Latest news with #AbdulrazakGurnah
Telegraph
8 hours ago
- Politics
- Telegraph
We should still read VS Naipaul, even if he was racist
Civil wars among Nobelists aren't unusual, but what struck me about Abdulrazak Gurnah's verdict on VS Naipaul was its dismissiveness: 'I can't read him anymore.' To be sure, there is no denying the ghastliness of some of the latter laureate's politics, and indeed his unedifying personal conduct. Naipaul was abusive to his wife, serially unfaithful, and disdainful of friends and acquaintances. Yet it would be churlish to wholly dismiss the man who held a caustic mirror to the postcolonial world. Naipaul's letters suggest he was acutely aware of his un-PC prejudices – but still remained unrepentant. Much of his disdain for black people, one suspects, stemmed from the gradual transfer of power from white and brown into black hands in his native Trinidad. 'The noble ni***r is really a damned nasty ni***r,' he wrote to his wife in 1956, alarmed at the global sympathy for black nationalism. Later in life, his biographer Patrick French slyly quipped, 'the only Blacks he associated with were Conrad and Barbara.' But Naipaul, that enfant terrible of postwar letters, did not merely punch down; he punched everywhere. His pitiless gaze spared no one: not the postcolonial elites of Trinidad nor the ruling class of India, the land of his forebears. All were skewered with withering prose. There is no moral comfort to be found in Naipaul's fiction or travel writing. In a clutch of early novels, A Bend in the River and In a Free State among them, he dissected the disappointments of decolonisation – often cruelly but with unmatched precision. His India trilogy, particularly India: A Million Mutinies Now, forsook romanticism for a granular, disillusioned portrait of a society crippled by kleptocratic elites and riven by religious and caste prejudice. He chronicled, with a clinical and sometimes gleeful disdain, the stagnation that followed the high hopes of mid-century Third Worldism. No self-respecting nationalist could refute the maladies he so coldly diagnosed: entrenched clientelism, military repression, persistent poverty, pervasive cynicism. A child of the Enlightenment, Naipaul treated no society with kiddie gloves. Deriding what he called 'multi-culti,' he rejected the bromides of liberal multiculturalism. There was little warmth in his world, and certainly no humour – and these are the real defects of his oeuvre. Yet it is that unsentimental lens that also contributed to Naipaul's achievement. His curmudgeonly worldview, while unforgivable in life, supplied on the page a sharp clarity. Perhaps, then, the only way to read Naipaul today is with qualified, even begrudging admiration. To acknowledge his flaws – personal, political, moral – is not to absolve them. But to ignore his work altogether is to pass over one of the more incisive chroniclers of the postcolonial condition.
Telegraph
20 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
British Nobel prize winner labels fellow recipient ‘racist'
The British Nobel literature laureate Abdulrazak Gurnah has labelled one of his predecessors 'racist'. The Tanzanian-British novelist, who was awarded the Nobel prize in 2021, said he could no longer read the works of the late laureate Sir VS Naipaul. Speaking at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, he said that the realisation had slowly dawned on him and led him to reread Naipaul's earlier work, which in turn cemented his opinion. Trinidadian-born British author Naipaul, who was knighted in 1990 and awarded the Nobel prize for literature in 2001, was a divisive but acclaimed author, who achieved his breakthrough with his semi-autobiographical novel A House for Mr Biswas. He won the Booker prize in 1971 for his novel In a Free State, and achieved success with his 1975 novel Guerillas. However, his personal views were questioned by many of his contemporaries. Naipaul had negative views on post-colonial life and wrote about the 'primitivism' of African societies. He also said it was a 'mistake' being born in Trinidad. Gurnah, who is best known for Paradise, By the Sea and Desertion, said that Naipaul was once someone he had 'read with great admiration'. He said he believed Naipaul was less cautious about expressing racist views as he became older and more acclaimed. Speaking at the festival in Scotland, Gurnah said: 'At a certain point of reading him, I thought, 'It's true, this guy is a racist.' 'And I can't read him any more. The case [that he is a racist] becomes less difficult in his later books.' 'Unguarded' racism He cited the author's 1979 work A Bend in the River, saying: 'It is in an unguarded form in some of his later writings. As he became older he [perhaps] became less careful.' Gurnah said he could no longer read the works of Saul Bellow, the late Canadian-American writer, either. 'I think I probably read everything he had written with great admiration and then a certain point came when Bellow was being asked which African writers do you read or admire, and he said, 'When you produce your Zulu Tolstoy then I will read that',' Gurnah said. '[I thought], 'Right, I can't read that guy any more.'' He continued: 'I'm afraid there are several writers that I read with great admiration who are now in that category. Because you find out more. 'You read with pleasure and a certain kind of innocence and then you learn more and think, well.' The author, who became a literature professor at the University of Kent, moved to the UK in the 1960s as a refugee from Zanzibar. He left aged 17, four years after a coup broke out in the former British protectorate. 'There's something dramatic about being displaced,' Gurnah previously told The Telegraph. 'I see it as an experience of our times and one that allows me to comment on certain issues and ask questions about the divisions between this land and another or the now and the before.'
