Carin Klaesson, Content Manager of Public Programs at the Nobel Prize Museum, sat down to talk to 2021 literature laureate Abdulrazak Gurnah at the Swedish Academy in Stockholm, Sweden on 28 April 2022. In a wide ranging conversation they spoke about his journey to the Nobel Prize.

Abdulrazak Gurnah, such a pleasure sitting here together with you in this grand hall belonging to the Swedish Academy. You are very welcome to Stockholm.

Abdulrazak Gurnah: Thank you very much.

It is actually in this room that the permanent secretary every year comes out, he enters the room from those doors in front of you and he announces the new Nobel laureate in literature. In October, 2021, it was your name that was announced. I believe that he called you just in advance just to let you know before everyone else knew. Do you remember that call?

Abdulrazak Gurnah: Of course, yes. I was just coming in from the garden. It was around about lunchtime just before lunch. I guess I was about to make myself a cup of tea and kind of debating what was there to have for lunch, and the phone goes, and these days, and I’m sure you have the same thing here, we get a lot of these cold calls. I found that I don’t … I’m not saying this is a revolutionary discovery or anything like that, but I’ve found that if you don’t speak, then the other end hangs up as you were, because I guess it’s computerised or something like that. So I didn’t speak, and eventually somebody very softly says my name, and I said, “Who are you?” He said his name, but of course it didn’t mean anything.

Then I said, “What do you want?” Like that, thinking a plumber or somebody trying to sell me something. He said, “You’ve just been awarded the Nobel Prize,” and I said, “Oh, come on, get off. What is this? Some kind of a prank or something like that?” But Mats Malm, of course, was the one speaking to me. He then very courteously politely as, you know, his voice and his manner, and just kept saying, “Yes, you have, if you don’t believe me, go to the website,” et cetera, et cetera. I went to the website, it was just before 12, I think by the time I got to the computer and actually logged on and got the Swedish Academy website, he was just coming through those doors and he started to speak in Swedish, but in the middle of this speaking, I heard my name. I thought, well, it must be true, because really until that moment I really was dubious about it. I thought, what is this? But then there was, and then after that, it was impossible not to believe because the phone rang immediately and continued to ring really for another few days. In the end I just unplugged it: “I can’t take this anymore.”

He did say your name. He also said a prize motivation that comes with every Nobel Prize. Kind of a way to summarise or to point out the essence of the achievement or the work. The motivation that followed your name in this room in 2021 was “for his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents”. On the note that it is hard to compress decades of writing into one sentence, can you find this description adequate?

Abdulrazak Gurnah: This is what the committee wanted to highlight in their reading and understanding of the work and it is accurate. But of course, as you’ve already suggested, it isn’t what I would think of as the complete account of what I’m interested in and what I do. I understand the difficulty, it’s not after all you’re talking about 10 novels and even one novel is difficult to put in one sentence, which is why it’s a book. It’s quite reasonable that if you’re going to make a statement about a lifetime’s work, it’s going to focus on whatever it is that you want to prioritise in your reading. It’s not going to say everything that’s important about, about that reading, but I don’t argue with it. I certainly don’t want to argue with the Swedish Academy for any reason anyway, but I don’t argue with that. It seems accurate enough in what it’s in a part of what I do, I think.

Yes, indeed. Another frequently used theme in your novels is memories, where the characters that bear memories of all kinds. They deal with pain, with loss, memories of another place, another time, other people. How do you remember the place where you grew up?

Abdulrazak Gurnah: How, in what sense? I do remember a great deal in any case. I’ve also been back and have had some of those things prompted by my sisters or friends and so on. But also I think for me as a writer that’s the hinterland of my imagination, if you like, so I go there a lot. Often when you start a train or a trail of memory, other memories also come and so you remember. Something else comes back because you’ve now thought about this. As people often tell you one of the interesting things about being away from Zanzibar for so long that there’s so many other people who are also in the same situation, who’ve been away for many years, and sometimes we meet in another place like Stockholm and then it does become possible. Do you remember we were at school together, something like that? I do, and sometimes I don’t, and that way of prompting each other keeps memories alive, but I think it’s probably because of that writing process, which in some ways rather unfortunately is constantly going back to, for me, my practice, going back to certain events. It’s very hard to forget even if you wanted to because not all these memories are happy memories and not all of them are things, moments to celebrate. They’re not just because I’m thinking of traumatic memories for myself, but also just simply because there are certain things you wish you could not keep remembering.

