March 29, 2025 • 27 mins
Tanzanian-born, London-based author Abdulrazak Gurnah was midway through writing his latest novel, Theft, when he received a call letting him know he’d won the 2021 Nobel Prize for Literature. After more than a year of events and literary obligations, he finally returned to Theft, with more enthusiasm than ever. On this episode of Read This, Michael sits down with Abdulrazak to discuss his writing, the phenomenon of tourism and his latest book.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hello there, It's Ruby Jones and I'm back to share
another episode of Read This, Schwartz Media's weekly books podcast,
hosted by editor of the Monthly Michael Williams. It features
conversations with some of the most talented writers from Australia
and around the world. In this episode, Michael sits sound
for a chat with Nobel Prize winning author Abdul Razak Gerner.
(00:22):
As usual, I'm joined by Michael to tell me a
little bit more about the episode.
Speaker 2 (00:25):
Hi, Michael, Ruby Jones.
Speaker 1 (00:27):
Hello, So Michael, I think it's fair to say that
your guest on Read This this Week reached the pinnacle
of literary success in twenty twenty one when he was
awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. How life changing is
it to win a prize like that for a writer.
Speaker 2 (00:45):
Look, it's the big one in many ways, but the
Nobel Prize is a peculiar beast, truth be told. I
digress for a second, but there's this amazing video that
you can watch on YouTube from a BBC report when
Doris Lessing won the Nobel and it's just this fantastic clip.
She's climbing out of a taxi and she's got all
these bags of grocery. She's eighty eight, She looks tired,
(01:07):
she looks grumpy, she looks over everything, and then all
these people start thrusting kind of microphones and cameras in
her face and bombarding her. And eventually she's like, who
are you here to photograph? And the journalist says, we're
photographing you. Have you heard the news You've just won
the Nobel Prize And she looks at them, massive eye roll,
shoulders slumped, and she just says, are christ utter perfection?
(01:32):
Here is someone who's won arguably one of the biggest
literary prizes in the world, and she has no fucks
to give. I love it, and the Nobela is a
bit like that. It's kind of exalted in literary circles,
and yet it doesn't really have an impact on sales.
It doesn't really cut through to the consciousness. The best
thing about it really is that it highlights authors outside
(01:52):
the anglosphere. So the kind of works that we would
normally only find in translation. You know an E know
or I don't know, ogatok. People like that suddenly get
attention in the English language world, and that's amazing. And
the guests this week. As you noted, Abdul Razak Gurner
won the Nobel Prize in twenty twenty one. Now he's
(02:12):
London based, tanzan enborn. He writes in English, but the
Nobel for him becomes this kind of massive boost. He's
been spending a career writing these kind of extraordinary novels that,
more than anything else, capture what it is to be
a refugee, the nature of human displacement, the kind of
long shadow of colonialism. But it takes those works from
the kind of literary sphere and make sure that they
(02:35):
get greater awareness, greater recognition, and that's super exciting.
Speaker 1 (02:39):
And so in this episode, you and abdol Razak speak
at length about his latest novel, Theft. So tell me
a little about this one.
Speaker 2 (02:47):
Yeah, to be fair, he actually started writing Theft before
he won the Nobel Prize. And it's in many ways
classic Gurner. It follows three very different young people, Karem,
Falsia and Baddah, and their lives kind of intersect in
all these interesting ways that culminate in this shattering false
accusation that splits them apart. Is it such a terrific
(03:09):
novel and oneful bit of writing. And you know, for
all my bladder about the Nobel Prize, it's a reminder
that it's what's happening on the line, in the sentence
that really makes great literature, not all the literary accolades
that surrounded and Abdulraza is a writer that listeners really
should catch up with, if they haven't already.
Speaker 1 (03:29):
Coming up in just a moment, Zanzibar is still home
for abdul Razak Gurna.
Speaker 2 (03:39):
I might start with what is, in many ways the
ultimate obvious and banal question, which is the tyranny of
expectation your first novel after being awarded the Nobel Prize
for Literature, and whether that felt like a burden or
at the very least something that got into your head
as you are writing theft No.
Speaker 3 (03:59):
Actually, I can say without any sort of pretense of
you know or whatever, it so happened that I was
some way into the writing of the book when the
announcement was made, maybe the first quarters of the book
in the end, but with the announcement that had to stop,
because I mean, there's just too much going on, and
(04:22):
my sort of slight anxiety is doing all these wonderful
things for the next several months or a year, and
several months I should say, was when I go back
to it, it's still going to be alive. And I
went back to it, and it was, so I just
picked up and carried on. And I guess, you know,
because I wasn't writing it, but I was thinking about it.
(04:44):
I was able to get back to it and move
quite rapidly in the writing because I had so much
time to plan and think and anticipate.
Speaker 2 (04:54):
Tell me about that process or that feeling of a
liveness when it comes to writing a book. How much
which is that about a narrative or a story, and
how much of it's very much about character? Because this book,
perhaps alongside several of your earlier ones, but this one
is very acute la, a kind of three hammer, and
character is essential to the energy and the beating heart
(05:17):
of this book is that what's alive? Is it that
you can return and see those people.
