Latest news with #Theft
The Herald Scotland
12 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.
The Hindu
08-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Hindu
Review of Theft by Abdulrazak Gurnah
Nobel laureate Abdulrazak Gurnah's latest novel Theft is beguiling in its construction of a fictional universe where lives are upended or redeemed by the cruelty and kindness that the characters encounter. Their own actions do play a critical role but causality is not straightforward here; there are secrets and silences, revealed only when the novelist deems the timing to be ripe enough for drama and heartbreak. Gurnah shows yet again why he is a master storyteller. Set in Zanzibar and Dar es Salaam, the novel revolves around the trio of Karim, Badar and Fauzia as they transition from teenage to early adulthood in the 1990s. What they have in common is a love of books and thirst for knowledge. Their circumstances, however, are vastly different. Karim, whose world is shattered after his parents' divorce, is nurtured by his half-brother Ali, sister-in-law Jalila, and his mother Raya's second husband, Haji. Badar, a 'servant', knows little about his biological parents. He has survived thanks to the generosity of adults who raised him but they too have run out of resources, so he is now employed in the house of Haji's father, Uncle Othman. This is where Karim and Badar meet. Surprise elements Through their intersecting lives, Gurnah explores the human heart's wonderful capacity to embrace people beyond the call of duty or obligation. It is moving to witness the genuine pride that Ali takes in Karim's academic accomplishments despite their murky family history. It seems that since Karim can never fully repay the kindness that Ali, Jalila and Haji extend to him, he pays it forward to Badar. When Badar is wrongly accused of a theft, it is Karim who stands by him, welcomes him into his house, and also helps him get a secure job. Gurnah's genius as a storyteller lies in surprising readers. While Karim is being put on a pedestal, it is difficult to imagine his impending downfall later in the novel. Badar feels indebted for everything that Karim has done for him, so he does not mind the latter's patronising tone. However, some lines cannot be crossed. Karim's bitter outburst at the end of the novel is startling because it challenges almost everything that one is led to believe about the kind of person he is and what he values. Fauzia's role in the narrative is closely connected to how this transformation plays out, but she is more than just a device to move the plot forward. Gurnah presents her as a woman of profound strength; one who is aware of her intellectual gifts but feels low on self-esteem because of a childhood illness that she fears she might pass on to her child with Karim. The novelist's depiction of their courtship is tender and breezy, so the complications in their marriage come across as alarming. Social realities Gurnah is not opposed to giving a love story its happy end, but he is in no hurry. Badar has feelings for Fauzia but he cannot dream of betraying Karim's trust. Karim, however, is drawn to a woman named Jerry, who he meets at Badar's workplace. Read the novel, the first after Gurnah's Nobel win in 2021, to find out how it ends. It is a journey worth undertaking because the author makes one feel deeply for his characters and root for their happiness. In a patriarchal culture that treats women as dispensable, he celebrates their ambition, sisterhood, and resilience. That said, he does not idealise women characters or overlook their flaws and vulnerabilities. In addition to the plot and characterisation, what stays with the reader is Gurnah's worldbuilding that looks effortless but is highly sophisticated. It displays his subtle observations about social hierarchies, the rural-urban divide, and the lure of capitalism in a part of the world that he grew up in but had to leave when he arrived in England as a refugee. The reviewer is a journalist, educator and literary critic. Theft Abdulrazak Gurnah Bloomsbury ₹699
Hindustan Times
26-04-2025
- General
- Hindustan Times
Abdulrazak Gurnah: 'Silence can also be vocal'
No, it doesn't feel like a new life. It has obviously made a big difference in how much time I have to write or to do whatever other things I might wish to do. For me, the most important thing about the Nobel award was the recognition. Everybody knows about it — even people who don't read. But for a writer, it is something very definite. That is to say, your writing is okay. The prize is given once a year and even for just one year, to be told something like that is very reassuring. In addition, there is, of course, the interest that it generates in readers. They want to know about the work, the person. The translations follow. People want to meet you, you get invited, travel, etc. For a writer, you can't wish for something better than to have your work transmitted in this way. But it does take time. It does take time. Your works are full of silences pregnant with meaning. Silences come in different forms and as