Belfast Telegraph
25-05-2025
- General
- Belfast Telegraph
Nobel Prize author did not pick literature A-level as it did not feel ‘useful'
©Press Association Nobel Prize-winning author Abdulrazak Gurnah has said he did not pick literature as an A-level as it did not feel 'useful'. The Tanzanian author, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 2021, was born in 1948 on the island of Zanzibar, now part of Tanzania, and moved to Britain as a refugee in 1968, fleeing a repressive regime that persecuted the Arab Muslim community to which he belonged.
Powys County Times
25-05-2025
- General
- Powys County Times
Nobel Prize author did not pick literature A-level as it did not feel ‘useful'
Nobel Prize-winning author Abdulrazak Gurnah has said he did not pick literature as an A-level as it did not feel 'useful'. The Tanzanian author, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 2021, was born in 1948 on the island of Zanzibar, now part of Tanzania, and moved to Britain as a refugee in 1968, fleeing a repressive regime that persecuted the Arab Muslim community to which he belonged. His A-level subjects, however, consisted of maths, physics and chemistry after being 'led' to take science courses to help contribute to his country. Speaking on BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs, he said: 'We grew up during the campaign for decolonisation, and it was kind of drummed into us, and perhaps it didn't need that much drumming, that if you get an opportunity to study, then you must do something that's going to be useful to your country. Whoever thought that reading literature was going to be useful to anybody? 'So, really, we were all kind of being led towards either doing science subjects, if you got the opportunity, or possibly law or something like that. And so when we came here, we chose to do A-levels in those subjects. I worked pretty hard, especially when my cousin was still here with us, and he just made sure we we did all the homework.' He later changed courses to study literature and took evening classes, going on to obtain a Bachelor of Education from Christ Church college Canterbury and then a PhD. Gurnah added: 'I thought, this is what I should have done from the beginning. I should not have listened to that hectoring voice that was saying, be something useful. I should have done this because this is something I get pleasure from doing and that I know I can do well.' The award-winning writer was praised by the Swedish Academy for the 'uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism' reflected in his 10 novels including Memory of Departure, Paradise and By The Sea. Gurnah arrived in Britain in the 1960s after persuading his father to let him and his brother travel out of the country through 'illegal' means, although they did not tell their mother they were leaving. He said: 'It was difficult to organise because it was not possible to have travel documents. The security advisers for the government were from the GDR, East Germany, and they were, as you know, obsessed with making sure people don't travel, don't leave, so it meant that we had to leave in rather, well, really rather illegal ways, which I'll leave at that. Speaking about whether he got his mother's blessing to leave, he said: 'No, we couldn't tell her. 'The first thing I thought when I was on my own after having been picked up from the airport by the cousin and taken to the place where we were staying, and I was lying in bed and thinking, 'What have I done?'' It was another 17 years before he was able to see his family again, after leaving his parents and four siblings to study in Britain, and paid for the flight using insurance money he received for a roof leak in his house in Balham, stuffing the hole in the ceiling with newspaper. In the episode, which asks guests to share the soundtrack to their lives, Gurnah selected a range of music including songs from his Zanzibar heritage, the Beatles and Hit The Road Jack by Ray Charles. His fifth song for the programme was The Beatles' A Day In The Life, which he explained reminds him of his first Christmas in the UK after a family hosted him and his brother. He said: 'We were invited to spend Christmas day, our first Christmas in England with this family, if I remember correctly, there was two sons and a daughter. The eldest son was possibly about 18 or 19, something like and one of his presents was Sergeant Pepper. And so he put it on in a record player. And so that's the first time I heard this, but every time I listened to this opening, I remember that family and that Christmas.' In March he published his first book since winning the Nobel Prize, Theft, which follows the lives of three young men in Tanzania at the turn of the twenty-first century.
