Zanjibar: Wa Akfān min Rahim al’alam (Book Review)

Laura Goffman is a Ph.D. student in Middle East and North African History at Georgetown University. She also holds an M.A. in Near Eastern Studies from New York University. Her research focuses on the cultural and social dynamics of militarization in twentieth-century Oman. Check her out on Academia.edu.

Al-Ghonaimi, Sheikha. Zanjibar: Wa Akfān min Rahim al’alam. Maktaba ḍāmirī lilnashar wa at-tawzī‘. Sultana Oman, 2012.

The cover of Sheikha Al Ghonaimi’s 2012 novel Zanjibar: Wa Akfān min Rahim al’alam (Zanzibar: Shrouds from the Womb of Pain) is an outline of the map of Zanzibar, splattered haphazardly with blood-red blotches of paint, spilling from the island into the surrounding Indian Ocean. We learn in Ghonaimi’s introduction that this blood represents the Omanis of Zanzibar who were slaughtered during the 1964 Zanzibar Revolution. This uprising led to the death and expulsion of thousands of Arabs and South Asians, including the Omani Sultan who had been placed at the head of a constitutional monarchy when the British Empire granted Zanzibar’s independence in 1963. He fled the island on his yacht—many others were not so fortunate.

While Ghonaimi’s narrative focus is on the social life and political events of Zanzibar, the orientation of her characters firmly remains in the Omani homeland. Ghonaimi structures her novel in the form of a letter written by her narrator, Mohammed bin Abdullah Al Harthy, to his older brother, whom he has not seen since he departed from Oman some 30 years earlier. Like many Omanis of the impoverished interior, the fictional Mohammed left Oman with his father in the early 1950s in search of greater prosperity in East Africa. Mohammed is only 8 years old when he and his father arrive in Zanzibar, and the first part of the novel is built around a child's nostalgia for an idealized home in Oman. The dramatic focus of this section is Mohammed's recollection of his mother's reluctance to agree to her youngest son's departure, and his father's persistence in convincing her that their son would benefit from learning the ways of trade. Guiltily, Mohammed describes his childish ignorance of the gravity and permanence of his departure, and his mother's rare display of tears as he left. His mother, we learn, has long since passed away, and he longs to have been able to tell her goodbye.

This melancholic nostalgia for his family colors Mohammed's depiction of life in Oman, which Ghonaimi describes, through the lens of his memories, as a pure and simple existence among an intimate circle. The predictable rhythm of trips to the mosque, agricultural work, and religious education structures Mohammed's early life. This Omani community emerges in his memory as majestic in its commitment to these daily rituals. For example, he describes his first trip to the mosque with his father, "I entered the mosque for the first time at dawn...there the men were as though they were illuminated...they were dressed in the Omani way, which reflected the purity of their hearts...it was beautiful to see human beings participating as angels in that atmosphere of spiritual purity" (17, quotations are my translations).

Some troubles do seep into Mohammed’s memories of this well-ordered world of Oman's interior: the father and the teacher both feel justified in beating mischievous children, who in turn harass Antoor, a homeless wanderer who lost his entire family in a fire that started while his wife was cooking. Also, clear hierarchies prevail, as girls cook and boys carry tools to work on the date farms, and Mohammed recalls his mother sadly reminding his aunt after she learns of Mohammed's approaching departure, "I had no say in the matter" (29). His aunt is horrified that her sister is forced to relinquish her youngest son, but the necessity of covering her face and retreating from view as the men arrive to take him away prevents her from expressing these feelings to Mohammed's father, so away they go, over the mountains with their caravan to catch a ship to Zanzibar.