a consequence or as a response to different kinds of pressures. For powerless people, I think silence is more or less the last resort to retain their dignity. If you know you do not have the power, as it were, to reply or to refuse, then in a sense, silence is all that's possible. To say, okay, you can do what you like because you have the power to do it, but I'm not going to defer to you, then silence is also a means of holding on to the dignity of the self. Silence is also a disagreement. It could be something somebody says to you and you don't want to get into an argument, so you keep quiet. It's also a means of offering a response. Silence can also be, in this sense, vocal. It's saying, I don't agree. And there is something disconcerting, particularly against the bullies and groups, about silence. [For example, they get confused.] Why aren't you angry? Why aren't you showing some sign? So, it can be a way of demonstrating that power isn't all-powerful; power can be resisted. Children do it all the time. They tell you, no, I'm not happy with what you're doing by doing nothing, saying nothing. Critical Perspectives on Abdulrazak Gurnah by Tina Steiner and Maria Olaussen (2013) notes that your 'fiction asks the reader to consider stories as provisional accounts that cannot claim closure or complete knowledge even when narrators tell their own stories'. This sits well with your latest, Theft, where, despite operating with limited knowledge, the characters narrate their lives as if they know everything. This is a very old technique. Sometimes you imagine that you're watching a play. The figures in the play don't know something that the previous scene has already told the audience. So the audience knows much more than the people actually on the stage doing their business. Dramatic irony, that is. The same kind of technique really works in fiction. You have some information. Of course, there is more because a practised reader will probably start speculating things. And then that's part of the interest of both reading and writing. It's not a contest, but it's part of the pleasure of it. And then if something unexpected happens, you say, I didn't see that coming. So, all of these are ways in which the tension of the story in fiction works. Otherwise, you're just going to have a kind of like a synopsis. This is what it's about. This is what happens. But this way [with dramatic irony] you engage with the movement of the events and you engage with the people themselves — the characters, the figures, because they too are discovering as you are discovering. And so, I think it's part of the pleasure of reading. I wanted to touch on that aspect because, as you said, seasoned readers can sense what is to come. For example, when Karim, in the beginning, says that he won't become a typical father figure, you know to expect something later. Seeing what they anticipate come true, do readers gain pleasure, is the ego massaged, or are they disappointed by 'predictability?' It's part of the pleasure of reading. It's not ego. It's like when you say, I knew it was going to be like that. You don't want that to be too obvious, though. Because if the signals are too strong, there's no 'God, I know what you're going to do.' You know, this very famous comment that Chekhov is said to have made — if a gun appears in Act One of a play, then you know, it's going to be used. So there's going to be a death somewhere a little further on. Depending on whether you're a practised reader or otherwise, you see something more, possibly or possibly not. Except for Fauzia, one can sense absentee father figures in this book. Was it something you were purposely trying to do given that there's also a peppering of Oedipal signals throughout the book? Well, it's really the two boys — Karim and Badar. One does not know his parents, his mother or his father, his actual parents, that is, although he's brought up by people. Whereas the other one is, in a sense, brought up by his grandmother and then by his stepbrother, finds a mother again. And so, although the father is absent, there is a network of support. There are varieties of ways in which these children, as they grow up, are orphaned or, in the case of Fauzia, not orphaned. And I think it's not unlikely that you might find a real difference between people's experiences of parents and domestic support. But my idea was to have somebody who is indeed powerless and who does not have that network of support still has to make his way in life in some way, and how does he do that? Where does he find the resources to do that? Somebody like Karim is going to be all right because he does have a network. Somebody like Fauzia will also have that, but here's somebody who doesn't (Badar). So, I put those three together to see what they deal with, what life has dealt to them, and how they cope with what life has dealt to them. Leaving, which is one of the themes of the novel, is seldom a voluntary movement. Several factors influence this decision. Were you trying to say something about the nature of power and its effect on others? To a certain