Speaker 3 (05:23):
Yes, not only that, but the loveliest thing and the
most wonderful thing you can I can feel as a
writer is to say, I haven't said this yet, and
I haven't done that yet, and I haven't done the
other yet. So it's not only what's there is alive,
but they anticipated next parts are also already kind of
(05:44):
like stirring. So in that sense, you see, you feel
there is a destination. It isn't something that feels as
if it's kind of so what. There are things to write,
So that's the thing, that's the life.
Speaker 2 (05:58):
That's a nice thing. So I'm not stat that there
is that kind of a desire to kind of push
forward and for motion.
Speaker 4 (06:05):
That's it.
Speaker 3 (06:06):
There is something to continue with, you know, So it's
not it doesn't feel as if it's kind of run
into the ground or something like that.
Speaker 4 (06:15):
So there was that sense.
Speaker 3 (06:16):
But also in the meantime, of course, if you're talking
about those figures, the characters, then I've had all the
time to think about them and to sort of shape them,
perhaps more in greater detail. Often I think of writing
as this kind of process of accretion. I start with
the core idea, and many of the things that end
up being the novel are not there already, but there
(06:39):
is the core idea, and then as you write, things
pile up, as it were, and get more dense and
more intense and so on.
Speaker 2 (06:49):
I want to return to the three young people at
the heart of theft in a moment. But it seems
to me the other element that's integral to this book
is the setting, not just in terms of place, but
in terms of time. And I'm curious about that period
of the nineteen nineties in Zanzoba and what it was about,
the kind of nineteen nineties into the turn of the
(07:10):
millennium that so captured your imagination that you knew that
was a period in life in Zanzeba that you wanted
to explicitly write about.
Speaker 4 (07:20):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (07:21):
Sure, it was very much the period that it does
start earlier, So I wanted that to be the kind
of the focus period. But I also wanted to have
the before as well. And the before was the period
of just independence and the possibilities of that, the usual
disappointments that almost all our former colonial territories countries experienced
(07:46):
one way or another. But the nineties was a period
of kind of change in the sense of some of
the early ideas about what transformational society had already been
abandoned in a way. The various attempts to make a
socialist corporative state clearly.
Speaker 4 (08:06):
Did not work for Tanzania anyway.
Speaker 3 (08:08):
The excesses of the revolution in signsbag had quietened down.
Speaker 4 (08:13):
And one of the biggest factors, and this was tourism.
Speaker 3 (08:18):
You don't want to have people being mistreated and whatever
when you have tourists around, because they won't come back.
Speaker 2 (08:25):
It does take the edge of the cocktail.
Speaker 4 (08:29):
Yeah, it does.
Speaker 3 (08:31):
So in a way, it did lead rather strangely to
quieting things down, But that's not the only reason. The
other reason was also the kind of a new generation
of politicians and leaders now who many of whom were
people who traveled elsewhere, studied elsewhere and coming back with
different ideas about what is possible and what the future
(08:52):
should hold. So it's a period of possibilities. But possibilities
can also be seductive. They can seduce people from acting
within integrity if you like, and or strengthen others and
to say no, this is what I think is the
best thing to do.
Speaker 4 (09:06):
So I wanted that sort of suggestion of things.
Speaker 3 (09:09):
Opening up, but also opening up in ways that were
not always as clean as they looked.
Speaker 2 (09:16):
What was your relationship with zenz Aba at that time,
during that period you had returned after the many years
in which you hadn't visited, did you feel it all
on the outsider returning after your period of exile or
was it still your place?
Speaker 4 (09:34):
Can I just change that word exile? Yes, I don't
like to use that word.
Speaker 3 (09:39):
Because I don't think it's it's a description of my circumstances. Really,
because can me tell you why I think of exile
as a condition one finds oneself in a principle, usually
because you've said something in opposition, and in addition to that,
your life is at risk in some way, so you
choose exile rather than prison or being shot or whatever
(10:01):
it is. I left because I wanted to study and
it was impossible at that time, So my life was
not at risk when I left. I was not in
danger in any way at all. I was deprived of
this or that, or that or the other, but I
was not in danger. I think of exile as a vulnerable, dignified,
(10:21):
indeed an admirable position. I don't blame that for what
I did, which was to leave in order to improve
my life.
Speaker 2 (10:29):
I'm very interested to hear that. I absolutely understand and
respect that distinction. I mean, in that period you're away,
even though it was by choice, did you feel a
sense of estrangement from your homeland?
Speaker 4 (10:42):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (10:43):
Well, I did what I did because I was eighteen
years old and didn't know what I was doing, not
suggesting that it was simply a straightforward, heroic thing that
I thought, right, this is what I'm doing. Perhaps somebody
who was older and knew a little bit more about
the world would not have done that. But then at eighteen,
you don't know those things. You do something which may
be reckless, which may which may be brave, or what
(11:05):
you don't know. You act because certain situations are intolerable. No,
I don't want to live like this. So yeah, as
soon as I left. One of the first questions I
asked myself when I arrived in England was what have
I done?
Speaker 2 (11:20):
I mean, I think that's a reasonable response to England
in many respects historically, so that's a fair question, even
beginning with culinary opportunities and they're moving on from there,
what have you done?
Speaker 3 (11:35):
Yeah, No, it was more. It was more the being
so far away from everything I knew. And I think
this probably is not spectacularly unique or anything like that.
