Abdulrazak Gurnah, writer

0:00BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Hello, I'm Lauren Laverne and this is the Desert Island Discs podcast. Every week I ask my guests to choose the eight tracks, book and luxury they'd want to take with them if they were cast away to a desert island. And for rights reasons, the music is shorter than the original broadcast. I hope you enjoy listening.

0:43My castaway this week is the writer Abdul Razak Gurna, a Zanzibari-born British author. He's a Booker Prize nominee, Emeritus Professor of Postcolonial Literatures at the University of Kent, and as of 2021, a Nobel Prize winner. He was born in 1948 and left Zanzibar when he was still a teenager, Leaving behind the upheaval that gripped his home country after the 1964 revolution, he arrived in the UK with few connections. As he began to build a new life in a strange country whilst facing a prolonged period of poverty and alienation, he started writing as a way of untangling his own story. Identity, memory and the migrant experience are recurring themes in his work, which includes the novels Paradise and By the Sea.

1:29His heroes are often of the unsung variety, hospital orderlies, canteen workers, housewives. But by unearthing the intricate histories that lie just under the surface of their apparently small lives, he affords them the emotional complexity and humanity of an epic hero. Life as a Nobel laureate has brought him to new readers all over the world. His books have been translated into 40 languages, including his first, Swahili, for the very first time. He says, I want to entertain people, but I also want to advance the way we all understand things. Just one little inch forward with each book. Abdul Razak Gurnah, welcome to Desert Island Discs.

2:10Thank you very much. So your first novel, Memory of Departure, was published almost 40 years ago. And this year you've published your 11th, Theft. I always think of that moment of releasing new work as a kind of edge of the diving board moment. You know, it's about to land with the public. How does it feel to you when a new book is about to come out? It gets increasingly less worrying. I think partly it's because as each book comes out, you come to understand that you have readers who are kind of travelling with you in a way. But in addition to that, there are always reviews and things like that.

2:47So you begin to have a sense of how the book is being received. It feels good. And of course, more attention than ever. after being awarded the Nobel Prize in 2021. You really didn't believe it at first, did you? What actually happened? How did you hear about it? Yeah, well, I don't think there are many people who will say when that phone call comes, oh, at last. Where have you been all this time? I think it will be a surprise for most people. But it was a great joy because of the nature of the thing, because of what it is. Where did you get the phone call? I was at home, almost lunchtime, and I was just sort of making a cup of tea prior to checking out what's in the fridge, that kind of thing.

3:25Yeah. And the phone rang. And at first I thought it was one of these annoying cold calls that we get now. And I found over the years that if you keep quiet, they go away. This one didn't. And eventually somebody spoke and said, is this Abdulaziz Akurna? And I said, who are you? What do you want? Kind of thing. Trying to be rude to chase this person away. then he announced that you have been awarded this and I thought no no come on stop it. When did it sink in when did you realize that actually this was for real? He said we're just about to make an announcement if you go to your computer and log into our website you'll be able to watch me announcing this so I did I went to the computer and got there just as he came out onto the stage and started speaking in Swedish but my name was in that Swedish spiel.

4:17And then the phone rang immediately. And I bet it didn't stop ringing. How long did that go on for? It went on for quite a while. In fact, in the end, I unplugged the phone. I mean, just an incredible achievement. So exciting. And to see all those new editions, what was it like for you to see, you know, the Swahili versions of your books for the first time? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's great. It's wonderful, obviously. I mean, this is what a writer wants. And I would have thought any writer. You'd want your work to be disseminated as thoroughly, as widely as possible. And the Swahili translation was also something special because although people were reading the books, not everybody can read in English.

4:54So this way it makes it available, and importantly, makes it available as a book that younger people can read at school and this kind of thing. You're sharing your discs with us today. How big a role has music played for you? Is it important? It is important and it isn't always important because I sit there and listen to it. Some of it is something that is going on in the world, I mean, as well, as well as music that I love to sit quietly and listen to. When I was growing up, there was no TV, it was just the radio. And actually, there was more or less one radio station. So whatever was played there was the music that we heard.

5:31Well, we can't wait to hear your Desert Island Discs today. So why don't we get started with your first choice? What have you gone for and why? So I thought I'd start with Hit the Road Jack by Ray Charles. Part of the town that I lived in, that I grew up in, was born in and lived in as a youth until I left, is called Malindi. And there are lots of cafes, not cafes like Paris cafes. These are cafes where people who worked in the docks, which is roughly this area, would probably go to have their lunch or to get a snack or something like that. And they all had radios. That is to say, they had amplifiers outside.