The Omani community in Zanzibar is apparently close-knit and guards its communal privileges by maintaining a tight control over its network of families. Ghonaimi illustrates this protection of their own when Muhammad and his father arrive in Zanzibar as bedraggled immigrants, but are immediately taken up by Al Barwani, a prominent Omani merchant with an elegant home and a host of black servants. Mohammed and his father have no connection to Barwani except for their shared Arabic language and Omani heritage, but he becomes their willing patron and invites them to be his guests after Mohammed’s father asks him for help translating the Swahili spokenon the dock. Barwani supplies Mohammed with a black servant boy, Youssef, to teach him Swahili until he is proficient enough to enroll in the local school, and he helps Mohammed’s father to start a business.

Youssef becomes like family to Mohammad, yet he holds a separate status as a non-Arab “native”. For example, when Barwani first suggests that Mohammed learn Swahili from Youssef, his father worries about his son mixing with blacks.Barwani assures him, “Don’t worry, Youssef has been brought up in my house, and his manners and morals are excellent” (61). The implication here is that Youssef, despite his race, is an acceptable companion due to his cultivation in an Omani domestic setting. When violence erupts on the island in 1964, Youssef's family saves Mohammed, now 18, and his little brother, Ahmed. In an ultimate act of loyalty, Youssef decides to accompany Mohammed and Ahmed as they smuggle themselves off of the island in the storage cabin of a ship, and when Mohammed questions his willingness to leave his own family, Youssef asks him angrily, "How can you say that there is a price for friendship?" (127).

Friendship between a black former servant and an Omani immigrant may be priceless, but it does have its limitations: after they have reached Dar es Salaam, for example, Mohammed spots an older Omani woman on the docks, and switches from Swahili to Arabic. When Youssef protests that he does not understand, Mohammed replies that he is using Arabic because "I want her to feel that I am close to her" (156). Just as Barwani took in Mohammed and his father in Zanzibar, in Dar es Salaam Mohammed immediately forges a connection with an Omani he identifies by language and appearance. As Mohammed and his brother settle into another enclave of the Omani diaspora, only Youssef’s exceptional loyalty to Mohammed and his upbringing in Barwani’s household grant him entry to this community.

As Nate Mathews noted in another post on Coverage of East Africa in the Omani Media, nostalgia for Oman's East African "empire" has become widespread in Omani media today. Ghonaimi adopts the standard points of this narrative. Through the voice of a minor character (a man who helps Mohammed and his companions to escape Zanzibar during the uprising), Ghonaimi offers an elaborate account of the history of Omanis in Zanzibar. The crucial points here are the propagation of Islam in East Africa through Omani efforts, the primitive nature of Africans before the Arab arrival (even alluding to acts of cannibalism), and the gracious, cultivating influence of the Omanis (138-139). The legacy of slavery is hardly mentioned, and after this historical rendition, Mohammed asks indignantly, "Why do the Omanis deserve all this pain in a country they improved so much?" (141). The answer to this query is at the didactic heart of the novel, and Ghonaimi assures us that the horrors of 1964 came about due to officious British colonizers and demagogic mainlanders (in the final section of the book, Mohammed even lists the names and crimes of specific political leaders), whose combined influence, she suggests, tragically disturbed the harmonious and cosmopolitan balance of pre-1964 Zanzibar.

The most engaging parts of Zanzibar: Shrouds from the Womb of Pain are Ghonaimi’s vivid descriptions of family and community life in Oman and Zanzibar. Here, her enthusiasm for Omani history and her sensitivity to the textures of daily life make for fascinating and compelling reading. Ghonaimi’sinsistence on Omani benevolence and victimhood in East Africa is, however, somewhat one-sided due to her reliance on racial and cultural stereotypes of "Africans" and to her neglect of the historical reverberations of slavery and ethnic chauvinism. Ultimately, these shortcomings are detrimental to her innovative attempt to use the epistolary novel and the complex power of memory to make some sense of the horrific violence of the 1964 Zanzibar Revolution.

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Speak Swahili Dammit (Book Review)

James Penhaligon. Speak Swahili Dammit! Trevelyan Publishers. Falmouth, Cornwall, 2012.

