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The Herald Scotland
11 hours ago
- Entertainment
- The Herald Scotland
Beware white women: a Dickensian masterpiece of modern Africa
Or I could simply say that when I got within 50 pages of the end of Theft by Abdulrazak Gurnah I panicked that it would all soon be over and I'd have to say goodbye to its world and its characters, some of whom I'd come to love, some of whom I despised. All the learning would come to end, the lessons I'd been taught about the food and fashions of east Africa, the history of Zanzibar, the culture of people far removed from me through distance but exactly the same as me, my friends and my family in their shames and ambitions, failings and braveries. This is the first book Gurnah has written since he won the Nobel Prize. Be in no doubt, his talents remain undimmed. If anything this is his most affecting book, in terms of its emotional heft, and his most important given its ruthless dissection of colonialism and the hangover which remains for both Africans and Europeans. Theft is intensely political, but its politics are almost invisible. It isn't hectoring. You aren't being lectured. You aren't even aware that history is being laid on the anatomy table. Theft by Abdulrazak Gurnah (Image: Bloomsbury) This is a book about family and friendships. Yet its message reaches right to the poisoned root of the relationship between Africa today and the Europe which exploited the continent for two centuries. This is a book you want to stand up and applaud when you finish. The comparison with Dickens is apt. Like Dickens, Gurnah's lead character is the classic 'orphaned boy'. Badar has no mother and father. He's raised by distant relatives who care little for him, then farmed out to another family as a servant. I must tread carefully, for fear of ruining the plot, but we're in David Copperfield territory here, Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby. It feels somehow wrong to equate Gurnah with Dickens. To do so is almost the kind of inward-gazing colonial act he takes his scalpel to, but the comparisons are too strong to avoid. Theft, like any Dickens novel, is driven relentlessly forward by character. You cannot resist the company of his creations. The story is addictive and page-turning. Again like Dickens. This blend of character and story is so heady it hides the very powerful, very political points the writer makes. Again like Dickens. Though Gurnah has a subtlety Dickens lacks. Read more Midway through, Badar is falsely accused of theft. Initially, it seems this gives us the book's title. However, as the novel closes, we learn that the theft Gurnah is exploring isn't one of property or money. To understand the theft Gurnah is really investigating, we must turn to the white characters - specifically, and uncomfortably, white women. It's the action of white women who explain the metaphor of theft. Again, I'll say no more, lest I ruin a moment in the book, which for white readers is deeply troubling but horribly and shamefully recognisable. After all, who are history's great thieves if not our colonial ancestors who stole the very land from under the feet of the peoples they invaded and ruled? Are we more like them even today than we care to acknowledge? Do we still have the thief's mind? Like Dickens, Gurnah expertly dissects broken families. There's no family here not carrying some secret, some shame, some guilt. Children are abandoned, raised by relatives, shipped off. Parents disappear, sleep around, hurt their kids. There's one scene of physical violence when a character we began by loving but come to loath harms their own baby in the most ghastly way. It's a moment of shocking horror in a novel that's otherwise tender, even when dealing with the pain of poverty and humiliation. In essence, Theft tells the story of young and impoverished Badar, taken under the wing of the slightly older and much wealthier Karim. The pair set out to make their way in 1990s Tanzania as it juggles modernity and tradition: a nation trying to maintain its dignity amid the interference of western charity workers who use Africa to burnish their own fake sense of virtue. They're nothing but modern missionaries, dressing the colonial mindset in the clothes of progressive liberalism. Much more harm is done than good, and those harms crowbar their way into the lives of Badar and Karim. While Badar and Karim are the twin poles the book revolves around, the supporting cast is dominated by strong women characters, from Karim's feckless and selfish mother, to the modern but diffident Fauzia. This isn't a book which simply turns white characters into monsters, though. Indeed, white characters cause harm through thoughtlessness, self-absorption and carelessness. Black characters can be just as unpleasant: vengeful, cruel, petty, intolerant. Damage is inherited. Damaged parents create broken children, and it takes great courage to overcome this inheritance. The same is true of countries. How do they recover from the damage of colonialism? Do they inherit the sins of the coloniser? What matters to Gurnah is the simple contents of a human soul. It's irrelevant if you're rich or poor, had good parents or bad, come from a country of colonisers or the colonised. It's the heart inside you which shapes your humanity. Badar wonders to himself if white people come to Africa as they 'feel entitled to please themselves because in the end it was they who mattered'. The same is true of men in their behaviour towards women in this book, and parents towards their children. Damaged people hurt others as they believe they are all that matters. In their pain, they cannot see the lives of others. What Gurnah does is paint a picture of how empathy is the escape mechanism. If we can find that key within us we can save ourselves from the horror of history and the pain of family. In the end, if we're to be human, empathy is all we've got.
South Wales Guardian
25-05-2025
- Entertainment
- South Wales Guardian
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? '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. Abdulrazak Gurnah's episode of Desert Island Discs is available on BBC Sounds and BBC Radio 4 from Sunday at 10am.
Rhyl Journal
25-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Rhyl Journal
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? '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. Abdulrazak Gurnah's episode of Desert Island Discs is available on BBC Sounds and BBC Radio 4 from Sunday at 10am.
North Wales Chronicle
25-05-2025
- Entertainment
- North Wales Chronicle
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? '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. Abdulrazak Gurnah's episode of Desert Island Discs is available on BBC Sounds and BBC Radio 4 from Sunday at 10am.
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.