6:08So even if you're walking the streets, you'd be hearing the radio. And as I said, there's only one radio station. Imagine the terrific sense of walking through the streets, past this cafe after cafe after cafe, and all of them are playing Hit the Road Jack. Oh, wow. Hit the road, Jack. Don't you come back no more, no more, no more, no more. Hit the road, Jack And don't you come back no more What you say Hit the road, Jack And don't you come back no more No more, no more, no more Hit the road, Jack And don't you come back no more Oh, woman, oh, woman, oh Treat me so mean You're the meanest old woman That I've ever seen I guess give you sense Ray Charles and Hit the Road, Jack And you're saying, Abdul Razak Garner, that you can see yourself Yes, I can see myself walking through the streets there and listening to this and bobbing my head up and down.

7:07The magic of Ray Charles. So you were born in Zanzibar Town in 1948, the second of six children. When you think back to your home and your childhood, what comes back to you first? Yeah, I think playing in the streets there, it was quite safe. There were very, very few cars or anything like that. But during holidays, then gangs of children would congregate. We would be allowed to stay out till nobody bothered us in the evenings and that kind of thing. And you were the second eldest in the family. What was your role among the siblings? Were you one of the leaders? Punch bag. Oh, punch bag. But there were a lot of other children.

7:43Many of them have remained friends for life. Even though we've all been scattered all over the place, we know about each other. Your father was a trader. Did that mean that you lived close to the water? You lived near a job? That's right. His work was largely to buy the products of the sea, really. And every year these boatloads of people would come from various parts of the Indian Ocean, from Somalia, from Southern Arabia, from the Gulf and so on. And they would bring a variety of products, fish, cured fish of some kind or another, dates, etc. And his business was buying this in bulk and then retailing it to outlets, to shops and so on.

8:22That was his work. And so for you, that meant that you were growing up in a very multicultural, multilingual environment. Absolutely. Multireligious as well. Because we were so, so near the docks. I mean, literally, you could see the docks from the house like that. Then any open area near us would become some kind of impromptu campsite for these sailors. because this wasn't kind of a particularly cultured invasion of people across the ocean. These were sailors, you know, rough-hewn, dirty, you know, salties or whatever you call those things. You dedicated your book-nominated novel, Paradise, to your mother, Salma.

8:59Tell me about her. What was she like? She had six of us and I think quite possibly it was difficult. Her health did not benefit as a result. But she was all right. She was OK. She and my aunt, her sister that is, both valued very much the possibility of education for us, partly because they were not allowed to go to school. Was she able to read herself? No, she wasn't able to read. She learned to write her name because during the campaign for decolonization, when for the first time women were allowed to vote, she wanted obviously to use her vote. But in order to register for the vote, you had to either sign your name or do the thumbprint thing.

9:46She was determined that she's not going to do a thumbprint like a beast. So she learned to write her name. But that's about all she could do. All right, it's time for some more music. Abdul Razak Gurner, your second choice today. What are we going to hear and why? We're going to hear Petite Fleur by Sidney Bechet. I heard this for the first time. Again, it would have been that same sort of time, early 1960s. At the time, I think we were being wooed by the United States and by the British with the establishment of the USIS, as it was called, the United States Information Service, established a kind of library, a place where you could go read newspapers, listen to music and this kind of thing.

10:28And the British had another one, which was doing the same thing. Did you go to both? Did you get to? Yeah, yeah. It wasn't easy to get hold of reading materials. It wasn't easy to get books. And most of us did not have, I mean, we didn't have a record player at home. So the idea of you could go to a place and pick music and listen to it. So I didn't know anything about jazz, but that's because it was American USIS, there's a lot of jazz music. and one of the first things I heard was this Sidney Bechet, Petit Fleur. And I was drawn to it because I thought, Bechet, that sounds like a Swahili name.

11:01I wonder if that's one of us. But of course it's a French name. Anyway, so I heard Petit Fleur and it's stayed with me ever since.

11:29¶¶

12:10Sydney Bichet and Petit Fleur. So you picked that up in the American Library, Abdul Razak Garner. Did the British Library have records that you could listen to as well? No, they had newspapers. That's not bad. Favors, magazines and some books. But the Americans won out with the jazz, did they? And also you could take one home. Ah, OK. You could actually take it out, but you didn't have a record player at home, so that wasn't any good. So tell me, when you were growing up, you mentioned spending time with your mother and your aunt in particular. Were they the people who nurtured your love of storytelling?

