories have run out.

When he returns to Zanzibar he is overwhelmed, 'I felt my eyes watering at the clarity of memory which had preserved these pictures so effortlessly, without renewal or exertion’. He now tells us a different story of his childhood.  His dissembling continues: he does not want to reveal the details of his life in London; his common law wife and teenage daughter. Faced with his family’s delight at his homecoming he treads the line of least resistance. 'I was keen not to be seen to have changed beyond recognition, not to be thought alien.' And he seeks out from his mother another story – of what happened to his father, who left the family before he was born and caused shame to the family. His family had stayed behind and suffered through the days of hardship post the 1964 revolution.

He is invited to visit the Permanent Secretary to the Minister of Culture. 'They were at ease with one another and with themselves.' He has lost this comfort, so he performs and mocks them in their ‘stolen’ houses.  The strange job he is offered and declines is to translate the great books of the western world. Meanwhile, he dallies with his mother’s plans for him to marry a girl half his age (a girl also trying to escape her lot in Zanzibar for educational purposes). But he knows that it cannot be, for he is already committed.

The elegance of the language draws you into the many layers of Admiring Silence as it takes you on these humourless wanderings. When our narrator returns to London, having been told that he is 'lost' to his Zanzibar family, he is further lost as Emma leaves him. And that is when he comes to occupy a 'fragile silence'. Maybe in this silence he will come to find comfort in who and where he is. For on this final occasion he does write home to share his sad news. Maybe a fragile truth is emerging. We are not to know.

Admiring Silence appears to be a simple story, not much momentous happens and yet it covers a wide complex canvas and raises interesting issues. One of them is the return of a prodigal son to his homeland that has changed and suffered so much in the twenty years since his departure. ‘You should have brought us (rice and sugar)…instead of the chocolates and bottles of perfume’, his sister complains. The sewers are blocked, water and power intermittent. Roadblocks, corrupt police and politicians are facts of life.

Gurnah's language is luminous, simple and powerful, almost poetry at times. He has an ability to speak of the heart, revealing people in all their rawness. You can open this book at any point and be enthralled.

Anne Chappel was born in Mwanza and grew up in Tanganyika where her father worked for the British Government. In 1956 the family moved to Pemba and then Zanzibar where they lived until the January 1964 Revolution. She went to university in Natal, South Africa and studied Politics & Economics and then obtained a teaching qualification. She then did a second degree in Commerce and specialised in computers. This led to a career in Business Modeling. In 1987 Anne moved with her husband to Australia and she is now retired in Adelaide, South Australia. She is a keen student of African history, in particular the history of Zanzibar. Over the years Anne has written many travel articles for newspapers and magazines - recently for the East African in-flight magazine on various aspects of Zanzibar. Short stories and a local history book have been written and published and she is now working on the biography of her father and a novel set in Zanzibar.

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A Talk and a Reading from Abdul Rahzak Gurnah

In two fascinating talks over this past week, the Program of African Studies at Northwestern University was treated to the prose and reflection of Abdul Rahzak Gurnah, one of the foremost writers in the United Kingdom as well as a Zanzibari exile who writes about East African history, migration, and postcolonial identities in Zanzibar and the UK. In his talks, Gurnah emphasized how two of his major books--Paradise and Admiring Silencewere written after traveling. Traveling, according to Gurnah, unlocks a kind of knowledge different from other kinds of knowledge. In Paradise, which Gurnah wrote the ending to 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 Revolutionary 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--showing its various hierarchies and subtle gradations of subservience.

Gurnah's characters are not helpless but often powerless. Their way of moving through the world is a different style than open resistance. It is a kind of stoicism, a gracious accepting, a recognition that your way of living is itself a kind of integrity, even in passivity.

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. The art of storytelling...and reading a Gurnah novel, you are in the hands of a master.

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Paradise by Abdulrazak Gurnah

Paradise is a little book about a boy named Yusuf who grows into manhood in East Africa. As a coming of age story it is remarkably simple and straightforward, but the way in which Abdulrazak Gurnah illuminates the tremendous historical changes sweeping around Yusuf, and does so while still maintaining the narrative integrity of his man-child protagonist, is simply breathtaking.

Yusuf starts out in a provincial town in the East African interior, the son of a poor hotel owner. He is mortgaged by his father to pay his deepening debt to a man Yusuf knows only as Uncle Aziz. Yusuf travels in the care of Uncle Aziz to the coast, where he befriends Khalil, another debt-slave whose has secrets Yusuf will eventually discover.

Yusuf is an exceptionally beautiful boy and a very sensitive observer who cries at visions he sees in his dreams. His journeys in Paradise mirror two processes which bound the interiors of Eastern Africa to the Western Indian Ocean--one a process of the migration (often via slavery) and subsequent Islamization of upcountry Africans, and the other a venturing into the interior as far as Eastern Congo by armed bands of Swahili-Arab traders.

Gurnah's description of life on the caravan road is illuminative and he vividly portrays the 'utani' relationship of sly joking and storytelling by which the porters structured the monotony of the march. He also gives one of the richest explorations (through dialogue) of the fantastic dimensions of East African Islamic mythology, in which the 'washenzi' lurk in the lands of Gog and Magog waiting to destroy the believers and dragons, birds, jinns, and ghosts all inhabit a universe in intimate interaction with humans. Finally in the background are the Germans, a brooding silent foreboding force who everyone around Yusuf speaks of with trepidation, and who intervene at a key point in the novel. Gurnah accurately captures the ambigous status of Yusuf as grows up on the eve of European colonial rule, and searches for a way out of his dependency. His unexpected decision ends the book abruptly, almost breathlessly, but somehow completely appropriately. In this single last sentence, Gurnah has somehow captured what Jonathan Glassman calls "the contradictory dimensions of slave resistance," the moral dilemma through which Yusuf will shape an independent destiny for himself. Paradise more than lives up to his name and will offer students of East African history and literature a beautiful and compelling read.

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