Interview: A Conversation with Abdulrazak Gurnah

This art icle was downloaded by: [ Universit y of St ellenbosch] On: 29 May 2013, At : 07: 16 Publisher: Rout ledge I nform a Lt d Regist ered in England and Wales Regist ered Num ber: 1072954 Regist ered office: Mort im er House, 37- 41 Mort im er St reet , London W1T 3JH, UK English Studies in Africa Publicat ion det ails, including inst ruct ions for aut hors and subscript ion informat ion: ht t p:/ / www.t andfonline.com/ loi/ reia20 A Conversation with Abdulrazak Gurnah Tina St einer Published online: 22 May 2013. To cite this article: Tina St einer (2013): A Conversat ion wit h Abdulrazak Gurnah, English St udies in Africa, 56:1, 157-167 To link to this article: ht t p:/ / dx.doi.org/ 10.1080/ 00138398.2013.780690 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTI CLE Full t erm s and condit ions of use: ht t p: / / www.t andfonline.com / page/ t erm s- and- condit ions This art icle m ay be used for research, t eaching, and privat e st udy purposes. Any subst ant ial or syst em at ic reproduct ion, redist ribut ion, reselling, loan, sub- licensing, syst em at ic supply, or dist ribut ion in any form t o anyone is expressly forbidden. The publisher does not give any warrant y express or im plied or m ake any represent at ion t hat t he cont ent s will be com plet e or accurat e or up t o dat e. The accuracy of any inst ruct ions, form ulae, and drug doses should be independent ly verified wit h prim ary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, act ions, claim s, proceedings, dem and, or cost s or dam ages what soever or howsoever caused arising direct ly or indirect ly in connect ion wit h or arising out of t he use of t his m at erial. A conVErsAtion With AbdulrAzAK gurnAh Downloaded by [University of Stellenbosch] at 07:16 29 May 2013 tina steiner The following interview was conducted on 11 September 2012 at the University of Kent in Canterbury. Since we started to talk about the gaps in the biographical details available on his life on the way from the station, this conversation begins in medias res… TS: When you left Zanzibar, you had done O-levels? AG: I inished secondary school in 1966. Then it would have been expected that you go on to do A-levels, but it was two years after the revolution in Zanzibar and they didn’t think that anybody should do A-levels so they shut down the sixth forms, which were not that many anyway in Zanzibar at that time. All people who completed school were sent on what was then called National Service, which meant they sent you wherever they thought they wanted to send you. A lot of us were sent to teach in schools as assistant teachers. Some people were sent into government jobs, civil service junior clerks, that kind of thing. Actually, I’m writing about this in my new novel, amongst other things. It’s not a big matter in it, but I do mention it. So all of us just got sent out like that and I was sent to a school in the country. TS: Were there some people chosen for tertiary education, like your character Latif who travels to East Germany in By the Sea? They would have been sent abroad, was that the only possibility to study? AG: Yes, and in fact the only places you could go to were East Germany, the Soviet Union, and Czechoslovakia – Eastern bloc countries. Those countries gave scholarships to the government and the education department selected people that wanted to go. And not everybody actually wanted to go anyway, because of the idea that they offered inferior education or in some cases, as in By the Sea, people worrying that the communists would twist their minds and all that stuff. So those who went abroad would have been generally people who are trusted by the authorities, the children of people who are trusted by the authorities would have been sent to those places. TS: And that wouldn’t have applied to you and your brother? AG: Well, it would have been less likely but not impossible. If we’d shown enthusiasm, we might have. I don’t think it ruled people out. I guess it was a way of showing a kind of afiliation and allegiance. If you actually wanted to go, it was a way of saying this is the side I’m on. 157 DOI: 10.1080/00138398.2013.780690 E-mail: tsteiner@sun.ac.za English Studies in Africa 56 (1) 157 © University of the Witwatersrand pp 157–167 Tina Steiner Downloaded by [University of Stellenbosch] at 07:16 29 May 2013 TS: Was that not almost impossible after the revolution? AG: No, not really. The revolution was a mixed affair, because one of the break away factions of the old nationalist party, which was called the Umma party, was also part of the revolution. I don’t know if you’ve heard of Abdulrahman Babu [Abdulrahman Mohamed Babu (1924-1996)]? He became quite a senior minister in the Tanzanian government, after the union. And various other people like the senior military oficer in the Tanzanian army was also one of these guys who was originally in the Zanzibar revolution but who came from the nationalist side rather than the AfroShirazi side. So there was some luidity. Mind you, it all ended when Karume [Abeid Amani