The environment as such was a very, as you have described it, cosmopolitan environment and just to add to that, you grew up next to a harbour. Can you give us a picture of that house, even street, that close environment?

Abdulrazak Gurnah: From our house upstairs, you could look towards the harbour. You could see the harbour, but you could also see the warehouses of the harbour. You could also see the traffic on one side on this other side, you could see into the old harbour, which usually is sailing boats and fishermen’s crafts and so on. You could also see other warehouses. We lived in literally five minutes to the sea, if that. When a ship was coming in, a flag used to go up on a tower, I don’t really know why, maybe it’s to announce the country of origin of the ship, I don’t know, but from our house, you could see it, think, what ships are coming in? We were very, very close indeed. But in relation to that traffic of people from different parts of the Indian Ocean literal, that I referred to in By the Sea, for example, during the monsoons, then they would pour out of their sailing ships. Most of them, some of them had motor propellers, but most of them were sailing ships. They would just pour more or less literally into the square in front of our house. You would see them as still smelling of the sea, still smelling of the filth they’d been living in on the boat for several weeks as they were sailing or indeed sleeping on the merchandise. You could probably smell that on them as well. It was great for us as growing up as children and youths, it was great to see this great variety of people. In earlier times, my mother’s sister, my aunt, they lived in a different place, of course, but from where she lived, she could see in a different direction down towards the harbor, very close, but she also spoke about this crowd of people in a different way.

At a different time, the presence of all these people was also menacing, in particular as the season was drawing to a close. The season draws to a close, the wind direction changes and begins to blow in the northward direction, which then means these people begin to go away to wherever, to Somalia, to South Arabia, to the Gulf, et cetera, all these places, India. Then it was dangerous because sometimes children were kidnapped. That’s how she recalls it when she was a child, not as this terrific, exciting thing, but that parents told their children to stay indoors as this movement away begins, because sometimes a child would disappear and you can only assume that that child was stolen by one of these and taken away. It wasn’t all fun. There was another side to it, which was, I suppose, the danger of … These are uncouth sailors sometimes, they’re just people on the make, to some extent. I mustn’t romanticise it when I say these things, but they leave things behind, they leave their merchandise, they leave their stories, the knowledge of other places and so on. And that’s what makes it cosmopolitan.

Whenever I listen to a person that talks about his or her childhood you can always look at it as upon chapters, and I tend to do that with my own life, different chapters. It’s a construction and not true, but it’s maybe helpful. I don’t know. I’m thinking of when you are 18 and you are forced to leave Zanzibar, I imagine that is another chapter that starts coming to another different country in every possible way. How was that?

Abdulrazak Gurnah: You talked a moment ago about memory. Now that’s an episode that I can recall pretty much step by step, almost day by day as it was, because it wasn’t just get on a plane and go with the various things that one had to do to get the paperwork sorted out, to hide this, to hide that, to find money and so on. It took a few days to actually make that. I can recall that in great detail. This is what I meant about that there are certain moments I think that never, never go away. It was generally speaking exciting and relatively trouble free. My brother and I traveled together and when we got to London the immigration officer looked at our passports, said what are you here for? We said “Just visiting, tourists” because we didn’t have anything else to say. We didn’t have an educational institution or something like that, it should have been another thing, say we’re students or whatever, but no, we’re just tourists. There was something like you had to have 400 pounds to be allowed in as a tourist, you had to show that you had enough money, you can’t just say I’m a penniless tourist, because they don’t want you if you’re a penniless tourist, so we had borrowed, we’d been told that this was a requirement.