I'm sure it's the reaction of a stranger in a place,
particularly young, without skills, without money, without you know, any
kind of preparation. Really, but your question really was how
(11:56):
did I feel when I return? Yeah, So the very
first time I returned was after about seventeen years of
being away because, like I said earlier, knew new leaders
and so on, so there was an amnesty. So okay,
everybody who left can return if they.
Speaker 4 (12:10):
Want to, and so I went.
Speaker 3 (12:12):
At that point, I was not sure what kind of
reception I would receive. I thought, and this is to
do the guilt of the person who's been away. You
think either they will have forgotten me, or they'll say,
as soon as you open your mouth to say you've changed,
you're different, we don't know who you are, or something
like that. In fact, none of those things. The welcome
(12:33):
was incredible, and sure I was able to just come back,
go back rather and feel at home. And subsequent returns,
of which have been many since then, I have kind
of simply reassured and endorsed and whatever all that feeling.
The first thing my father said to me after I
sort of greet at him, and he said, yes, hello,
(12:55):
have you said your prayers today? And I said no,
not yet. He said, well, you've got the mosque, now
I say your prayers. And I felt like I was
a son.
Speaker 4 (13:03):
Yeah he is he hasn't seen me for seventeen years.
The first thing he says is have you said your prayers?
Go to the mosque?
Speaker 2 (13:11):
Reverting to type with one's parents is exactly is a
great privilege.
Speaker 3 (13:16):
You're still my son, I think, and do it what
I expect you to do. So it was very easy
to not even think about that, apart from obviously when
our hosts, but it was very easy to sort of
put that one side and be this other person that
I recognizably like the one I left, even if obviously
(13:36):
I'm not.
Speaker 2 (13:39):
When we return, we discussed the three characters of the
heart of Theft, and Abdul Razakh is the problematic phenomenon
of tourism in his hometown of Zanzoma.
Speaker 4 (13:49):
We'll be right back.
Speaker 2 (13:50):
So coming back to Theft of the kind of central
characters Kareem, Fasia and Bada. Was one of them prominent
in the conception of this book or was it the
(14:11):
interplay between the three of them that was your kind
of insighting idea?
Speaker 4 (14:17):
Yes, better was the starting point.
Speaker 3 (14:20):
In fact, I think I began by writing that section
which is now like the third chapter where he's taken
to the house of Uncle ost Man. I think that's
where I started. But because the starting point was the
accusation of theft, so that was the starting point of
the injustice of that, and it did how somebody in
(14:43):
his situation powerless to resist such an accusation, how he
might take that accusation, or what he might do about it. Yeah,
So it was to start with, it was to see
to position him, prepare him, if you like, for that
episode that it's going to be that he's going to
be accused. And as I was thinking of that, I
(15:05):
was thinking, well, how is he what are going.
Speaker 4 (15:07):
To be his options as he were?
Speaker 3 (15:09):
And then that's how Kareem came to mind that he
was going to be somebody who befriends him and takes
him away. And then I'm not saying anymore because it
really might spoil for the reader.
Speaker 2 (15:21):
Part of what I think is so acutely realized in
this book is that the nature of a wrongful accusation
is so embedded in ideas about how you are perceived
by others and the ways in which they get to
define who you are and what your capacity and your
limitations are. And that seems to me to be a
(15:43):
particularly interesting idea in this book.
Speaker 3 (15:45):
Yes, indeed one of the reasons for making better as
he is, which is that he's a set powerless, but
he's also aware of his powerlessness. He's an intelligent young man,
which in a way is precisely what makes him so
watchful and looking and seeing and trying to understand all
(16:07):
the time. So for me, it seems that this is
his greatest defense. He doesn't protest, he doesn't try to
defend himself against these accusations, or rather he does only
feebly as well. But he doesn't he doesn't have an
answer because he has no position, he has no power,
he has no support. But what he has is this
(16:28):
ability and capacity to see and kind of think about
it and learn something. And as you know, as as
you said, you've read so of in your books, I'm
always interested in how people manage to draw back from
a traumatic situation, At a situation which is which is oppressing,
(16:49):
how do they find the means to retrieve something from that,
to get out of that. Whereas somebody like Kreem moves
on because of his dynamism, I suppose it's it's ambition,
et cetera. Something like whether doesn't move on but kind
of calmly tries to understand.
Speaker 2 (17:12):
And at the heart of that is that kind of
relationship between passivity as a character and active kind of engagement.
And you know, between those two that becomes a kind
of a major point of tension. There's that and I'm
sorry I'm going to misquote this, but there's a wonderful
moment when but things to himself, I've learned to endure that.
(17:35):
You know, the steadiness that that not being reactive, that
not defining yourself in oppositions to the things that happen
to you can be a virtue in and of itself.
Speaker 3 (17:46):
Well, especially if you don't have the means to defend yourself,
if you don't have the means to say that's nonsense,
I'm not having that, don't talk to me like that,
or something like that. It won't it won't achieve anything
because of the situation that he's in. But in any case,
it's also a kind of defense. Courtesy and silence and
whatever can sometimes work to disarm.
Speaker 2 (18:10):
Tell me about the kind of third key figure in
the present day narrative or the latter narrative of the book, Fauzia.
Tell me about her and where she came from, and
how you say her.