James Penhaligon is a doctor who grew up on a remote gold mining town in colonial Tanganyika. The book is a memoir of childhood, told through a child's narration. The resulting narrative is rich in affect and Penhaligon exploits the hilarity of a child's point of view with great skill and relish. Penhaligon, whose father dies at the beginning of the book, grows up between two worlds--the white colonial world of the wazungus, whom he hates, and the African world of the watu.

Jim is gradually (and reluctantly) incorporated into wazungu society through his boarding school experience, though he hates every minute of it, and rebels by running away several times. He describes the sense of "double-consciousness" he feels as someone straddling both worlds, and how people around him call him a social chameleon. The book ends with the closing of the mine after Tanganyikan independence.

Penhaligon has a gift for vivid description, and succeeds in both skewering the provincial racism and insularity of the white colonials, while also showing some of its internal diversity--Germans, Italians, Greeks, Scots, and Austrian Jews, survivors of the Nazi death camps. He portrays a rich tapestry of life choices that bring people to Geita, the mining town. There are surprisingly perceptive observations on the elaborate internal social hierarchies that pervade the town.
The book is also rich with Swahili vocabulary, although it is obvious from the many oddly spelled Swahili words and strange grammatical constructions that the author is remembering a language he picked up orally and then likely stopped speaking for many years. As someone who learned Swahili in a formal setting, I cringed each time Penhaligon quoted people using the word kuja to command someone to come. (The imperative command for come in Swahili is, in fact, njoo; kuja is the infinitive form of the verb). But I am also not familiar with how Swahili was spoken in the 1950s around Lake Victoria; perhaps my "Kiunguja" snobbishness has got the better of me!

As a boy, Jim loves nothing more than running and playing in the bush, creating imaginary kingdoms with his best friend Lutoli, harassing the "night soil" man (who comes during the day and is called in Swahili, machula) and listening to war veterans from the first and second world wars recount their exploits.

As a historian, these stories were one of the most interesting parts of the book. I learned about General Paul Von Lettow Vorbek, the enterprising German general whose military genius during the first World War routed superior British forces time and time again, and who was only forced to surrender by the German declaration of surrender. I also learned about the local askaris, trained by Germans, who carried themselves with pride and dignity as members of an elite fighting force. Through Jim's inquisitiveness, we also learn snatches of the experience of the Africans who were brought to Burma to fight agains the Japanese, and the impact of this experience on their consciousness.

The other part of the book that particularly interested me was the author's recounting of the Zanzibar Revolution, through an Indian clerk who works with his mother at the store. Here is Amil Mistree, the Indian clerk's account, as described by Penhaligon:

"At Bagamoyo, Amil and his relatives are woken in the small hours by the distant sound of explosions and gunfire. Zanzibar is only four miles away. They're alarmed. Later that morning, towards noon, bodies began to float up onto the beach below his cousin's house. Many have chunks bitten off by sharks. Flies carpet the rest. Panic-stricken, Amil takes his wife and children and flees the coast. Three days later, exhausted, dusty and terrified,, he arrives back at the mine. His is the first news of the massacre to reach Geita. Until then all that's known is that the 'corrupt' sultan has been overthrown by 'valiant freedom forces' on Zanzibar."

The passage is remarkable. I do not believe that Bagamoyo and Unguja were close enough to actually hear gunfire from the island on the mainland. And certainly Unguja is further than four miles offshore from Zanzibar! This is the first account I have read of mainlanders actually seeing corpses from Zanzibar float to the mainland. Finally is the death toll, which Penhaligon quotes (without attribution) as 17,000, claiming this figure was only admitted to years later (by who, he does not say). This is almost double the traditionally cited figure of 10,000. (Although during field research in Muscat I heard people quote figures as high as 30,000). It made me wonder if perhaps there are other accounts that reproduce these stories, as a kind of rumor, expressing something of the bloody terror that overran Zanzibar in the wake of the revolution.
Overall, this is a great book to pass time with. I do not know how much pedagogical value it has, and I remain skeptical of some of the Swahili reconstructions, but it is filled with hilarious and poignant stories.