We had had to borrow 400 pounds from a relative just to be able to say, yes, we have 400 pounds and the guy pulled us out and took us into a room and asked us more questions. I don’t remember the questions asked of me, but then I was probably too excited to take everything in. Then he said, “Yes. Okay.” Boom, boom. You’re in. It’ll be different now of course, so in some respects, I think it was a kinder time in that respect, in the sense of immigration, even though there was another panic going on. I didn’t know that, but there was another panic going on about immigrants. This time from mostly Asians from east Africa, Asians as they were called. People of Indian ancestry from east Africa who had been I don’t know how… The British in their hubris, I think, as they were decolonizing various places, particularly Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Tanganyika, rather as it then was, offered them the opportunity of retaining British passports.

I guess not suspecting that they would need to use them to go to the UK, but that they would use these British passports to travel around or something like that. Anyway, as a result of various policies of post-colonial governments in all these three states, the Indian community, the Asian community started to panic. Very quickly, as you might suspect, the government’s going to close this down, the rumors start, and great numbers of them begin to leave and they arrive in the UK with their British passports, and there’s no way of saying no to them. We don’t want you, but there’s no way of saying no. There was this great panic going on to do with that, but I didn’t know that. I arrived, I think at a moment of racial panic of this kind, which is regular in the UK and regular in other parts of Europe, but so regular in the UK. In the UK the target changes a little bit. It was West Indians. Then it was Asians, Pakistanis. Then it was Zimbabweans at the moment, of course, Afghanis and Kurds and Syrians. But there is, it seems to me, this regular outbursts of panic about immigrants. I arrived in the midst of that, which was news to me. I didn’t fully understand it at the time, and it was quite hurtful to somehow be included in this hostility. But on the other hand it was an adventure. It was a new place, it was things to see, understand, learn and also painful in other ways, because of being away so far away from home, so there was a mixed thing.

18 is not a child, but you were a very young man.

Abdulrazak Gurnah: 18 is very young. Especially I think an untraveled 18. Some 18-year-olds these days have been around the world. But I think, we were just sort of coming out of a little island off the coast of Africa.

After you arrived to UK, your writing starts. You start to write perhaps not to become a writer in the beginning, but eventually.

Abdulrazak Gurnah: Yes, it did rather good isn’t it, it sort of worked out.

Very practical. Yes. It worked out fine.

Abdulrazak Gurnah: I think at some point when I finally did begin to study literature, which was maybe about four or five years from when I arrived until I was actually finding myself, I thought at that point I was then writing. I was also studying literature and I thought what I would like to happen in my life is to have an academic career to teach in an institution like this, where I was studying. Not necessarily like this one, because I like this one so much, but an academic career. I also would like to be able to have a career as a writer, to write. It was great to be able to say it worked out.

Yes, it definitely did. Did you know, from the beginning what you wanted to write about?

Abdulrazak Gurnah: I had an idea that I wanted to write about where I had come from. The place I had come from, thinking about various dimensions of it, like for example as things came back and thinking, why did we live like that? Or why was it that we chose to do things in that way? Why were some parents – so this is not my story – but why were some parents so brutal to their children? Why was there this kind of unkindness within families sometimes? And of course, also the horribleness of the terrorist state that I had been living in, I wanted to think about that and to write about that. I think I say in the Nobel Lecture that there were several things that it seemed to me it was necessary to do if I was going to write.

One of those was to write about where I had left or indeed why I had left in a way. It’s not so much about me, but to reflect on that and to kind of fictionalise that, which is what I do I think, I hope, in Memory of Departure, but I was also by then, and it took a long time for that book to be published. In the meantime, I was also living in the UK and experiencing UK and coming to understand that and the complexity of that and the complexity of being a stranger in another place. Not just sort of hostility in whatever, but a variety of other things and how you live with your imagination and your memory of another place. So, if you said, what did I know what I wanted to write? I knew I wanted to write about those things. I wanted to write about the other place first and I wanted to write about being in England and working there. It had been such a full experience of working, of living and of living with things that were unforgettable, that there was no problem about what to write about, really. The problem was writing it, but not what.

In literature, there are heroes and there are gods and there are kings and superpower, protagonists. The characters in your novels, they are not like that. Are they?