extent, this is true for most of us as we go through, particularly at a certain age, when you're not in control or you have control to some extent, but not entirely. In the case of Badar, of course, he says, once again, his life has changed without any decision on his part, which is exactly to demonstrate just how powerless he is. He has no control. He cannot make decisions. Decisions are made for him. Well, at least not at that stage. Of course, later, he is able to make decisions. So, it's not just about leaving. It's also about other people being able to make decisions, like where will you go and what you will do. And he is not the one who's doing so. Even Karim is somebody who says, come to Zanzibar with me and I will help you. So, it's still other people directing his life at this stage. A few reviews note that you're critiquing the growth of the tourism industry in Zanzibar in Theft. Was it intentional or do you think it was where the story could naturally go given Badar's background? Tourism is a complex thing for a small country. For a prosperous country, tourism is something completely different from tourism for a small country like Zanzibar. For example, maybe for India, it's a different situation. But for a small country, it can have a terrific, transforming impact. Of course, in some respects its impact is positive. It brings work; possibly a certain kind of calmness because the government has to behave itself. It can't go around being too authoritarian. Otherwise, the tourists won't come. The pavements get fixed. The water is available, etc. These are the positives. But the other side of it is that it also brings a kind of corruption of the customary social practices of a place. Something new comes, something very powerful — lots of money, different ways of living, different ideas about what constitutes propriety and so on. And it corrupts those who should know better. Those who should be making decisions now take money to enable certain things that they should say no to. For example, no, it's not in our interest to allow you to make that a private beach; no, it's not in our interest to allow you to knock down this part of town in order to build a hotel, and so on. But they take a commission and say, yeah, OK, do it. I'm saying this is exacerbated and made worse in a small place, whereas in a bigger place, it can be absorbed in other ways. You can overcharge them, etc. It becomes something dominant and dominating and to some extent corrupting in a small place. Unfortunately, if a country is too dependent on tourism, then the resistance is also diminished. You have no choice but to accept whatever it is that the foreign money is demanding should be there. Readers are sort of teased to discover a theft in your novel which also has several narrative arcs that signal theft. Was that why the novel's title is Theft? Of course. When I started, the central idea for me was the accusation of theft and the injustice of that. And again, as I've said, how does somebody like Badar without support, without family, without education, without anything really, a servant, how does he cope with such an accusation, which is unjust, but leads to his expulsion? But, as you said, there are different kinds of thefts — stolen childhood or the [Tamarind] hotel, which is a building stolen from an Indian family. Or, later, an accusation that's made against Karim. So, there are also sorts of theft — beyond the theft of life but also of thefts of a physical nature, there are thefts of a global state. So, it seemed like a good title to me for the book. Saurabh Sharma is a Delhi-based writer and freelance journalist. They can be found on Instagram/X: @writerly_life.
Telegraph
22-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Nobel novelist: ‘Sunak and Patel, whose parents migrated, are now the most virulent migrant-haters'
Abdulrazak Gurnah surveys his garden – and sighs. 'I used to grow vegetables,' he says, 'but with so much travelling it's not possible to do it properly.' Gardening, it seems, has to go by the wayside when you win the Nobel prize in Literature. So does literature. No sooner had Gurnah, now 76, been announced as the 118th laureate in October 2021 than he was launched on a ceaseless round of globe-trotting, speechifying and meeting-and-greeting. Eventually, he ordered his agent to accept no new engagements for six months and finally finished his latest novel, Theft – the book he had been working on when the Swedish Academy rang him with the good news. Softly spoken but forthright, the white-bearded Gurnah, who was chair of English and Postcolonial Literatures at the University of Kent until his retirement in 2017, retains the bearing of an emeritus professor – congratulating me on an insightful question, smiling indulgently at those he judges more banal. We are talking in the new home that he and his wife, the Guyanese-born academic Denise deCaires Narain, moved into a few months ago. With the £840,000 Nobel bounty, the couple, who have four children and 10 grandchildren, opted for an unostentatiously attractive house in a tiny village in Kent. Gurnah has lived in the county more or less ever since he arrived in Canterbury in 1968 as a 19-year-old refugee from Zanzibar (now part of Tanzania). He insists I mustn't leave the area without walking the few minutes to Oswalds, the house where Joseph Conrad lived and died. 