Speaker 3 (18:22):
Well, I got interested in the idea of epilepsy as
I started to write, and somehow, you know, this is
what I think of his writer's luck. I had this
idea that I was starting to work or whether and
I heard a story of somebody I knew whose son
was born epileptic and very intelligent, gentleman, really talented, and
(18:45):
the anxieties and difficulties that the parents had for this boy,
this young man growing up. I think I was about fourteen,
And so I became interested in the idea, Well, what
are the symptoms, what is it?
Speaker 4 (18:58):
How can it be dealt with? You know what I mean?
Speaker 3 (19:01):
And in the circumstances of a place like Zanziba, where
where really health services are not very advanced still in fact,
if anything they've gone down, how would that have been perceived?
And how would the parents have coped with that? So
that first gave me fare, but it also gave me
Fausia's parents, you know, to see how they might cope,
(19:24):
particularly the mother. And naturally, you know, in a novel,
you've got to have a romance going on somewhay.
Speaker 2 (19:30):
You have a deeper romantic heart. It has to be said,
you know, you know, more than many novelists with ten
eleven books. And then I think I come to expect
when I read a book from you, that there is
going to be a romance.
Speaker 3 (19:43):
Absolutely okay, So it was obvious that this young woman
was going to be part of the relationship with either
possibly this career, but it becomes it's not just romance
for on its own sake. It also becomes away of
trying to understand human relations and how people are sympathetic
(20:04):
or kind to each other all the opposite. And it
seems to me that one to one, that is to
say that a loving or not a loving relationship is
the most intense kind of stage in whicher to explore
capacity for compassion and kindness and empathy and all of
(20:24):
those six and so we see how people cope.
Speaker 2 (20:28):
And I think compassion and kindness and empathy but also accommodation.
You know that thing about modifying one's life for one's
expectations because of love for another. And I think you
capture those rhythms of a love story incredibly well, that
idea that there is stuff that you give up willingly.
Speaker 3 (20:51):
For love, absolutely, and not only for love of man
and woman, of course, but also for love of a child,
to parent parent child, and all of these ways. So
Farsia is also, of course a dutiful daughter as well
as a clever and interested young woman. As Karim says
(21:11):
of her, you think, maybe slight condescension, she's an intellectual.
Speaker 2 (21:17):
Coming back to the thing that you flagged before about
Zanzibar in the nineties and the rise of tourism, because
I do. I think that that's one of the threads
in the book, and one of the kind of pressures
that I just don't remember reading before is it's such
a kind of potent postcolonial theme. But you deal with
(21:41):
it very gracefully, very sharply.
Speaker 3 (21:43):
I think, well, of course, I know that tourism is
a problematic phenomenon, and I know that very well, whereas
answer Base can sert, but that wasn't the show I
was interested in here, or rather, what I'm interested in
is also in a kind of original way, the way
these become disruptive forces. There is a way in which
(22:04):
they are very much disruptive forces in the way they
affect the economy, the way they encourage our leaders to
become more corrupt than they're inclined to be. Because of
all these commissions to get here, commissions to get there.
Speaker 4 (22:18):
But there is another way in which, as I said earlier,
it forces.
Speaker 3 (22:24):
The administration like the government, to provide a more peaceful environment.
It forces all kinds of developments to happen, roads to
be made, so the country kind of gains something even
as it loses some of the normal you know, rules
(22:46):
of behavior and so on that people are drawn into.
Speaker 4 (22:50):
Less so now than I think at first.
Speaker 3 (22:51):
You know, where drugs become a problem, for example, or
young women become involved in you know, relationships that are
are going to be exploitative. But what also has happened
is that the kind of tourists who now comes to Zanzibar.
In the nineties it was very much people who are
low budget or whatever the phrase is, whereas now people
(23:14):
come as families and you get a different atmosphere with
the tourists from the hedonistic young men and women who
are coming when in the early eighties, sorry, the mid
eighties and early nineties. It doesn't mean that the ugliness
of tourism isn't isn't there, but it's more restrained I think.
(23:35):
But what the most corrupt part of it is the
way in which money money gets used to build flash
hotels rather than money gets used to build better hospitals
and better schools.
Speaker 2 (23:47):
And there is culturally an idea about the tourists. And
I think it's Felsia's mother who has this amazing speech
about tourists, kind of furious about them, that culturally the
idea that it's superficial engagement with the place to be
a tourist, that you're you're there in a purely kind
of extractive sense without actually engaging. And it's struck me
(24:10):
reading the book that to a certain extent, the argument
seems to be that the tourist is almost the opposite
of the novelist, That the novelist tries to build something
and plant something and engage at a kind of deep
level from the roots up, whereas a tourist is there
taking what they can and skidding across the surface.
Speaker 3 (24:31):
Sure, I mean we're all we are all tourists, of course,
one way or another. But I think sometimes the relationship
between the tourists and the local person or the native
culture is so unequal that you can go in and pretend,
you know, like you go into these all inclusive sort
(24:52):
of places, A lot of tourists go to those places
and answer. But they go to their hotel by the beach,
they get taken on bus tours to this, to that that,
they get sent back to the hotel and they don't
really see anything. It's not so easy to be able
to do that if you if you're a tourist saying
in the UK, because you're not in that position of
an unequal power. You have to be on the underground,
(25:13):
you have to rub shoulders with people, you have to
hail a taxi, you know, sneered out by the waiters
and that kind of thing. But I think I tried
to do that to show how disengaged the tourist is,
and of course in the mother's outbursts at the end
is to have somebody say, you know, this is what
do they want here? Why don't they have beaches in
(25:35):
their own countries? Where do they come here?