Karume, irst President of Zanzibar] was assassinated in 1972, though the person who did it was also from this side. After that, they expelled all those guys and imprisoned them, then there was a break. But earlier it wouldn’t have been a straightforward racial division. This is simply the story they liked to tell later, especially when you consider that Karume’s wife was an Indian anyway and his children are half African and half Indian. You know Zanzibar is an odd place like that. TS: You left in ’68? On a tourist visa? AG: We left actually in late ’67. Well, we didn’t have a visa. In those days you couldn’t get a visa, it was a very bad time, because of all the expulsions of Asians from East Africa. Not Amin’s [Idi Amin, President of Uganda from 1971-1979], but all the various others, so they were very suspicious of anybody who wanted to come to Britain from our parts. So I think we went to the British High Commission in Dar es Salaam and they said no, no visa, but you can take a tourist visa, which will allow you to stay there for a month or something like that. So what did we do? We came as tourists, and a cousin of ours, a very close cousin, we grew up together in the same house, was then doing his PhD at Wye College, which was a London University college, which is only 15 miles away. It’s part of the University of London but obviously they have land down here, which is why we ended up in Canterbury. He came and picked us up and said, ok what are you going to do? We wanted to do A-levels, so we enrolled at the Tech College here in Canterbury to do our A-levels. He inished his PhD the following year and left, so we were here on our own. Now, how did the tourist visa turn into a student visa? It was a slightly kinder time than now, and they didn’t ask for a visa, we just enrolled. TS: It is inconceivable now that they did not check your visa. AG: That was your business according to the college. So we enrolled and after being accepted, only then did we apply for a visa. The immigration authorities weren’t happy about that and there had to be a little bit of acting and crying, but in the end they said alright, but you have to go the police station every month for them to check that you are a student. TS: And how did the study permit get converted into a residence permit, or do you have British citizenship? AG: Yes, eventually, much later, I was married to an English woman, so it was straightforward. But for a while, we went to the police station with a report from the college that we were attending classes and after about three months or so, the police oficer we had to see said it was alright we didn’t have to come anymore. TS: And A-levels, how long did that take? 158 A Conversation with Abdulrazak Gurnah AG: Two years. TS: And after that you started at the University of London? Downloaded by [University of Stellenbosch] at 07:16 29 May 2013 AG: Well, no. What happened was that when we came here, both of us were persuaded by this cousin of ours, who was doing agriculture, that you must do science A-levels otherwise what’s the point of studying? You know, if you do science then you will be able to get jobs, and do something useful, the usual kind of arguments. So both of us did that. Ahmed did more biological sciences because he decided that that’s the direction he wanted to take, and I did physics, maths and chemistry with the idea that I would do engineering. And in fact it was all going quite well, and I even got offered two places to study. However, there was no money when we came here. So we struggled. I don’t quite know how we survived, actually, but we did. TS: And were you both doing casual jobs, is that when you worked as a hospital orderly? AG: No, that was later. We were both doing summer jobs, but it was more like we were living poorly. The landlady and the landlord, who we were lodging with, were very kind, for months and months and months we didn’t pay any rent. We couldn’t. We just said we were waiting for money to come from home, but there was no money coming from home, we knew there was no money coming from home, but what can you do? We did eventually pay some of it back, afterwards, when we both got jobs, me at the hospital, and Ahmed at the post ofice. But basically it meant that we couldn’t continue studying, we had to get jobs. And so we did, and that’s when I worked in the hospital for three years and Ahmed worked in the post ofice for maybe two. TS: How old were you when you started your irst year of the teaching degree at London University? AG: I would have started that in ’71, I think, so I was 22, something like that. But by then, while I was working in the hospital, I decided that I really didn’t want to do engineering, so I did evening classes. I took English A-levels because I wanted to study English. I started at Christchurch who just last year awarded me an honorary degree. TS: Thank you for clarifying some of the gaps in your biography. Shall we move on to your work? I thought we could start by talking about the craft itself. Do you have a particular routine? Do you write with a special pen, or do you write at the