Abdulrazak Gurnah: No, they’re not, no. They’re little people on the whole, which is not to say there are people without ambition or aspiration. So yes, it wasn’t necessarily an intention from the beginning that I would focus on small lives as it were and how people cope with trauma and with disappointment. But I think I admire that resilience in the human spirit, as it were, to do so. To recover, to reconstruct, to retrieve something meaningful out of traumatic experience or out of, as I said, disappointment or bad luck or whatever. I think I don’t write about heroes because I think there is something quite predictable or almost a cliche about celebrating heroes. They’re already heroes. But I think there is also something heroic in small lives in a way. That’s why I find myself ending up there often with writing about ordinary people coping with … I like this phrase retrieving a life out of after trauma, which is precisely … Because that’s what I’ve written about in Afterlives. I think that’s the most recent formulation, as it were, that I have of this idea of retrieving something,

Being a writer is also being a reader. And now you have joined the crowd of 120 years of Nobel Prize awarded writers. Are there any precious literature laureates that you like to read and perhaps return to in reading?

Abdulrazak Gurnah: Yes. It’s great to join this team. Yeah. It’s very nice. It’s very nice. It’s also because so many of the more recent of these writers whose work I’ve taught and admired in some cases the writers I have met and have known and still read.

I know that you have been writing about Wole Soyinka and Naipaul as well.

Abdulrazak Gurnah: Yes, I admire those writers. J. M. Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer, Walcott. Those are writers whose work I taught as well because of my special interest in postcolonial literature, but they are amongst them also writers whom I haven’t taught, but whose work I admire, too. Ishiguro, Toni Morrison, Seamus Heaney etcetera. They’re all there. They’re great. Good. There are one or two odd ones, but now I’m not going to mention these.

We’ll focus on the ones you like to read. If we go back to the motivation, the prize motivation. The word compassionate is mentioned and as a reader of your novels, I do find, even though the brutality and discrimination and pain of all sorts of different levels are present, compassion is also present. What do you put into that word? What does it mean to you?

Abdulrazak Gurnah: I think what I referred to a short while ago to what I admire about the resilience of the human spirit, as it were. I think one of the more important things about that human spirit is our capacity for kindness. I know we also have an enormous capacity for cruelty and unkindness, and we can’t do anything about that. Seems to me that there is a kind of monstrous dimension of the way we are, but there is also this other possibility, always there, of people being helpful and kind to each other, of people being perhaps not as straightforwardly reprehensible as we think they are, even when they’re in the process of perhaps doing those monstrous things. So this is not to forgive anything or to say it’s alright, we’re all human beings, we all make mistakes or anything like that, but it’s also to understand that, in thinking again of Afterlives and perhaps the German officer in there, that it’s also at times very difficult for an individual to allow the expression of that kindness or sense of wrongness at injustice, because of the way they’re compromised by their state or by their society or by the sanctions that rule their lives. But I like to think underneath that people know when they’re doing those monstrous things and when an opportunity arrives, maybe they might be capable of doing the kind thing. I guess that’s what compassion means.

We spoke about chapters earlier and maybe being a Nobel Prize laureate is a new chapter.

Abdulrazak Gurnah: I haven’t done it before, no.

Exactly. So how’s it going? Do you enjoy it?

Abdulrazak Gurnah: Oh, it’s great. We’ve just been talking a moment ago about joining this team. I mean, that’s great. It’s a wonderful recognition, as it were, of the work that I’ve been doing. To be told, yes, we think you’re doing fine. It’s a great honour in that respect. It is, of course, it makes my life very busy, but I hope this will only be for a while and that it will then settle down to something less busy. I understand that. It’s not something that that irks me at all, and I think this is what it means. This is a global prize, a global recognition, and people want to know you and to hear from you and indeed most wonderful of all to read you or to read your work. So that’s fine. I’m going along okay. But of course the body is what it is, if you are working it more than it likes, then you get tired or something like that. But aside from that, in my mind I’m quite happy to meet and to speak with people.

We appreciate immensely that you are here. You’ve said that something like stories help us to understand the world that we live in. That goes with good stuff and the bad things. I want to thank you so much Abdulrazak Gurnah for talking to us.

Abdulrazak Gurnah: It’s a pleasure.

It’s a pleasure.

Abdulrazak Gurnah: Thank you.

Thank you so much.

Watch the interview

Did you find any typos in this text? We would appreciate your assistance in identifying any errors and to let us know. Thank you for taking the time to report the errors by sending us an e-mail.