Glasgow Times
25-05-2025
- General
- Glasgow Times
Nobel Prize author did not pick literature A-level as it did not feel ‘useful'
The Tanzanian author, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 2021, was born in 1948 on the island of Zanzibar, now part of Tanzania, and moved to Britain as a refugee in 1968, fleeing a repressive regime that persecuted the Arab Muslim community to which he belonged. His A-level subjects, however, consisted of maths, physics and chemistry after being 'led' to take science courses to help contribute to his country. Speaking on BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs, he said: 'We grew up during the campaign for decolonisation, and it was kind of drummed into us, and perhaps it didn't need that much drumming, that if you get an opportunity to study, then you must do something that's going to be useful to your country. Whoever thought that reading literature was going to be useful to anybody? Tanzanian writer Abdulrazak Gurnah in Canterbury, Kent, after he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature (Steve Parsons/PA) 'So, really, we were all kind of being led towards either doing science subjects, if you got the opportunity, or possibly law or something like that. And so when we came here, we chose to do A-levels in those subjects. I worked pretty hard, especially when my cousin was still here with us, and he just made sure we we did all the homework.' He later changed courses to study literature and took evening classes, going on to obtain a Bachelor of Education from Christ Church college Canterbury and then a PhD. Gurnah added: 'I thought, this is what I should have done from the beginning. I should not have listened to that hectoring voice that was saying, be something useful. I should have done this because this is something I get pleasure from doing and that I know I can do well.' The award-winning writer was praised by the Swedish Academy for the 'uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism' reflected in his 10 novels including Memory of Departure, Paradise and By The Sea. Tanzanian writer Abdulrazak Gurnah won a Nobel Prize in 2021 (Steve Parsons/PA) Gurnah arrived in Britain in the 1960s after persuading his father to let him and his brother travel out of the country through 'illegal' means, although they did not tell their mother they were leaving. He said: 'It was difficult to organise because it was not possible to have travel documents. The security advisers for the government were from the GDR, East Germany, and they were, as you know, obsessed with making sure people don't travel, don't leave, so it meant that we had to leave in rather, well, really rather illegal ways, which I'll leave at that. Speaking about whether he got his mother's blessing to leave, he said: 'No, we couldn't tell her. 'The first thing I thought when I was on my own after having been picked up from the airport by the cousin and taken to the place where we were staying, and I was lying in bed and thinking, 'What have I done?'' It was another 17 years before he was able to see his family again, after leaving his parents and four siblings to study in Britain, and paid for the flight using insurance money he received for a roof leak in his house in Balham, stuffing the hole in the ceiling with newspaper. Tanzanian writer Abdulrazak Gurnah (Steve Parsons/PA) In the episode, which asks guests to share the soundtrack to their lives, Gurnah selected a range of music including songs from his Zanzibar heritage, the Beatles and Hit The Road Jack by Ray Charles. His fifth song for the programme was The Beatles' A Day In The Life, which he explained reminds him of his first Christmas in the UK after a family hosted him and his brother. He said: 'We were invited to spend Christmas day, our first Christmas in England with this family, if I remember correctly, there was two sons and a daughter. The eldest son was possibly about 18 or 19, something like and one of his presents was Sergeant Pepper. And so he put it on in a record player. And so that's the first time I heard this, but every time I listened to this opening, I remember that family and that Christmas.' In March he published his first book since winning the Nobel Prize, Theft, which follows the lives of three young men in Tanzania at the turn of the twenty-first century. Abdulrazak Gurnah's episode of Desert Island Discs is available on BBC Sounds and BBC Radio 4 from Sunday at 10am.