computer? AG: I write at a computer at home. I hardly ever do it at the ofice, I always write at home. It’s one of the little subterfuges that I play on myself. When I’m here, I do university work and I try not to take it home and when I’m at home I write and I try not to bring that here. Unless there’s something quite speciic that I’m doing, maybe I’m proof reading a story or an article, then I might do it here, because I have a couple of hours to spare or I have some urgent marking to complete then I might take that home, but I try to keep these two things separate. That’s just an artiicial division. So I work at my computer at home but I do keep handwritten notes. TS: Let’s say you have an idea for a novel, do you create mind maps or story boards? AG: No, I don’t have charts. Some people do and they ind it quite useful to do that. I don’t. It often takes quite a while for me to begin, because of teaching and other academic writing that I do, and also nowadays because of travelling – people want to have you here or have you there. 159 Tina Steiner Quite often vacation time, which used to be for me the time when I would be able to concentrate on writing, is not always as free as one would like. I don’t write during term time. I usually like to have a period of time in front of me where I know I can get up every day and, if I have the strength, just work on that thing for however long I’ve got, a month, two months. Currently, for example, I’m just completing a period of study leave which I’ve had since January, so that is nine months that I’ve been writing. I’ve just completed the irst draft of a novel. That’s the ideal way of working for me. The summer is very good on the whole. TS: And when you’ve got an idea and have started writing, can you work at it the whole day? Downloaded by [University of Stellenbosch] at 07:16 29 May 2013 AG: I would like to say yes, but not really. Actually, just last year I was talking to a writer who is quite well known and successful and she said she can’t work beyond 12 ’o clock. I set myself a complex series of targets as it were. So it’s not just time, it’s how much I have written. TS: Word count? AG: No, not word count, not exactly. It doesn’t have to be precise. It’s about keeping these things in the balance: Has it gone well? But it’s only 2’o clock. Should I press on? Shall I stop while it’s going well? Have I done enough work? Sometimes you really get stuck on something and it’s necessary to push through until you get beyond that blockage. I don’t think it’s a good idea to stop when it isn’t going well. I feel I want to reach a point where things are beginning to just low a little bit, and I think this is the moment to stop, because then you can pick up again in a more optimistic state of mind, rather than returning to something that’s all tangled up. Again, this doesn’t always work, because you can’t always sort it out. TS: Do you think your work as an academic creates a dificult tension or do you ind there’s lots of spill-over between academic and creative writing? AG: Well, you’re talking about a long period both as an academic and as a writer. At different stages it would have been different. When I started out, it was a real struggle – my children were small – to keep all these things going. But not impossible. It was just hard work. Now I’m much more relaxed about it because my children have grown up. I’m not so concerned as I was at one time about academic writing, although I do it when interesting things occur to me. But I’m now much more committed to being a writer of iction. So there isn’t the same conlict of guilt and responsibilities. But that’s not really the question, or not entirely, the question is also is there a conlict in terms of what engages you. And that has never been so. I’ve always found the two things quite separate, but they kind of inform each other in an interesting way. One way more so than the other, that is to say that my reading informs my writing much more than my writing informs my reading. TS: In ‘Writing and Place’ you spoke about the possibility of narrative offering more complex ways of knowing, and you used this intriguing formulation: ‘with time, dealing with contradictory narratives has come to me to seem a dynamic process even if by its very nature it is a process irst undertaken from a position of weakness.’ What did you mean by that? AG: I think I would have meant that this is a defensive position. What I was referring to is how these narratives, or narratives like these, are actually challenging a dominant narrative, obviously a European or an imperial one, because they offer more details, and even appear to contradict 160 A Conversation with Abdulrazak Gurnah Downloaded by [University of Stellenbosch] at 07:16 29 May 2013 themselves at times because they’re not as consistent as that all powerful narrative. And so the position of weakness is that you’re not able to say with complete conviction, that it’s not that, it’s this. Because quite often you don’t have that capacity or it might be that it’s not possible to actually deliver the deinitive rebuttal to that imperial narrative. So, in that sense, delivered from a position of weakness, but that too has a kind of dynamism about it because you’re not seeking to produce one powerful narrative. You’re already granting that this is a narrative which is bitty, fragmented, incomplete, and a guy down the next street may very well contradict it. TS: I wonder if this doesn’t also translate into the kinds of positioning of many of your characters? The narrative of Memory of Departure concludes with Hassan standing on the boat and as he looks back to land he wishes for irmer ground. Is this wish for irmer ground under one’s feet a metaphor for many of your characters who cannot claim that sense of arrival, of exactly knowing where they stand. Does that position of weakness become a particular ethical or situational stance? AG: Yes. I could have answered your question about that position of weakness by saying that it is also a subjective position. A position where, if you’re making an argument that says things are more complicated than they seem, it seems to me that you’re already positioning yourself as somebody who cannot speak authoritatively. That too is a position of weakness. That subjective self-awareness is always that wishing for irmer ground. But it’s not really a true wish, because if you do have irmer ground then you lose the capacity for complexity. TS: There are many gaps, silences, secrets and lies represented in your narratives. The silences might be enforced, so either characters cannot speak or they don’t wish to speak, or both actually. But this creates the dificulty of writing something that cannot be said. How do you write about the way in which the characters have to negotiate gaps of knowledge or the possibility of not being able to say something, yet saying something in the narrative? AG: Well, I guess, that’s a challenging subtlety to achieve or to aspire to. That is to say, so much is impossible to say in intercourse with other people. It’s just not possible to say things, because it would cause offence, because it would hurt, or because you would be revealing more than you’d want to, and so all the time there is this checking, both of oneself and also of the limits of intercourse and exchange. And I guess, the more you trust, the more you release, the less you trust … So in the irst place then, it’s just simply that. It’s a way of saying, this is how we deal with each other: we don’t really open up to each other. We deal with each other in these sort of suppressed exchanges. Does this mean we can’t read what’s going on? We can. TS: But we also misread. I was thinking about Admiring Silence and the unnamed narrator and his relationship to Emma. It’s interesting to me that she wants stories of Zanzibar and his past, but somehow he can’t tell her the truth about the past. And maybe it is because he thinks that she expects a certain kind of past that he doesn’t have, or cannot give. But I think he also forecloses the possibility of that relationship lourishing because he is telling her lies. AG: When he’s telling her lies, my idea there, anyway, was something to do with the seduction of the possibility of making yourself anew. And I think this is one of the things that happens to people who are dislocated. They don’t have to be from a poor place but just dislocated, there’s no one to check on those stories. You can alter them. So what I was trying to do with that is really to say this is how he is seduced into these stories, he is seduced because these are cleaner stories. 161 Tina Steiner But then in the end, because he knows he’s doing that, he’s doing it with a self-consciousness, he then begins to parody himself, to satirize himself for doing what he’s doing, which is to tell, you know, lying stories. So he then tells even bigger lies as if to say look what a bunch of idiots these are, they believe anything. Downloaded by [University of Stellenbosch] at 07:16 29 May 2013 TS: Well exactly, that I think is particularly stark with Mr. Willoughby. But even Emma sort of forces the narrator, so it’s a reciprocal problem: she wants him to be a certain kind of man that she can admire, so it’s a two-way process that somehow goes wrong. And I wonder if Abbas’s silence in The Last Gift is a different kind of silence or is it similar? AG: No, I think that’s probably a different kind of silence. That’s primarily a shamed silence, rather than an admiring silence. It’s clearly a lying, disguising silence. Whereas in the case of Abbas, it’s one of those stories that you wish to bury forever and not to ever remember. Let me tell you how that idea came to me. It wasn’t really from Admiring Silence, although it was at a time when I was writing Admiring Silence, sitting in my ofice, not here, down there somewhere [he gestures toward the English department corridor], an old man rang, just like this, in the morning, and we spoke for a few minutes and he said ‘I’m from Zanzibar. And I’ve just read in the newspaper about your book Paradise and that it’s on the Booker [shortlist], and I just thought I’d ring you and say hello. I live in Ashford’. And he said, ‘I left Zanzibar when I was very young, I was stowed away on a ship”. And I said, ‘oh really? Where did you go?’ He said, ‘oh lots of places, but I’ve now forgotten Swahili, I don’t remember anybody, I’ve never been back, and I’ve never spoken to anybody. You’re the irst person from Zanzibar that I’m speaking to’. Unfortunately, I was actually too distracted with my own life and the things that were happening to me, and God knows what, probably work, to really take this in completely. And I said, ‘Ok, anyway thanks for calling. Bye’. But then afterwards, for many years I was thinking about this conversation. But as I say, then I was actually in the middle of writing Admiring Silence and I had already got beyond the point where he has gone away. But these things happen sometimes, you know, life begins to relect what you’re doing and you think, hey, what? But I’m writing about that! He said he couldn’t speak Swahili anymore, he’s forgotten. So then when I was thinking about Abbas and I started to write or to think about writing The Last Gift, I wondered what had happened to that man. That’s when I thought this might be a credible story of what might have happened to that fellow, and I remember he sounded really unhappy, but maybe he was just old and unwell. Anyway, different silences I think. TS: The cost for Abbas of hiding his past is very high, and not just for him but also for Maryam and the children and I wonder if you want to say something about how much the next generation needs to know about their parents’ origins? It seems that Jamal’s reaction to his father’s story is more enabling, but Hanna is unable to cope with the fact that she didn’t know anything about her past. AG: Yes, I suppose those are the two ways, I could have swopped them around. I just wanted one being able to sympathize or empathize, to begin to imagine the life of his father. And the other feeling outrage at both not being told about the past but also at being put in these circumstances by both her father and her mother, who claims to have been raped. 162 A Conversation with Abdulrazak Gurnah TS: The characters’ internal story within the family and the hurts that go with it is one aspect of Hanna’s outrage, another is the need of society to put her in a box. The dinner scene when Uncle Digby says he is outraged that she doesn’t know her origins works against her in a way. Downloaded by [University of Stellenbosch] at 07:16 29 May 2013 AG: Of course. She’s rejecting that position of weakness we were discussing earlier. She’s rejecting the indeterminacy of the migrant second generation. Are you English? Are you British? Are you something else? Where do you belong? So what Digby’s wanting to say, we know you don’t belong exactly, where do you really belong? It’s a way of debating of how someone like her might be read, but also how someone like her wishes or is afraid of being read. So she is not interested, particularly, in being given this indeterminacy. She wants to be English. Not because, at least not in the novel anyway, not because there’s anything in particular she admires about being English, but so she can just get on with her life, like everybody else. TS: Would you say that race is really the sticking point here? AG: It doesn’t have to be race entirely, it’s appearance that’s the issue. And I was also thinking about religion, not in the sense of practice, but in the sense of cultural belonging. Being a Muslim in this current climate is not easy for her. She changes her name, she doesn’t know why. She doesn’t discuss it. But there are various ways in which she wants to distance herself. Jamal attempts to analyze this a little bit. There are various ways in which she wants to distance herself from this mess of her identity. Incidentally she’s not the only one who’s doing that. I have various people in The Last Gift who are in some ways also trying to evade their selves, obviously Abbas. TS: Maybe you can speak a bit more about Islam on the Swahili coast? Islam functions as a cultural inheritance that is enabling to Saleh Omar in By the Sea, who prays the Ya-Latif on Alfonso’s towel. Religion there is a sheltering, it provides anchorage. But then there’s also Othman, the miser, in The Last Gift and that family in Memory of Departure whose performance of respectable spirituality rings hollow. AG: I’m really interested in how people understand the world, so it’s the cultural meaning of religion that I explore. I remember when I started thinking about Paradise, one of the things that I was interested in then was to say: How do people know the world? What is their understanding of the world? What informs this understanding? These are not readers, these are not people who check encyclopedias for information. I think that the way they understand the world is vitally informed by Islam, or Islamic culture. And I wasn’t inventing that, this was a relection of how of the world in which a lot of the coast, and not only just the coast, really probably further south and further north, were being told stories that were current and that were transmitted through belonging to