'He was born speaking Polish, of course, but chose to write in English. Why? Because you can find an intimacy with a language that isn't the one you speak most fluently. I speak and write Swahili, but I don't think I can evoke what I can in English in the same way.' Gurnah's novels are written in an unshowy, elegant, often pleasingly old-fashioned prose that lends a certain beauty to stories that are sad and sometimes squalid. Several are about the experiences of African immigrants in Britain (Pilgrims Way, By the Sea, Gravel Heart); others are historical novels set in colonial East Africa (Afterlives, Desertion, the Booker-shortlisted Paradise). Theft, his 11th novel, spans half a century and marks Gurnah's first attempt to write extensively about Tanzania after the Revolution of the 1960s. One of the central figures is Badar, a teenager who works as a servant for his wealthier relatives, until he is falsely accused of stealing groceries and sacked. 'That happened to somebody I knew when I was young, about the same age as me, who was a servant – servants in Zanzibar meaning pretty raggedy guys who did errands,' says Gurnah. 'This injustice has stuck with me all these decades. He was powerless, and I often write about the powerless: how they learn to cope and survive, and with some integrity as well.' The book also focuses on Badar's well-off cousin Karim, who, as the country becomes less hidebound and forges closer ties with Europe, seizes new opportunities both financial and sexual, while neglecting his long-suffering wife. 'I've seen this in Tanzania and in many places in Africa: as these new possibilities open up, people do talk themselves out of a sense of what is the right thing to do, and do things that are really unkind or actually crooked.' Although Gurnah makes frequent trips to Tanzania, he would not return to live there. 'I've made my life here. And the same problems remain. Some of the prosperity is driven by tourism, which has its downside: building bigger and bigger hotels is a priority, building better schools or paying teachers properly are not.' Wasting money is nothing new in Zanzibar. He recalls glimpsing Princess Margaret on a visit to the country in 1956: 'They built a special pier just for her to step out on to, which was never used again except by young people diving into the sea.' Abdulrazak Gurnah has published ten novels and a number of short stories. The theme of the refugee's disruption runs throughout his work. He began writing as a 21-year-old in English exile, and although Swahili was his first language, English became his literary tool. #NobelPrize — The Nobel Prize (@NobelPrize) October 7, 2021 He remembers, too, the extraordinary sight of British soldiers: 'We regularly used to have some [Royal] Navy ships coming in, I guess just to show us who's the boss, and some regiment or other would march through the town. I was astonished because I thought they all had great big hairy heads – I didn't know about busbies. 'We didn't think the British were evil. They were just irrelevant to be honest, we just wanted them to go.' Independence in 1963 was swiftly followed by the Revolution, with the majority Black African population overthrowing the Sultan of Zanzibar's Arab government, and thousands of people slaughtered or imprisoned. 'This is what happens with empires. Everything is stable and orderly because there is coercion – remove that coercion too quickly and there is chaos, everything that has been tamped down erupts. This is what's happening in Syria at the moment.' Gurnah and his brother left Zanzibar illegally, arrived in England on tourist visas and fetched up in Kent where a cousin was studying. It was the year of Enoch Powell's 'Rivers of Blood' speech, and Gurnah felt far from welcome: 'It was not about sometimes being abused or being called names, but a constant sense – the way people stop talking when you go into a shop – of 'You're not welcome here, we don't want you'. Every now and then this still happens but, when you're used to it, you don't care any more.' Miserable, lonely and poor, Gurnah worked as a hospital cleaner for some years. He had no ambitions of becoming an author, but began to put his experiences into writing, 'because it helps to disentangle things when you're feeling gloomy. And then you start to organise what you've written – and you're hooked.' While taking a PhD on African literature at the University of Kent, he wrote his first novel Memory of Departure (1987). His 2001 novel By the Sea featured a British immigration official who was notably cruel to migrants, despite himself being of Romanian heritage: a character whose background was inspired by that of the Conservative Home Secretary Michael Howard. '[Howard] was vocal about foreigners, and I thought, what ironies: here's this man – and there was [Michael] Portillo as well – whose parents were recent migrants. It was a very similar phenomenon with Sunak and Priti Patel, these people whose parents were themselves migrants who are now the most virulent haters of migrants.' What accounts for it? 