Speaker 2 (25:37):
It feels like a very as far as albust good,
feels like one that you have either heard on many
occasions or maybe even outed yourself.
Speaker 3 (25:46):
I certainly apparently on many occasions, definitely, especially when when
something unpleasant has come about has happened, as in this case,
why did they come here?
Speaker 2 (26:00):
Yeah? But even then you're undercut it. There's a wonderful
idea about all ages. Imagine they knew what was of
value and now no longer do that. That this is
that we all have this kind of failure to see
the ways in which we're guilty of some of the
same things.
Speaker 3 (26:17):
Yes, although of course that is aspirational talk. There is
an argument about that because I think it's some mother
who says that, or the father, and it's Fauzier who says.
Speaker 4 (26:27):
But that we need them.
Speaker 3 (26:29):
Yeah, you know, they bring money, so we need them.
So both sides, you know, there is an argument to
be made on both sides.
Speaker 2 (26:40):
Abdul Razak Gerner's latest novel, Theft, is available at all
good bookstores. Now.
Speaker 1 (26:50):
Thank you so much for listening to another special episode
of Read This. We'll have another episode of Read This
to share with you next Sunday. As always, if you
want to dive further into Read This, you can search
for it where if you listen to podcasts, there are
more than eighty episodes in the archive for you to enjoy.
See you next week.
Hello there, It's Ruby Jones and I'm back to share
another episode of Read This, Schwartz Media's weekly books podcast,
hosted by editor of the Monthly Michael Williams. It features
conversations with some of the most talented writers from Australia
and around the world. In this episode, Michael sits sound
for a chat with Nobel Prize winning author Abdul Razak Gerner.
(00:22):
As usual, I'm joined by Michael to tell me a
little bit more about the episode.
Speaker 2 (00:25):
Hi, Michael, Ruby Jones.
Speaker 1 (00:27):
Hello, So Michael, I think it's fair to say that
your guest on Read This this Week reached the pinnacle
of literary success in twenty twenty one when he was
awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. How life changing is
it to win a prize like that for a writer.
Speaker 2 (00:45):
Look, it's the big one in many ways, but the
Nobel Prize is a peculiar beast, truth be told. I
digress for a second, but there's this amazing video that
you can watch on YouTube from a BBC report when
Doris Lessing won the Nobel and it's just this fantastic clip.
She's climbing out of a taxi and she's got all
these bags of grocery. She's eighty eight, She looks tired,
(01:07):
she looks grumpy, she looks over everything, and then all
these people start thrusting kind of microphones and cameras in
her face and bombarding her. And eventually she's like, who
are you here to photograph? And the journalist says, we're
photographing you. Have you heard the news You've just won
the Nobel Prize And she looks at them, massive eye roll,
shoulders slumped, and she just says, are christ utter perfection?
(01:32):
Here is someone who's won arguably one of the biggest
literary prizes in the world, and she has no fucks
to give. I love it, and the Nobela is a
bit like that. It's kind of exalted in literary circles,
and yet it doesn't really have an impact on sales.
It doesn't really cut through to the consciousness. The best
thing about it really is that it highlights authors outside
(01:52):
the anglosphere. So the kind of works that we would
normally only find in translation. You know an E know
or I don't know, ogatok. People like that suddenly get
attention in the English language world, and that's amazing. And
the guests this week. As you noted, Abdul Razak Gurner
won the Nobel Prize in twenty twenty one. Now he's
(02:12):
London based, tanzan enborn. He writes in English, but the
Nobel for him becomes this kind of massive boost. He's
been spending a career writing these kind of extraordinary novels that,
more than anything else, capture what it is to be
a refugee, the nature of human displacement, the kind of
long shadow of colonialism. But it takes those works from
the kind of literary sphere and make sure that they
(02:35):
get greater awareness, greater recognition, and that's super exciting.
Speaker 1 (02:39):
And so in this episode, you and abdol Razak speak
at length about his latest novel, Theft. So tell me
a little about this one.
Speaker 2 (02:47):
Yeah, to be fair, he actually started writing Theft before
he won the Nobel Prize. And it's in many ways
classic Gurner. It follows three very different young people, Karem,
Falsia and Baddah, and their lives kind of intersect in
all these interesting ways that culminate in this shattering false
accusation that splits them apart. Is it such a terrific
(03:09):
novel and oneful bit of writing. And you know, for
all my bladder about the Nobel Prize, it's a reminder
that it's what's happening on the line, in the sentence
that really makes great literature, not all the literary accolades
that surrounded and Abdulraza is a writer that listeners really
should catch up with, if they haven't already.
Speaker 1 (03:29):
Coming up in just a moment, Zanzibar is still home
for abdul Razak Gurna.
Speaker 2 (03:39):
I might start with what is, in many ways the
ultimate obvious and banal question, which is the tyranny of
expectation your first novel after being awarded the Nobel Prize
for Literature, and whether that felt like a burden or
at the very least something that got into your head
as you are writing theft No.