Islamic culture. And it’s that that’s in motion. And trade. Trade, I would have said probably, but also the way in which scholarship is transmitted. As I said, these are not readers but this is how a religious scholar might visit and say this is this, this is what happens here, this is what happens there. In a way you might say this is something kind of medieval, but that would be to diminish it, in the way that the imperial narrative always diminishes other forms of knowing which are not archival or book based. But it is certainly a propagation of a way of knowing, the stories you tell about the world. What makes Islamic culture or the Indian Ocean exchange system important is that it actually forms the story of the world for people in those cultures. TS: This reminds me of the way you spoke about Fra Mauro’s Mappa Mundi [at the Zoë Wicomb Colloquium, Stellenbosch University, April 2010]; it captures that world with the little red 163 Tina Steiner banners that have legends and stories on them. Yet the way in which the map is written is very accurate, so would you say that that relates to Islamic culture? AG: That’s why I brought it up. One of the interesting things about Fra Mauro is that he did not leave Venice. To him, these were transmitted stories, and he was not querying them, or rather he was querying them up to a certain point, but there they are. They too form a kind of a collection of stories that become the story of the world. Downloaded by [University of Stellenbosch] at 07:16 29 May 2013 TS: Like A Thousand and One Nights? AG: Well it’s a very good example of transmission in itself, because it isn’t actually a volume of stories. It’s only now a volume of stories because it’s been collected. These were a series of stories starting from different places: China, through India, so you see names like Sinbad, which means somebody from Sindh. You read those stories of Aladdin, obviously Chinese. These are stories from everywhere, you have stories from Haroun al-Rashid, Iraq, Egypt, and they circulate against each other and amongst each other. Only when someone calls them A Thousand and One Nights and puts them in one volume we begin to think of them as if they would have been transmitted whole instead of this knocking around and with some different versions. People would know these stories even if they’re not readers, because they would be told. People still used to tell stories when I was a child. TS: You were talking about the civility of trade. The Indian Ocean World is generous but it’s also rapacious and violent. Yet there is this courteous way of engaging, is that linked to an understanding of one’s world as part of an Islamic world? AG: No, not really. The sense of belonging to that Indian Ocean world, at least the part of it that I knew, which is largely an Islamic one which had been sort of incorporated into Islamic epistemology, even if you’re talking about India or Hindu cultures. So that’s one way of understanding, as I say. But then these other things that are to do really with more complicated matters. It is the history of violence; it is a history of exploitation, of people coming from elsewhere, particularly the part of the East African Coast that I come from. Coming to make money, to trade, but it isn’t a benign adventure. We come here to trade to the best advantage we can, whether it’s to trade in materials or whether it’s to kidnap people and sell them. But the deeper thing is that, again this is what I was thinking of in Paradise, it’s a profoundly patriarchal culture. Its victims are its own prodigy, women, children, those unequal, powerless within it. And while it’s not unforgiving, while it’s full of its courtesies and humanities it’s also fairly inlexible about its patriarchy. TS: The violence in the text assumes quite a lot of space, in the sense that it is relentless and often painful because it interferes in the most intimate relations between people. For example, parents are very cruel to their children – would you say that this has to do with the patriarchal system? And again, I want to come back to this idea of hypocrisy, of pretending to be devout or living a life according to a sense of honour, but then within the families it is so unforgiving the way in which people treat each other, particularly if one considers the Shaaban family in By the Sea or the family in Memory of Departure. AG: Yes, well, obviously Memory of Departure was the irst book I wrote and I, well there you go, one mustn’t be critical of one’s own work too much, but I suppose there was something quite 164 Downloaded by [University of Stellenbosch] at 07:16 29 May 2013 A Conversation with Abdulrazak Gurnah deinite I had in mind, that this was a family that was already marginalized, that had already become dishonoured because of the father. Both of what the father is accused of, but also because of the way the father is. So in a sense, he would not be a typical igure in that system or culture. And it’s precisely because he is so marginalized that he is so violent. So you see, I tend not to think of what I write as violence, so I’m always a