12:42That's the way it worked for a lot of people, really, because children were the responsibility of the women. And they loved telling stories. What kind of stories did they tell you? Well, probably the stories they themselves had been told. Some of them were games. I remember one in particular that we loved and loved and loved. It was a big python that's been sighted somewhere out of town, and it's getting closer and closer. So all the place names are mentioned, and we as children are kind of quaking with terror. You know, he's now down the street, he's now there, he's climbing up the stairs, this kind of thing.

13:14So learning about building anticipation right from the beginning. You mentioned that you went to the local Quran school when you were quite little, so five, and then I think you started primary school, your colonial education after that. So what was on the syllabus there? In the early days, it was all Kiswahili, so we were learning to read and read as in Kiswahili. And it was quite fun because most of us didn't have books. In our house, there were no books. And most of the children I was at school with, they didn't have books at home. So primary schools, all our teachers were local teachers, no European teachers.

13:53And everything was taught in Ksuhili. Until at a certain stage, as we were approaching the end of primary school, we knew that we were going to do an examination, a little bit like the 11 plus, a national examination that everybody would have to do. And that was going to be arithmetic and English. And the reason for that is to actually select students who will then go on to secondary school. and there was only one secondary school for boys and one secondary school for girls. Well, they didn't really want to educate us particularly. They just wanted to produce a few clerks. And so for that, all you needed to do was to learn to read and write.

14:29But then if you were lucky enough to be one of those who did go on to secondary school, then it really was like that. So 60 students out of the whole country went on to secondary school. All your teachers, they were Europeans. And none of them could speak Swahili. So there you go. Your first eight years in primary school, you're being taught in Swahili. You go there and suddenly somebody's standing in front of the class giving you a history class in English or an algebra class in English. And you don't know what the hell they're talking about. And you mentioned that, you know, your mother saw education as the key to a better life.

15:01So you grew up with a strong sense of that. Did you internalise that quite quickly, do you think? I don't even think it was as much as something about a better life. I think they just valued it in itself and thought it was a good thing. and I think it's precisely because he was denied them, the two sisters that were my mother and my aunt, lamented this. I remember in my childhood lamented the fact that they were denied this. It was something that was deep. And so they wanted their children to participate in this good thing. You mentioned that books weren't all that easy to come by. What do you remember reading and loving as a child?

15:39The first time that a book kind of really captured your imagination? I remember the Arabian night stories. In a way, it was rather surprising because those were some of the stories that were being told by people who couldn't read, like my parents. In other words, these had become oral stories and were being transmitted orally. People were telling these stories. And then to actually discover and read a book, and I've heard that one before. But really, the only books we could read were books that were made available for us at school, at least until the ages of maybe about 13 or so. And what kind of collection was that?

16:13I'm wondering what was in the library. You know, you described this. What library? There's no library. Just a school cupboard. OK. And I bet you these would have been the same books that were distributed in the West Indies, in India and in other British colonies. They were produced as a result of policy decisions made in London. Very often they were abridged, very, very abridged. And they were kind of what you would call classics, I suppose. Oliver Twist, Kidnapped, Treasure Island, that kind of stuff. The legacy of the Victorian age. That's about it, yeah. In a colonial cupboard in every corner of the world.

16:49Yeah, and the adventure stories. It's because we were boys' school. In fact, one of the pleasures of coming to England was finding so many books to read and unexpected bonuses of being here in England. It's time for some more music, Abdul Razak. Your third disc today. What are we going to hear next and why are you taking it with you to your island? This is a song, Ni Pe Pe, which means fan me, and it's sung by a man called Sef Salim, who's a very good musician. He played the wood and he sang and he wrote songs. This is one of his songs. He was also an artist, I mean a painter. He was also a teacher.

17:28In fact, the first time I met him, as it were, was when he came to our school as a trainee teacher to do teaching practice. he took us for art classes and he wrote and sang this song which is a kind of elegy he's singing to his lover and clearly it's his dying and he's saying fan me is what makes me comfortable but in the meantime he declares his love for her and sadly Salim himself died pretty soon after that

18:10Nipepe, Nasebhizu Nakea Tatula

18:20Nipepe, Nasebhizu Nakea Tatula Save Salem and Nipepe. so Abdul Razak Garner in 1964 Zanzibar underwent a revolution you were 15 I think at the time what effect did that have on you and your family well the main effect was my father's business in terms of what happened to my family that was no longer it was taken away from him no private businesses were allowed to exist the Muslim trade was also ended so those people coming to Zanz but were not allowed to arrive, as it were. They could not come anymore. They ended up going to Mombasa and Tanga and other places on the mainland. But more importantly, almost everything else was also shut down.

