“But what’s it about?”
The common question that haunts many writers is one where their audience wants an incredibly complex creation like a novel reduced to a few – sometimes very few – words. Do you reveal the plot? The setting? The characters? The themes? The era?
Take “Hamlet.” What do you say? It’s about a Prince of Denmark… Okay, hardly gripping. It’s about a series of failed relationships; fathers and daughters, mothers and sons. It’s about power and succession; foreign intervention. Sounds a little complex. There’s a ghost, so it’s a ghost story too. Treachery and betrayal. Love and tragedy. Beauty and loyalty… Each would be true in a sense but none would actually do the work justice.
Is the author’s own background, race, life – now included in a ghastly section called “context” for students of literature – to be included? It’s a response to the playwright’s son’s death; true again but only partially illuminating. The answer usually lies in “read it yourself.” What, then, of Abdulrazak Gurnah’s novels?
Gurnah says that he hopes to create narratives that are “accurate, truthful and possibly powerful accounts” out of the experiences of individuals. As a writer, he has the privilege of creating a more nuanced response, allowing a narrative to acquire reflection, depth, and a significance not immediately available to the original owner of the tale.
Awarded the Nobel in 2021 for his writing that focuses on the “fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents” his works often centre around the plight and flight and fight of displaced individuals. He described how much of his writing is actually about characters searching for things hidden from them; sometimes truths about their past, their backgrounds, their culture. These are big issues that he addresses, ones which in the current fraught times of almost endemic displacement, a sandal-shod world on the move, seem searingly important. The voice of the individual, so easily lost in the churn of the crowd, is one that he allows to be heard. Through that voice and the unfolding narrative, he brings us their depth and humanity. The ironically titled “Paradise,” which clinched his award, also unleashed a flood of re-prints of his previous works, thus encouraging his “discovery” by many new readers. The bildungsroman genre of this novel finds Yusuf at its heart, traded in exchange for a debt owed by his father. “Desertion” and “By the Sea” follow the lives of individuals cut adrift from their surroundings but seeking some answers and stability in worlds very alien to their own.
Gurnah said that literature “poses questions for us… opens up issues… humanizes experiences”. His own observations as a teenager of a system in East Africa was of a time “when domination disguised its real self in euphemisms and we agreed to the subterfuge.” This sense of self-imposed deception echoes in some of his work. His own motivation to write grew “in refusal of the self-assured summaries of people who despised and belittled us.” The experiences that he shares and illuminates for us through the genre of the novel I think will find an audience keen to read for themselves “what it’s about” for years to come.
