Abdulrazak Gurnah may be writing about leaving Zanzibar for Britain, but he gives voice to displaced people everywhere
If one of the roles of the Nobel prize for literature is to shine a light on someone who has been less visible than they warrant, then that role was fulfilled this year in the announcement of Abdulrazak Gurnah as winner. Unlike previous recipients living in Britain (Kazuo Ishiguro, Harold Pinter, Doris Lessing and on back to Rudyard Kipling), he is not a household name. He could, as he said after the announcement, do with more readers; his publisher concurred. She also bemoaned the fact that he “is one of the greatest living African writers, and no one has ever taken any notice of him”, but with this he did not agree: “I didn’t think I was ignored.”
There is a gulf, here, that has to do with who is doing the looking, and what counts as officially being noticed. There is also a point of definition: calling Gurnah an African writer, while seeming to broaden horizons, in fact narrows and distances what he is doing. Gurnah was born in Zanzibar, and left when he was 18, escaping revolution for what he hoped were calmer waters but turned out to be Enoch Powell’s predictions of rivers of blood. He has lived in Britain ever since.