19:10Businesses, jobs, there was a great deal of violence. Schools were shut. It was a state of terror, really. People imprisoned, people killed, and so on. Did you witness any of that violence? I mean, how close to you, obviously devastating for your father to lose his business and all of that tumult around you, but how close were you to the violence that went on? Well, actually, my brother and I, we were in Dar es Salaam staying with relatives there. It was school holidays. First we heard about the revolution was on the radio. We were actually at the beach, the cafe, listening to atology, cafes all had radios.

19:45So there was a radio there and there was the news being announced. So we went back to the city and tried to get a flight back. Stupid. But anyway, that's what you think. But the airport was closed because of the violence. So we had to wait for about three days, I think, before we managed to get a flight on a little plane that was carrying newspapers or something there. So when we arrived, the very worst of the violence was over, but you could see bullet holes in walls and all this kind of thing. And, of course, a lot of people were still in jail, including my uncle, who remained in jail for two years.

20:23He was a policeman, wasn't he? He was a policeman, yeah. And there was curfew everywhere and all this kind of thing. So I didn't actually, the worst of the violence happened in the first three days. It was all over after three days. At least it was all over in the sense of the fighting. What continued for several months and years was the arrests and the state violence that was taking place. But totally disorientating for you. I mean, to come home and then it just must have felt like the world was turned upside down. Well, we were very frightened, but we were fortunate in that every immediate member of my family was fine.

20:56And, you know, you said everything shut down. Did that include school? Yeah, school shut down because one of the first things that they did, the new government, was they sent all those European teachers home. Secondary schools did not open for four months while they were trying to recruit teachers from elsewhere. And these mostly came from fraternal socialist nations, as it were, because the new government decided that it was going to be a socialist government. So we had teachers from the GDR, East Germany. We had teachers from Czechoslovakia, as it then was. And how was that for you? Well, it was difficult because they didn't speak Swahili and they didn't speak very good English either.

21:36So there was no way of communicating. We managed. We managed. It must have been surreal. I mean, was that how you coped with it, was to learn to laugh? I think we were very afraid quite a lot of the time. And we also knew that some amongst us classmates had been murdered during the fighting and some disappeared. So we knew that things were dangerous, as it were. So everybody just shut up and got on with it. I want to talk more about what happened next, but first, why don't we hear some music? Track number four, what are you going for? Isetta is playing this, Isetta Canemason. They're a wonderful family.

22:18They were little geniuses, I think. I've known the family, or rather I should say that my wife Denise was a colleague of their mother at the University of Sussex many years ago. And so I knew her by association in a way. But since then I've come to know her and indeed known the children. I've met several of them. and it just gives me so much pleasure to see how well they're doing and how beautifully they play. So let's hear I Sutter Playing Schumann.

23:16We'll be right back.

23:46Part of the first movement of Clara Schumann's Piano Concerto in A Minor, performed by Assata Kenna Mason on the piano, with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Holly Matheson. Abdul Razak Gurnah, when you were 18, you and your older brother made the choice to leave Zanzibar and come to Britain. How did you decide it was the right time to go, and how difficult was it to organise? Yeah, it was difficult to organise because it was not possible to have travel documents. The security advisors for the government were from the GDR, East Germany, and they were, as you know, obsessed with making sure people don't travel, don't leave.

24:26So it meant that we had to leave in rather, well, really rather illegal ways, which I'll leave at that. But the reason we chose to do it then was partly because we had finally persuaded our father that it's OK for us to do that and that he was willing to help us. Why didn't he want you to go? Was he just worried about you? We were young, I suppose. He understood that it was not going to be something easy to do and I guess he wasn't keen to go out into the world when you don't know anything and you don't have any money. But anyway, he agreed to let it go. And the other reason he agreed to let it go is because our cousin, I mentioned my aunt a few times, this is my aunt's son, And we all lived in the same house.

25:07We all grew up together. And he was at that time completing his PhD here in the UK at the University of London. So we kind of made the case and persuaded our other that, look, when we go there, he'll be there. He'll look after us. Poor fellow. So we descended on him. And he did help us. But he was completing his PhD. And he was gone a few months later. So he went to work at the University of Kumasi in Ghana. So you said, understandably, your father had been very apprehensive about the two of you leaving. How did your mother feel? Did she give you her blessing? No. We couldn't tell her. Oh. That must have been hard.