Speaker 3 (03:59):
Actually, I can say without any sort of pretense of
you know or whatever, it so happened that I was
some way into the writing of the book when the
announcement was made, maybe the first quarters of the book
in the end, but with the announcement that had to stop,
because I mean, there's just too much going on, and
(04:22):
my sort of slight anxiety is doing all these wonderful
things for the next several months or a year, and
several months I should say, was when I go back
to it, it's still going to be alive. And I
went back to it, and it was, so I just
picked up and carried on. And I guess, you know,
because I wasn't writing it, but I was thinking about it.
(04:44):
I was able to get back to it and move
quite rapidly in the writing because I had so much
time to plan and think and anticipate.
Speaker 2 (04:54):
Tell me about that process or that feeling of a
liveness when it comes to writing a book. How much
which is that about a narrative or a story, and
how much of it's very much about character? Because this book,
perhaps alongside several of your earlier ones, but this one
is very acute la, a kind of three hammer, and
character is essential to the energy and the beating heart
(05:17):
of this book is that what's alive? Is it that
you can return and see those people.
Speaker 3 (05:23):
Yes, not only that, but the loveliest thing and the
most wonderful thing you can I can feel as a
writer is to say, I haven't said this yet, and
I haven't done that yet, and I haven't done the
other yet. So it's not only what's there is alive,
but they anticipated next parts are also already kind of
(05:44):
like stirring. So in that sense, you see, you feel
there is a destination. It isn't something that feels as
if it's kind of so what. There are things to write,
So that's the thing, that's the life.
Speaker 2 (05:58):
That's a nice thing. So I'm not stat that there
is that kind of a desire to kind of push
forward and for motion.
Speaker 4 (06:05):
That's it.
Speaker 3 (06:06):
There is something to continue with, you know, So it's
not it doesn't feel as if it's kind of run
into the ground or something like that.
Speaker 4 (06:15):
So there was that sense.
Speaker 3 (06:16):
But also in the meantime, of course, if you're talking
about those figures, the characters, then I've had all the
time to think about them and to sort of shape them,
perhaps more in greater detail. Often I think of writing
as this kind of process of accretion. I start with
the core idea, and many of the things that end
up being the novel are not there already, but there
(06:39):
is the core idea, and then as you write, things
pile up, as it were, and get more dense and
more intense and so on.
Speaker 2 (06:49):
I want to return to the three young people at
the heart of theft in a moment. But it seems
to me the other element that's integral to this book
is the setting, not just in terms of place, but
in terms of time. And I'm curious about that period
of the nineteen nineties in Zanzoba and what it was about,
the kind of nineteen nineties into the turn of the
(07:10):
millennium that so captured your imagination that you knew that
was a period in life in Zanzeba that you wanted
to explicitly write about.
Speaker 4 (07:20):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (07:21):
Sure, it was very much the period that it does
start earlier, So I wanted that to be the kind
of the focus period. But I also wanted to have
the before as well. And the before was the period
of just independence and the possibilities of that, the usual
disappointments that almost all our former colonial territories countries experienced
(07:46):
one way or another. But the nineties was a period
of kind of change in the sense of some of
the early ideas about what transformational society had already been
abandoned in a way. The various attempts to make a
socialist corporative state clearly.
Speaker 4 (08:06):
Did not work for Tanzania anyway.
Speaker 3 (08:08):
The excesses of the revolution in signsbag had quietened down.
Speaker 4 (08:13):
And one of the biggest factors, and this was tourism.
Speaker 3 (08:18):
You don't want to have people being mistreated and whatever
when you have tourists around, because they won't come back.
Speaker 2 (08:25):
It does take the edge of the cocktail.
Speaker 4 (08:29):
Yeah, it does.
Speaker 3 (08:31):
So in a way, it did lead rather strangely to
quieting things down, But that's not the only reason. The
other reason was also the kind of a new generation
of politicians and leaders now who many of whom were
people who traveled elsewhere, studied elsewhere and coming back with
different ideas about what is possible and what the future
(08:52):
should hold. So it's a period of possibilities. But possibilities
can also be seductive. They can seduce people from acting
within integrity if you like, and or strengthen others and
to say no, this is what I think is the
best thing to do.
Speaker 4 (09:06):
So I wanted that sort of suggestion of things.
Speaker 3 (09:09):
Opening up, but also opening up in ways that were
not always as clean as they looked.
Speaker 2 (09:16):
What was your relationship with zenz Aba at that time,
during that period you had returned after the many years
in which you hadn't visited, did you feel it all
on the outsider returning after your period of exile or
was it still your place?
Speaker 4 (09:34):
Can I just change that word exile? Yes, I don't
like to use that word.
Speaker 3 (09:39):
Because I don't think it's it's a description of my circumstances. Really,
because can me tell you why I think of exile
as a condition one finds oneself in a principle, usually
because you've said something in opposition, and in addition to that,
your life is at risk in some way, so you
choose exile rather than prison or being shot or whatever
(10:01):
it is. I left because I wanted to study and
it was impossible at that time, So my life was
not at risk when I left. I was not in
danger in any way at all. I was deprived of
this or that, or that or the other, but I
was not in danger. I think of exile as a vulnerable, dignified,
(10:21):
indeed an admirable position. I don't blame that for what
I did, which was to leave in order to improve
my life.