little bit surprised when people say with such irmness, and I think, really? I’m not saying it’s not true but I don’t think of it as violence. I think of it as a kind of greed, so the house, the arguments in By the Sea, which are mostly to do with inheritance, and to do with houses, and who owns what. I think that, that’s something that happens in many places where these things are not clear cut, where they rely on some kind of unspoken laws and understandings and so on. You see what I mean? Whereas where you can go to a lawyer, have your will drawn up, and take the whole thing to court, it’s clear, but where things can’t be done like that or are not done like that, then it seems to me inheritance is – runs the risk of these sorts of feuds. You know people become transformed by the idea of possession and money and whatever it might be, and do quite cruel things to each other. TS: Yes but isn’t it Hussein who initially arrives and who with his stories, maps and the ud-alqamari captures Saleh’s imagination – so that he agrees to the disastrous loan – which then brings him into the squabble with the Shaaban family. How does the outsider igure in this? AG: Well because this is the other thing I was thinking of, a igure like Hussein, he’s driven by, ultimately, whatever other things drive him, his clothes whatever, like Uncle Aziz in Paradise, he’s a trader, he’s a mercantilist, he wants to get advantage wherever he can ind it. And the way I dress him up in certain clothes and give him perfumes, he is somebody who is a practiced conman at some point or another, he’s not entirely untrustworthy. But at a moment when he sees he’s after all probably bored, having to wait for the winds to change so he can return home, so he’s just having fun with this idiot man, that he kind of beguiles and seduces. So it’s malice more than violence, if you like. It’s more a malicious sort of taking advantage. TS: And how does the seduction of Hassan it into that? AG: Again, I would have thought just taking advantage. You see weakness, you exploit it. Certain kinds of people negotiate proit all the time. Even if they don’t really want it, but still, if they can take it, they do. I’m thinking these are people like Uncle Aziz, who are not bad people, who have politeness and manners and gifts of various kinds, who are intelligent, but really, who are exploiters. TS: But even in that story of exploitation there is a sense that it is more complicated because when Hussein leaves, Hassan is described as a bride who is mourning, and he follows him. AG: He is seduced, I suppose. For whatever reason it is that people feel that way about another person, love I suppose you would call it. But even if it isn’t that, I would guess Hassan is seduced by whatever it is he sees in Hussein. His sophistication, his manhood. TS: So much attention has been paid to the characters in your iction who leave, but what is also fascinating to look at is those who are left behind, and the way they have to piece their life together, for example the mother of the unnamed narrator in Admiring Silence, but also of course the women mainly in Desertion. And I wondered if the person who leaves isn’t always in some ways haunted by the story of those who have been left behind? 165 Tina Steiner Downloaded by [University of Stellenbosch] at 07:16 29 May 2013 AG: That was one of the big ideas in Desertion, with the two brothers, one who stays and one who leaves; because it’s a little debate I keep conducting with myself about, not so much personally although sometimes it is, what is it to leave, what is it to stay. Who’s the wiser one, the one who leaves or the one who stays? And I guess it’s one of the questions that keeps returning in what I write. The fact that it’s often the men who leave is because that often is the case. But also it’s what I know more about and I don’t know whether the regrets and the beneits would be the same for a woman leaving, I don’t know. I suspect it would be a different battle, or entail a different way of coping. TS: Maybe I can come back to circulating stories. In all your novels there is this intricate web of intertextuality and stories can either open up the world and allow possibilities but they can also come with a discourse that closes things down, for example I’m thinking of Dottie reading Dickens and Austen. It’s almost like the stories don’t give her what she needs in order to write her story of success or belonging or at least some measure of material comfort even. I wondered if you wanted to say a bit about literary inluences, people have remarked on Conrad in relation to Paradise but also Melville and A Thousand and One Nights in By the Sea. And then I stumbled across the Montaigne essays in The Last Gift and I was intrigued. AG: Well it’s entertaining partly, of course. Even as you said that, the Montaigne, you smiled, because I think it gives us pleasure as readers to say: Ah, I know what he’s doing! That recognition of intertextualities to some extent reintroduces us to each other as readers. We are reading the same thing, and this gives a sense of a shared textuality, and