'I think it's racism. I think people of Indian ancestry in Africa, which both Sunak and Priti Patel are descended from, were on the side of the British against the Africans. They see people of either Arab or African ancestry as inferior people, that's my guess.' He is pleased that in the UK 'people are talking about slavery now, and the idea of reparations has become something which is not quite lunatic to talk about, or the returning of various stolen artefacts. There is some movement, as other countries are doing, to listen to the concerns of people saying: 'We are still living through the consequences of things that you did' – inequalities, financial burdens. But,' he says, politely impatient at being nudged into the role of pundit, 'we are wandering a long way from books.' I ask what difference the Nobel Prize has made to the career of a writer who, unlike the other 20th-century British Laureates – Harold Pinter, Doris Lessing, Kazuo Ishiguro – was not already a household name when he got the call. 'A fantastic difference. Suddenly all my books were back in print, translations all over the place. I've been translated into Swahili for the first time. And I get to meet hundreds of these new readers. I've just come back from a wonderful month travelling in Latin America [with] so many people saying to me: 'Your experiences, we go through them as well – the leftovers of the experience of colonialism.' It is a kind of solidarity of shared history.' Gurnah became a British citizen decades ago, giving up his right to be a Tanzanian national as his homeland does not allow dual citizenship. Nevertheless, after his Nobel triumph he 'got an email from the president of Tanzania, and when I first went to Zanzibar after the Nobel there were dancers and bands and a motorcade, sirens howling through the streets'. The British government never sent the new Laureate a word of congratulation, however. 'I don't know why, but for sure they weren't bothered.' For now, it's back to his next book. Does the weight of the Nobel make writing easier or harder? 'The process of actually formulating what I want to say isn't any easier – the computer doesn't seem to realise that a Nobel winner is talking to it. But it's not intimidating either. They gave this award to me for what I've been doing; why should I do anything different?'
Wall Street Journal
20-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Wall Street Journal
Fiction: Abdulrazak Gurnah's ‘Theft'
In Abdulrazak Gurnah's 'Theft' (Riverhead, 304 pages, $30), a Tanzanian servant named Badar is listening to an anecdote being told by an older friend, the house's gardener. Impatient with the gardener's digressions, Badar tries to jump ahead to the point of the story, only to be smilingly admonished. 'Don't be in such a hurry,' the gardener says. 'Many things happened. That's how it is in life, many things happen.' That's also how it tends to be in Mr. Gurnah's novels, of which 'Theft' is the 11th—and the first since the Tanzanian-British author was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2021. Taking place from the 1990s into the 2010s, the book traces the intersecting lives of two men and a woman. The focus of the initial chapters is Karim, who overcomes a neglectful childhood by excelling in his studies, emerging as an up-and-coming government official in charge of environmental programs in the island city of Zanzibar. A marker of Karim's success is his marriage to Fauzia, an aspiring teacher whose path we follow from her own high-achieving student days. The cloud over Fauzia's happiness is her epilepsy, which she fears she will pass on to her children. Separate from the couple, yet soon entwined in their lives, is Badar, who is sent at age 13 from his farming village to Dar es Salaam, a city on the mainland, to work as a servant for Karim's mother and stepfather. Though Badar grasps that there is 'something degraded about his circumstances,' his honesty and self-possession make him an esteemed member of the household. When events conspire to take him to live with Karim and Fauzia in Zanzibar, he finds work at a tourist hotel, and his status—dependent or a friend?—grows blurrier. 'To himself he said ruefully, Once a servant, always a servant, but it did not feel like that,' writes Mr. Gurnah, a characteristically simple phrase suggesting vast emotions. In his sensitive and cheerfully unrushed fashion, Mr. Gurnah advances the trajectories of the trio to explore the mutable nature of family. There is an upstairs-downstairs story in 'Theft,' which fruitfully explores the meanings of work and love from Karim's and Badar's different points of view. The novel is also attuned to the influence of Tanzania's political evolution on the characters' private lives (Westerners from relief organizations gradually intrude on more and more of the narrative).
