Abdulrazak Gurnah - Postcolonial writer wins Nobel Prize for Literature 2021

Tanzanian-born writer Abdulrazak Gurnah, who specializes in refugee, migration and post-colonial experiences, is the recipient of the 2021 Nobel Prize for Literature.

The Nobel Committee on October 7 announced the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature to novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah 'for his steadfast and benevolent penetration into the effects of colonialism and the fate of the peoples. refuge in the chasm between cultures and continents'.

Abdulrazak Gurnah was born in 1948 and grew up on the island of Zanzibar but came to Britain as a refugee in the late 1960s. Until his recent retirement, he was Professor of English and Postcolonial Literature at the University of Kent, Canterbury.

Abdulrazak Gurnah began writing at the age of 21 while in exile, having published 10 novels and several short stories to date. Refugees are a theme that runs through his works. Although Swahili was his mother tongue, English became his literary instrument.

According to British Council Literature, Gurnah's characters are caught between cultures and continents, and live in a state of insecurity that they can never deal with. They must constantly renew themselves to fit their new environment. They are constantly looking for ways to reconcile their new lives with the past.

Gurnah, like his characters, had to leave his native Zanzibar and immigrate to England at the age of 17, identity being an ever-changing issue. His main characters are always looking for ways to confuse the fixed identities of the people they meet in the places where they emigrate.

Portrait of Abdulrazak Gurnah. (Photo: Royal Swedish Academy).

As cultural critic Paul Gilroy has pointed out, "When national and ethnic identities are represented and expressed as pure, exposure to difference threatens these identities, diluting and weakening them. affect their precious purity, making them potentially contaminated. Intersection such as mixture and movement must be guarded against.' The protagonists of Gurnah's novels exhibit identity pollution. of others through their differences.

Accordingly, when the unnamed narrator in Admiring Silence (1996) went to his girlfriend's parents to tell them their daughter was pregnant, they looked at him with hatred because their daughter would now be "have to live with some kind of pollution for the rest of her life. The girl won't be able to be an ordinary English woman to live simply in England among Englishmen."

As an immigrant to a foreign country, Gurnah is aware that: 'for some of my potential readers, there is a view of me that I must take into account. I am aware that I will represent myself to readers who may consider themselves the norm, without culture or ethnicity, without distinction."

 Refugees are a theme that runs through his works. (Photo: DW).

Abdulrazak Gurnah consciously broke with convention, changing colonial views to highlight the views of indigenous communities. So his novel Desertion (2005) about adultery became a stark contradiction of what he called 'romance'.

His fourth novel Paradise (1994) was his breakthrough as a writer, developed from a research trip to East Africa around 1990. It is a coming-of-age story and a sad love story in which there is a clash between different worlds and belief systems.

Last year, the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to American poet Louise Glück "for her unmistakably unique poetic voice, with austere beauty that makes personal existence universal".

Each year, the Nobel Committee awards prizes in six fields: biomedicine, physics, chemistry, literature, economic sciences and peace. The Nobel laureate will be awarded a certificate, a Nobel Prize medal, and a monetary prize of approximately $1.1 million.