When Abdulrazak Gurnah won the Nobel Prize for literature this year, Alexandra Pringle, his longstanding executive publisher at Bloomsbury, felt it was about time the Tanzanian author, born in Zanzibar, received the literary recognition he deserved.
She thought his latest book, Afterlives, published in 2020, was his best novel to date. An historical novel about the brutality of German colonialism in east Africa, it might have been the book that tipped the scales in Gurnah’s favour for this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature.
Gurnah’s novels focus on colonialism, racism and xenophobia, timeless subjects that feel particularly relevant in this era of displaced immigrants fleeing from war-torn Syria and the political and economic chaos of Central America or places like Venezuela.
This certainly seems to be the year for recognising both the plight of immigrants and the contributions of immigrant writers to international literature.
At 18, Gurnah left Zanzibar during the 1964 revolution to live in England.
Then there’s David Diop, who won this year’s International Booker Prize with At Night All Blood is Black, a moving, horrific novel about colonialism and its impact on cultural identity seen through the eyes of a Senegalese man fighting for the French in World War I.
For this review, I chose Gurnah’s novel Pilgrim’s Way because of its West Indian connection. Like all Gurnah novels, Pilgrim’s Way peels away layers of emotional and personal boundaries immigrants experience.
Pilgrim’s Way demonstrates Gurnah’s remarkable restraint in presenting his characters’ stories. He is a master of that old piece of writing advice, “Show, don’t tell.” Gurnah shows his characters’ complex lives and feelings without telling the reader what to feel or think. This evokes empathy while allowing readers to experience, however vicariously, the conflicts and ambiguity immigrants go through in their conflicted lives.
[caption id="attachment_926623" align="alignnone" width="1024"] 2021 Nobel Prize winner for Literature Abdulrazak Gurah gestures as he poses at his home in Canterbury, England on October 7, after news broke that he won the award. - AP PHOTO[/caption]
Gurnah’s immigrants grapple with identity in a new land they originally imagined as the perfect escape. They are sure migration will better their lives. But Daud, the protagonist of Pilgrim’s Way, finds prejudice and hatred in England. Just walking home can evoke great angst and danger as resentful, racist people taunt and physically threaten him. His new life is difficult and demeaning.
Daud’s quest to escape from his past, as well as his unpleasant present, often cause him to reimagine his childhood. When he conjures up nostalgic moments readers will first wonder why he left his country and a near-perfect life, but brutal honesty quickly surfaces, shoving idealised, false images of the past into their proper place. In truth, Daud migrated to escape hardships and in search of better.
Nearly every sc
