Abdulrazak Gurnah, writer
a long road (Salamandra, with translation by Rita de Costa) is the last novel by the Nobel Prize winner in Literature Abdulrazak Gurnah (Zanzibar, 1948), the first written after the award was granted. During his time in Madrid he has spoken with MN.
Open a long road with a quote from Conrad: “In general, it is very difficult to become an extraordinary person.” Why this?
I would say that the epigraph of a book is not always the beginning. In fact, I would say it usually isn’t. How did I get to that appointment? I had finished writing the book, had sent it to the publisher and was rereading Random, from Conrad, and suddenly I saw this sentence. I thought it described very well what I was trying to tell in the novel and decided to include it.
Do the quotes condition the book or the reader in any way?
I suppose they do condition the book, in fact I would classify them as an intertextual reference to something. Normally it is a quote, one does not invent a phrase to include it there and, in general, one looks for one that is related to what one is going to tell later or that, in some way, contributes or contributes to what one is going to tell. Sometimes they also serve to emphasize and put special attention on some aspect of the novel. In this case, many times, when people say they are going to be special or better, it probably won’t end up being that way. This was kind of the intention.
The novel’s protagonists, Karim, Fauzia and Badar, are hardly exceptional. Is it their normality that makes them extraordinary?
It’s true, you’re right, these are people who are not exceptional. My initial idea was to present three people who have not been lucky in life, who do not have particularly lucky lives. Badar is an orphan, Karim has been abandoned by his mother and Fauzia is a person who is raised by a very anxious mother. They all come with different burdens, they have a life that has been given to them and we have to see what they do with the cards they have been given. Each person must deal with what they have in life. If you are born in an exceptional context, it is quite clear what is going to happen: since you were a child you have an easy life, you go to good schools, good universities… People who seem extraordinary from the beginning are not the type of people that interest me. I’m interested in people who, in some way, prosper.
If you allow the comparison, it happens like the African continent, which prospers even though we don’t see it in the West.
In Africa there are many differences and, in my case, it was not a metaphor to talk about the continent, but rather the idea that this can happen anywhere and how people play with the cards they were born with. It is very important to keep in mind that (in the novel) both the location (Tanzania) and the period (1990s) are very specific, so other factors come into play: injustices, the historical moments of families, what makes children inherit certain things… You have to observe the political context, the impact of colonialism, independence, tourism, the things that happen in that specific place. The story would not have been the same if it had happened in Egypt or South Africa.
A few days ago he received his doctorate honoris causa by the University of Lleida. In his speech he spoke of literature as a fruitful way of learning. In what sense?
I was not trying to suggest that other forms of knowledge are less important or lower in a hierarchical order, or that, for example, literature is not more important than historical narrative. He spoke of fruitful in the sense of a more complex commitment. When you read literature, the first thing you look for is pleasure. If one does not get pleasure from reading, he abandons the book. The same thing happens a little with music. When one reads literature, one can identify oneself or try to search, to learn new things. Or being aware that there are other people who belong to very different worlds, but who are not very different from oneself. That is what makes literature fruitful, and not just the transmission of information or knowledge.
What recent reads are you enjoying?
I like to read new things and also things I’ve read before. I have recently enjoyed The emigrants, by WG Sebald, which tells four stories of German Jews who go to England after World War II. I am lucky that people send me their books or ask me to read certain things.
If you were a completely independent reader, what topics would interest you?
It varies a little. Before we talked about what is fruitful, and there are times when what I enjoy most is the writing itself, the narration. Many times you start reading a book that you would never have chosen after seeing the summary or someone telling you to read it, but you start and end up hooked. I like to go like this, with an open mind. There are things that I know objectively that I don’t like, like fantasy novels, those that are violent or describe horrible events, but I do like to trust the way of describing, the narrative.
In a long road He speaks, at a certain moment, about Karim and Fauzia’s library. There they appear The divine comedy either Hamlet. Do you think that on the African continent readers have been especially nourished by Western references and Africans have been lacking?
Well, I believe that other non-Western references are also mentioned in the novel, such as Hafez (14th century Persian poet) or the Guatemalan Rigoberta Menchú. I think we describe a young person who has intellectual curiosity and there are things that interest him more than others. In this case, Fauzia is attracted to everything Latin American for some reason. In the case of Badar, by chance he hears on the radio about a Persian poet called Hafez, from whom a quote later appears. I would not say that the references are mainly or exclusively Western. On the other hand, I believe that literature and writing are something that belongs to all of us. If what is available in front of your life at a given moment is that, you take that, you get hooked on it and then you go looking for other things.
The Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong’o denounced for much of his life the impact of the colonization of the mind through language.
Wa Thiong’o could think as he wanted, but it seems like a simplification of reality to think that because you use a language your mind is captured by everything related to that source that you use in literature. In his case, he argued that to free himself and his thoughts he was going to write in his native language, which was Kikuyu. I don’t believe that everyone feels trapped by language. You don’t accept everything about the culture that the language you use comes from, but you can connect only with certain things in the language. By using English one does not become a slave to the English. It seems like a simplification to me.
At one point, Fauzia remembers how she discovered Spanish colonization in Peru in school, the impact it had on the native peoples, and how Spain exploited and abused them for centuries. From a colonized continent like Africa, what do other colonial processes look like?
Well, first of all it should be noted that there are many different types of colonialism. The Western European would say that it is, in general terms, different from others such as the Ottoman or the Russian, who are mainly based on the colonization of the land. Spain and Portugal, for example, crossed oceans to colonize, therefore they reached different landscapes, cultures and languages. The European colonizer has been very different. We must also take into account the periods in which colonization occurred, from the 16th century to the 19th century, and it also depends a lot on the colonized, because power differences can arise between the colonizer and the colonized. For example, thinking about the United Kingdom, if when it begins the colonizing process it finds itself in a situation of weakness, it sees the need to negotiate to get the best out of the natives. There are different ways and you always have to take into account the place and time. What the different colonizing processes do have in common is that, in general, the colonized lose control of their life, their land is taken away and, sometimes, their life is even taken out of their hands. Therefore, when Fauzia hears about the conquest of Peru, and it is true that it is something that especially affects her, she feels identified, but not necessarily because she comes from a people that has been colonized, but rather my intention is for it to be a human response to colonization. What I mean is that she, perhaps, would have felt exactly the same if she had come from somewhere else. It is, rather, a form of human empathy.