I think that’s pleasing, just in itself. But in another way of course, they provide a very convenient echo or resonance, so that you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. Because there is this shared textuality, it means you can gesture towards another text and it enriches this one, but also, I think, enriches the reader’s understanding of what’s going on there. And I guess you can do several things here, you can disguise all this so that it requires proper scholarship and literary detective work to ind the parallels; or you can make it interesting by reinventing it in a way so that it’s like but displaced in a particular way so that it’s not an obvious echo, as I suggested, or resonance, or illusion, if you want. TS: So what were you thinking when Dottie says she can’t read the Dickens novel, it’s too thick for her? AG: Well at that point she’s not a member of this textual community, so for her, despite the resonances between her story and the story of Estelle, she’s not aware of that and so she doesn’t recognize it. But she will learn to be wiser than that. I suppose, that would be a third dimension to this, which is to say that these stories have already been told and we can think ourselves fortunate to have a Shakespeare to turn to and say ah! I’ve heard this before! Isn’t this familiar or isn’t this like that? So not only does it demonstrate a kind of shared readership but it actually, I’m trying to avoid saying it in a blunt way, all happened, these are not stories that are peculiar to Zanzibar or to whatever, but these are cycles of events that we simply have to look at now from a different perspective, and see them, understand things that we didn’t understand. TS: Can you explain how the Bartleby story works in By the Sea? AG: So why Bartleby? Well, because he’s fascinated by the choice that he makes, not just the silence choice, but he’s fascinated by the choice that he makes to withdraw himself. And what’s unclear in reading Bartleby, at least in my reading of Bartleby, is the question whether Bartleby 166 A Conversation with Abdulrazak Gurnah Downloaded by [University of Stellenbosch] at 07:16 29 May 2013 is defeated. Clearly he is, but is he defeated to the point of wanting to commit suicide? Which is how some people read it, so that he doesn’t eat at all until he eventually commits suicide; or is it a retreat which inevitably means that you can’t retreat from human contact and intercourse, if you do that it is a kind of death. Or is it that because nobody except the narrator who in fact misunderstands what he’s doing, that there is no possibility of intercourse with somebody who chooses to withdraw himself, and because Saleh Omar himself also does that after he’s been released from prison, and he just sits in that shop and doesn’t see anybody, doesn’t speak to anybody, that he too is somebody kind of retreating. He doesn’t go as far as Bartleby of course, and indeed in the end he’s pulled out of that, but he’s fascinated by what it means for Bartleby to do what he does. TS: You mentioned your new novel at the beginning of our conversation, I wonder if we can end off by you telling us a little bit about it? AG: There is always an impulse with each of these novels. I’ve been writing short stories recently and I thought I would put together a story collection. The irst story I wanted to write, I called ‘His Mother’, I had the title and the irst page, that’s how I write actually, I write a couple of paragraphs and then I leave it and sometimes it will stay like that for a year or two until I’m ready … so I don’t forget it. Anyway, I had this ready to go, so that’s what I started to write, the story called ‘His Mother’ only it didn’t want to be a story. TS: It wanted to be a novel? AG: So it just kept going and going. The idea of the story is based on something that happened to me, although that’s not what the novel is about in the end, this is how we talk about the impulse. My mother died in 2000, she died on Christmas Day, and because it was Christmas Day of course I was just as likely not to be there, and as it turned out I wasn’t there. We were away for three days when I got back, I think we were living in Brighton then, eventually somebody from home got hold of me and told me that she had died, and of course by then she was buried already, buried the same day, and the khitma readings were also over, so it was too late to do anything or go there. Anyway, so that was the starting point, I wanted to write a story about that, and obviously I planned to change it so that it wasn’t just you’ve gone to stay for a couple of days with friends over Christmas, or something like that, but to make it something less worthy. In other words, put together the idea of obligation and sense of duty that you might feel at moments like that and how it might be perceived by other people and how you might perceive it yourself. So a story that would have guilt and reassessment, you know. What was I doing? Why wasn’t I near a phone instead of doing whatever I was? That’s where it started. But it kind of goes its own way after that. 167