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Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh (Book Review)

Amitav Ghosh. Sea of Poppies. New York: Picador, 2008.

I've previously reviewed an earlier work from the prolific and brilliant Amitav Ghosh. 1993's In An Antique Land was an arresting mashup of Ghosh's fieldwork in Egypt and a historical reconstruction of the life of a 12th century Indian slave who moved with his master between Cairo and India.

Sea of Poppies finds Ghosh working the same rich themes of culture, language and hierarchy in the Indian Ocean world; but this time the context is colonial India in 1838, with Britain on the brink of the Opium Wars with China. Ghosh conjures up a world of sailors, merchants, convicts, colonial landlords and indentured laborers. The texture of language in the novel is almost unimaginably rich; one needs (and Ghosh provides) a reference index for the many untranslated words from the language of sailors. Whereas Ghosh's authorial voice intervened frequently in In An Antique Land, reflecting on both his own identity and the story he is tracking, in Sea of Poppies, the message is in the fully realized world that springs to life in its pages.

Ghosh wants to use language to pull us into the dizzying complexity and diversity of the Indian Ocean world; a subject that has fascinated historians and scholars. But Ghosh avoids the romanticism of much of this scholarship by emphasizing the strict social rules and hierarchies that structure individual lives. Racial discrimination, arranged marriages, slavery, caste, Hindu-Muslim relations are just a few of the topics Ghosh broaches with dazzling erudition.

Sea of Poppies is to be savored; its plot is easily lost in the texture of the multiple journeys of its fascinating characters--from the freeman Zachary, who is passing for white, to the Brahmin nobleman turned convict Raja Neel Rattan, to Deeti, a low caste opium farmer fleeing the vengeance of her family. But while the plot meanders, the goal is clear enough: each of these richly realized characters will end up aboard the ship Ibis, sailing from Calcutta to Mauritius.

With an obvious nod to The Many Headed Hydra, Ghosh emphasizes how a new kind of society emerges from the bowels of the ship; while this journey obliterates many barriers of caste and social distinction, it only serves to heighten other social tensions, propelling the novel forward to its tense and unresolved conclusion (the second novel in the trilogy, River of Smoke, is out now).

My only complaint about this magnificent novel is the character of Zachary, an "octoroon" freeman from Baltimore who passes for white. Ghosh struggles to find this character's inner dialogue and his language is curiously unaccented. His position on the ship allows him to talk to and engage with characters across the spectrum of society, both high and low; as such he remains a character who other characters talk to, but who lacks some of their tragedy and inner torment.

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Cargoes of the East (Martin and Martin)

Cargoes of the East: the ports, trade and culture of the Arabian seas and Western Indian Ocean. 
Esmond Bradley Martin & Chryssee Perry Martin
 London: Hamish Hamilton. 1978. 244 pp.

Zanzibar: Tradition and Revolution. 
Esmond Bradley Martin. 
London: Hamish Hamilton. 1978. 149pp.

Cargoes of the East is a long romantic pictorial essay on the traditional sailing vessel of the Western Indian Ocean, the dhow. The authors, an adventurous husband and wife team, have spent many years studying the dhow: where they go, who sails in them and what they carry. They have travelled widely in this area and talked to dhow owners, builders, captains, sailors, the buyers and sellers of the strange and exotic cargoes carried by these boats and written a diverting,almost escapist account of their research and travels. Though what has come to be known as a 'coffee table book', Cargoes has a wealth of anecdotes and richly-reproduced photographs.

Zanzibar has been more or less closed to the outside world since 1964. Edmond Bradley Martin claims to be the first writer to have been allowed full access by the authorities to 'carryout research and fieldwork' on Zanzibar and the island of Pemba which according to rumours current in the sixties was being converted into a Chinese military base. Being a geographer and because of his familiarity with East Africa, he has produced a good handbook, rich in description about the country's culture and ethnography.He also discusses Zanzibar's agricultural economy, its tourism and Islamic practices and includes a chapter on the country's future role in East Africa.