Speaker 2 (10:29):
I'm very interested to hear that. I absolutely understand and
respect that distinction. I mean, in that period you're away,
even though it was by choice, did you feel a
sense of estrangement from your homeland?
Speaker 4 (10:42):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (10:43):
Well, I did what I did because I was eighteen
years old and didn't know what I was doing, not
suggesting that it was simply a straightforward, heroic thing that
I thought, right, this is what I'm doing. Perhaps somebody
who was older and knew a little bit more about
the world would not have done that. But then at eighteen,
you don't know those things. You do something which may
be reckless, which may which may be brave, or what
(11:05):
you don't know. You act because certain situations are intolerable. No,
I don't want to live like this. So yeah, as
soon as I left. One of the first questions I
asked myself when I arrived in England was what have
I done?
Speaker 2 (11:20):
I mean, I think that's a reasonable response to England
in many respects historically, so that's a fair question, even
beginning with culinary opportunities and they're moving on from there,
what have you done?
Speaker 3 (11:35):
Yeah, No, it was more. It was more the being
so far away from everything I knew. And I think
this probably is not spectacularly unique or anything like that.
I'm sure it's the reaction of a stranger in a place,
particularly young, without skills, without money, without you know, any
kind of preparation. Really, but your question really was how
(11:56):
did I feel when I return? Yeah, So the very
first time I returned was after about seventeen years of
being away because, like I said earlier, knew new leaders
and so on, so there was an amnesty. So okay,
everybody who left can return if they.
Speaker 4 (12:10):
Want to, and so I went.
Speaker 3 (12:12):
At that point, I was not sure what kind of
reception I would receive. I thought, and this is to
do the guilt of the person who's been away. You
think either they will have forgotten me, or they'll say,
as soon as you open your mouth to say you've changed,
you're different, we don't know who you are, or something
like that. In fact, none of those things. The welcome
(12:33):
was incredible, and sure I was able to just come back,
go back rather and feel at home. And subsequent returns,
of which have been many since then, I have kind
of simply reassured and endorsed and whatever all that feeling.
The first thing my father said to me after I
sort of greet at him, and he said, yes, hello,
(12:55):
have you said your prayers today? And I said no,
not yet. He said, well, you've got the mosque, now
I say your prayers. And I felt like I was
a son.
Speaker 4 (13:03):
Yeah he is he hasn't seen me for seventeen years.
The first thing he says is have you said your prayers?
Go to the mosque?
Speaker 2 (13:11):
Reverting to type with one's parents is exactly is a
great privilege.
Speaker 3 (13:16):
You're still my son, I think, and do it what
I expect you to do. So it was very easy
to not even think about that, apart from obviously when
our hosts, but it was very easy to sort of
put that one side and be this other person that
I recognizably like the one I left, even if obviously
(13:36):
I'm not.
Speaker 2 (13:39):
When we return, we discussed the three characters of the
heart of Theft, and Abdul Razakh is the problematic phenomenon
of tourism in his hometown of Zanzoma.
Speaker 4 (13:49):
We'll be right back.
Speaker 2 (13:50):
So coming back to Theft of the kind of central
characters Kareem, Fasia and Bada. Was one of them prominent
in the conception of this book or was it the
(14:11):
interplay between the three of them that was your kind
of insighting idea?
Speaker 4 (14:17):
Yes, better was the starting point.
Speaker 3 (14:20):
In fact, I think I began by writing that section
which is now like the third chapter where he's taken
to the house of Uncle ost Man. I think that's
where I started. But because the starting point was the
accusation of theft, so that was the starting point of
the injustice of that, and it did how somebody in
(14:43):
his situation powerless to resist such an accusation, how he
might take that accusation, or what he might do about it. Yeah,
So it was to start with, it was to see
to position him, prepare him, if you like, for that
episode that it's going to be that he's going to
be accused. And as I was thinking of that, I
(15:05):
was thinking, well, how is he what are going.
Speaker 4 (15:07):
To be his options as he were?
Speaker 3 (15:09):
And then that's how Kareem came to mind that he
was going to be somebody who befriends him and takes
him away. And then I'm not saying anymore because it
really might spoil for the reader.
Speaker 2 (15:21):
Part of what I think is so acutely realized in
this book is that the nature of a wrongful accusation
is so embedded in ideas about how you are perceived
by others and the ways in which they get to
define who you are and what your capacity and your
limitations are. And that seems to me to be a
(15:43):
particularly interesting idea in this book.
Speaker 3 (15:45):
Yes, indeed one of the reasons for making better as
he is, which is that he's a set powerless, but
he's also aware of his powerlessness. He's an intelligent young man,
which in a way is precisely what makes him so
watchful and looking and seeing and trying to understand all
(16:07):
the time. So for me, it seems that this is
his greatest defense. He doesn't protest, he doesn't try to
defend himself against these accusations, or rather he does only
feebly as well. But he doesn't he doesn't have an
answer because he has no position, he has no power,
he has no support. But what he has is this
(16:28):
ability and capacity to see and kind of think about
it and learn something. And as you know, as as
you said, you've read so of in your books, I'm
always interested in how people manage to draw back from
a traumatic situation, At a situation which is which is oppressing,
(16:49):
how do they find the means to retrieve something from that,
to get out of that. Whereas somebody like Kreem moves
on because of his dynamism, I suppose it's it's ambition,
et cetera. Something like whether doesn't move on but kind
of calmly tries to understand.
