Abdulrazak Gurnah Quotes

Our histories were partial, silent about many cruelties.

(For any aspiring writers, is there a particular piece of advice that you would give to them?) The best advice you can give a writer is just write. There is no simple way.

What a shock it was to discover the loathing in which I was held: by looks, sneers, words and gestures, news reports, comics on TV, teachers, fellow students. Everybody did their bit and thought themselves tolerant, or perhaps mildly grumbling, or even amusing. At the receiving end, it seemed constant and mean. If there had been anywhere to go to, I would have gone. But I had broken the law in my own country and there was no going back.

(How important is diversity in literature?) I suppose, in order to understand how other people live and what it is that motivates and energises and makes them happy and unhappy you have to know about other people. It’s really quite as simple as that. You have to know. And the best way to know about other people is to hear what they have to say and not to be ventriliquising other people’s lives and trying to explain people away. So in this respect writing from other places, or at least from other perspectives, which might be cultural, social, gender, is one of the most direct ways in which you can hear what other people are saying.

(does Gurnah think the British know enough in general about the history of their influence around the world?) “No,” he says, baldly. “They know about some places that they want to know about. India, for example. There’s this sort of love affair going on, at least with the India of the empire. I don’t think they’re so interested in other less glamorous histories. I think if there’s a little bit of nastiness involved, they don’t really want to know about that very much.” “It’s because they don’t get told about these things. So you have on the one hand scholarship, which deeply investigates and understands all of these dimensions of influence, the consequences, the atrocities. On the other hand, you have a popular discourse that is very selective about what it will remember.”

There was also another understanding of history necessary to address, one that became clearer to me when I lived closer to its source in England, clearer than it had been while I was going through my colonised education in Zanzibar. We were, those of our generation, children of colonialism in a way that our parents were not and nor were those who came after us, or at least not in the same way. By that I don’t mean that we were alienated from the things our parents valued or that those who came after us were liberated from colonial influence. I mean that we grew up and were educated in that period of high imperial confidence, at least in our parts of the world, when domination disguised its real self in euphemisms and we agreed to the subterfuge. I refer to the period before decolonisation campaigns across the region hit their stride and drew our attention to the depredations of colonial rule. Those who came after us had their post-colonial disappointments and their own self-delusions to comfort them, and perhaps did not see clearly, or in great enough depth, the way in which the colonial encounter had transformed our lives, that our corruptions and misrule were in some measure also part of that colonial legacy. Some of these matters became clearer to me in England, not because I encountered people who clarified them to me in conversation or in the classroom, but because I gained a better understanding of how someone like me figured in some of their stories of themselves, both in their writing and in casual discourse, in the hilarity that greeted racist jokes on the TV and elsewhere, in the unforced hostility I met in everyday encounters in shops, in offices, on the bus. I could not do anything about that reception, but just as I learned to read with greater understanding, so a desire grew to write in refusal of the self-assured summaries of people who despised and belittled us.

Writing [came] out of the situation that I was in, which was poverty, homesickness, being unskilled, uneducated. So out of that misery you begin to write things down. It wasn’t like: I’m writing a novel. But this kept growing, this stuff. Then it started to become ‘writing’ because you have to think and construct and shape and so on.

When I was here as a very young person, people would not have had any problem about saying to your face certain words that we now consider to be offensive. It was much more pervasive, that sort of attitude. You couldn’t even get on a bus without somehow encountering something that made you recoil...Things appear to have transformed [but] then we have new rules about detention of refugees and asylum-seekers that are so mean they seem to me to be almost criminal. And these are argued for and protected by the government. This doesn’t seem to me to be a big advance to the way earlier people were treated.

Now, Britain has seen those despised people become fellow citizens and has learnt tolerance and discrimination in public dealings with them. In this respect, it is a more generous society than the one I first met 30 years ago.

It seems to me that fiction is the bridge between these things, the bridge between this immense scholarship and that kind of popular perception. So you can read about these matters as fiction. And I hope that the reaction then is to say, 'I didn't know that' and possibly for the reader, 'I must go and read something about that.'

This is a very big story of our times, of people having to reconstruct and remake their lives away from their places of origin. And there are many different dimensions to it. What do they remember? And how do they cope with what they remember? How do they cope with what they find? Or, indeed, how are they received?

I learned to have pleasure in reading simply because I love stories.

I want to remember the terrible risks people took to escape. We have seen pictures of these people on our television screens, crammed into fishing boats, clinging to the sides of canoes or even crudely lashed bits of wood. I hadn't seen any such pictures when I left Zanzibar and I don't suppose many of the ones we watch staring back at us in terror have either. People take such risks because they fear for their lives. It is an unarguable, terrible thing to be so afraid. I want to remember that, and to remind anyone who is inclined to forget or who has not got around to imagining what it might feel like.

I think the best moment in writing is when you think, yep, I think it’s done…Writing is best when it’s complete, when it’s finished .

writing cannot be just about battling and polemics, however invigorating and comforting that can be. Writing is not about one thing, not about this issue or that, or this concern or another, and since its concern is human life in one way or another, sooner or later cruelty and love and weakness become its subject. I believe that writing also has to show what can be otherwise, what it is that the hard domineering eye cannot see, what makes people, apparently small in stature, feel assured in themselves regardless of the disdain of others. So I found it necessary to write about that as well, and to do so truthfully, so that both the ugliness and the virtue come through, and the human being appears out of the simplification and stereotype. When that works, a kind of beauty comes out of it. And that way of looking makes room for frailty and weakness, for tenderness amid cruelty, and for a capacity for kindness in unlooked for sources. It is for these reasons that writing has been for me a worthwhile and absorbing part of my life.