Third World Quarterly, Vol. 1, No. 1 (Jan., 1979), pp. 167-168.

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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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African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam (Book Review)

This book review from Dr. Alamin Mazrui can also be found at JSTOR. I reproduce it in full here because it speaks to the methodological issues that scholars of slavery and the African diaspora in the Indian Ocean must continue to wrestle with. 

The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam. JOHN HUNWICK and EVE TROUTT POWELL (Princeton: Markus Wiener Publishers, 2002), 282 pp. Price PB £17.50. ISBN 1–558–76275–2.

In 1993, a major newspaper debate erupted in Kenya between two of the nation’s most prominent intellectuals, Ali Mazrui and Bethwel Ogot. It concerned whether the Arab-Muslim world should be held accountable for its role in African enslavement to the same degree as the West, and whether there were differences of scale and culpability between the two that should strategically make the West the initial focus for the African campaign for reparations. What was particularly noticeable is that the only general sources on African slaves in Arab-Muslim lands that the two scholars invoked in support of their different positions were those of Bernard Lewis, Race and Slavery in the Middle East (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990) and Joseph Harris, The African Presence in Asia (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1971). These two, in fact, continue to be among the tiny handful of book-length studies of the issue available in the English language. In a real sense, then, the study of African enslavement in the Arab-Muslim world is still virtually in its infancy, and the publication of Hunwick’s and Powell’s The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam is a very welcome contribution to the scholarship on this important subject.

This book distinguishes itself from the others, however, in its documentary approach, essentially being a compilation of primary sources. The only interpretive portions are the two introductions by the authors. Hunwick’s introduction, ‘The Same but Different’, is an excellent overview of some of the factors that may have led to the dearth of research in this area, the interplay between race and enslavement, the roles that slaves played in the Arab-Muslim world, and the quality of experience—a rather mixed record—that enslaved Africans encountered. If there is an Arab literature on the inferiority of ‘blackness’, there is also a literature that speaks of its virtues, leading Hunwick to conclude that ‘there is a lack of consistent literature that theorizes the inferiority of black people. Islam did not have its Gobineau’ (p. xx). Powell’s introduction, ‘The Silence of the Slaves’, on the other hand, discusses not the absence of scholarly works on the subject, but the absence of the voices of the enslaved themselves, whether in fictional or non-fictional format. Among the rare exceptions, discussed by Powell, is the slave narrative of Sister Josephine Bakhita, an enslaved southern Sudanese woman who finally converted to Catholicism.

The rest of the book is divided into fifteen sections, each containing extracts of documents on a specific theme. The first four sections provide a conceptual frame of reference about slavery in the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean region. Section I looks at what the canonical Islamic texts, the Quran and the Hadith, say about the institution of slavery. It concludes with al-Ghazali’s reading of the texts, that that ‘the rights of the one possessed are that he should share in the owner’s food and clothing and should not be assigned work above his capacity. [Nor should the owner] look at him/her with arrogance or disdain’ (p. 9). Section II, ‘Some Muslim Views on Slavery’, is a small sample of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Muslim responses, mostly apologetic, to Western association of slavery with Islam. But how did the above doctrines of Islam combine with the prevailing medieval culture of Islam to translate into actual law dealing with slaves? This question is the subject of Section III, though all the documentary material included here is from the Maliki school of Islamic jurisprudence. Section IV amplifies the scope of Section II, looking at perceptions of Africans in some Arabic and Turkish texts, some equating blackness with slavery and others rejecting such an equation. Even more provocative, however, are the ‘theories’ on the origins of blackness, ranging from versions of the Hamitic myth to environmental explanations (articulated particularly forcefully by Ibn Khaldun.

The next three sections give us a glimpse of the experience of Africans in the intervening period from the moment of capture (Section V), to the perilous journey especially across the Sahara Desert (Section VI), to the slave markets in the Arab-Muslim world (Section VII). Here we see how slave merchants went well beyond the provisions of Islam by capturing and enslaving individuals who could not be classified as war captives, the horrific cruelty that accompanied the transport of the enslaved, and the humiliation and abuse suffered at the slave market.

The book then proceeds to look at the actual master–slave relationships and the functions that enslaved Africans played. In Section VIII, on eunuchs and concubines, the authors make a compelling observation in their introductory remarks that, ‘It is a curious irony [of slavery in Arab-Muslim lands] that the best path to an easier life for male slaves was to be deprived of their sexuality, whereas for female slaves it was to have their sexuality exploited’ (p. 99). The aberration of castration, of course, was part of the Mediterranean culture of the time, but it acquired new proportions of frequency and cruelty in African enslavement, the increased authority that eunuchs later enjoyed in the houses of their masters notwithstanding. As for the concubines, they were there for the sexual enjoyment of the master at his will. Nonetheless, the documents indicate that many virtually acquired the status of additional wives, especially if they bore children: ‘A woman who bore such children could not thereafter legally be sold, and was automatically free on her master’s death’ (p. 99).

In addition to eunuchs (who were used to guard the harem) and concubines, the majority of enslaved Africans—especially women who, we are told, constituted about two-thirds of those who crossed the Sahara desert in the nineteenth century—are said to have provided other types of domestic service (Section IX). With regard to their treatment by their owners, the documents in this section indicate that these domestic slaves were far less fortunate than eunuchs and concubines. In addition, male slaves provided agricultural labour in North African oases, sometimes forced to carry out dangerous work like cleaning wells and underground irrigation systems (Section X) and military service in North African armies of the royal state (Section XI). In performing these various roles as slaves, most Africans eventually converted to Islam: in the process, their Islam sometimes became hybridized, combining practices of the faith they encountered in the new society with the spiritual beliefs from their original homeland (Section XII).

Islam made the freeing of slaves an act both of piety and atonement. Section XIII looks at the life of Diaspora Africans after such emancipation. The three case studies of the section demonstrate how post-enslavement life varied according to personal circumstances, the fortunes of the masters, and the pre- existing relationship between slave and master. It was not until the mid-1800s that some Arab governments moved decisively to abolish slavery in their countries; Section XIV considers the legacy of abolition in Tunisia and Egypt, sometimes in response to British appeals. The book concludes with a lengthy excerpt of the slave narrative of a certain Fulani slave, Griga, recorded in French by a French commandant, detailing his life from the moment of bondage to freedom. This narrative raises one fundamental limitation that cuts across the larger portion of this book. All the documents from Section VII onward are, in fact, based on records of European observers of one shade or another. The authors themselves acknowledge this problem, claiming that their reliance on this documentation is due to the dearth of other sources. While this kind of evidence cannot be wholly discounted, its Euro-Christian origin and its construction at a time of intense Muslim resistance to European colonial rule raises questions about the extent of its reliability.

The documents in this book offer an excellent opportunity for a comparative study of slave systems between the Atlantic world and that of the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean. What was the place of race in the two slave systems and what kind of comparative space did they provide for the assimilation of subsequent generations of the enslaved? Can there be different scales of slavery, just as there are different scales of murder in law? If so, how do the two fare relative to each other? And should the campaign for reparations, therefore, begin with the first degree of African suffering? What was the balance between sexual exploitation and economic exploitation between the two paradigms of slavery? This landmark publication is likely to shed light on some of these burning questions in the history of African enslavement. In the meantime, however, readers should bear in mind Edward Alpers’ words of caution against imposing on the slavery system of the Arab- Muslim world ‘paradigms developed from the experience of Africans in the Diaspora of the Atlantic world, with its particular forms of Euro-American racism and concomitant black responses’ (‘Recollecting Africa: Diasporic Memory in the Indian Ocean World’, African Studies Review, 43.1 (2000), 83).

Alamin Mazrui
Ohio State Universtiy

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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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