Speaker 2 (17:12):
And at the heart of that is that kind of
relationship between passivity as a character and active kind of engagement.
And you know, between those two that becomes a kind
of a major point of tension. There's that and I'm
sorry I'm going to misquote this, but there's a wonderful
moment when but things to himself, I've learned to endure that.
(17:35):
You know, the steadiness that that not being reactive, that
not defining yourself in oppositions to the things that happen
to you can be a virtue in and of itself.
Speaker 3 (17:46):
Well, especially if you don't have the means to defend yourself,
if you don't have the means to say that's nonsense,
I'm not having that, don't talk to me like that,
or something like that. It won't it won't achieve anything
because of the situation that he's in. But in any case,
it's also a kind of defense. Courtesy and silence and
whatever can sometimes work to disarm.
Speaker 2 (18:10):
Tell me about the kind of third key figure in
the present day narrative or the latter narrative of the book, Fauzia.
Tell me about her and where she came from, and
how you say her.
Speaker 3 (18:22):
Well, I got interested in the idea of epilepsy as
I started to write, and somehow, you know, this is
what I think of his writer's luck. I had this
idea that I was starting to work or whether and
I heard a story of somebody I knew whose son
was born epileptic and very intelligent, gentleman, really talented, and
(18:45):
the anxieties and difficulties that the parents had for this boy,
this young man growing up. I think I was about fourteen,
And so I became interested in the idea, Well, what
are the symptoms, what is it?
Speaker 4 (18:58):
How can it be dealt with? You know what I mean?
Speaker 3 (19:01):
And in the circumstances of a place like Zanziba, where
where really health services are not very advanced still in fact,
if anything they've gone down, how would that have been perceived?
And how would the parents have coped with that? So
that first gave me fare, but it also gave me
Fausia's parents, you know, to see how they might cope,
(19:24):
particularly the mother. And naturally, you know, in a novel,
you've got to have a romance going on somewhay.
Speaker 2 (19:30):
You have a deeper romantic heart. It has to be said,
you know, you know, more than many novelists with ten
eleven books. And then I think I come to expect
when I read a book from you, that there is
going to be a romance.
Speaker 3 (19:43):
Absolutely okay, So it was obvious that this young woman
was going to be part of the relationship with either
possibly this career, but it becomes it's not just romance
for on its own sake. It also becomes away of
trying to understand human relations and how people are sympathetic
(20:04):
or kind to each other all the opposite. And it
seems to me that one to one, that is to
say that a loving or not a loving relationship is
the most intense kind of stage in whicher to explore
capacity for compassion and kindness and empathy and all of
(20:24):
those six and so we see how people cope.
Speaker 2 (20:28):
And I think compassion and kindness and empathy but also accommodation.
You know that thing about modifying one's life for one's
expectations because of love for another. And I think you
capture those rhythms of a love story incredibly well, that
idea that there is stuff that you give up willingly.
Speaker 3 (20:51):
For love, absolutely, and not only for love of man
and woman, of course, but also for love of a child,
to parent parent child, and all of these ways. So
Farsia is also, of course a dutiful daughter as well
as a clever and interested young woman. As Karim says
(21:11):
of her, you think, maybe slight condescension, she's an intellectual.
Speaker 2 (21:17):
Coming back to the thing that you flagged before about
Zanzibar in the nineties and the rise of tourism, because
I do. I think that that's one of the threads
in the book, and one of the kind of pressures
that I just don't remember reading before is it's such
a kind of potent postcolonial theme. But you deal with
(21:41):
it very gracefully, very sharply.
Speaker 3 (21:43):
I think, well, of course, I know that tourism is
a problematic phenomenon, and I know that very well, whereas
answer Base can sert, but that wasn't the show I
was interested in here, or rather, what I'm interested in
is also in a kind of original way, the way
these become disruptive forces. There is a way in which
(22:04):
they are very much disruptive forces in the way they
affect the economy, the way they encourage our leaders to
become more corrupt than they're inclined to be. Because of
all these commissions to get here, commissions to get there.
Speaker 4 (22:18):
But there is another way in which, as I said earlier,
it forces.
Speaker 3 (22:24):
The administration like the government, to provide a more peaceful environment.
It forces all kinds of developments to happen, roads to
be made, so the country kind of gains something even
as it loses some of the normal you know, rules
(22:46):
of behavior and so on that people are drawn into.
Speaker 4 (22:50):
Less so now than I think at first.
Speaker 3 (22:51):
You know, where drugs become a problem, for example, or
young women become involved in you know, relationships that are
are going to be exploitative. But what also has happened
is that the kind of tourists who now comes to Zanzibar.
In the nineties it was very much people who are
low budget or whatever the phrase is, whereas now people
(23:14):
come as families and you get a different atmosphere with
the tourists from the hedonistic young men and women who
are coming when in the early eighties, sorry, the mid
eighties and early nineties. It doesn't mean that the ugliness
of tourism isn't isn't there, but it's more restrained I think.
(23:35):
But what the most corrupt part of it is the
way in which money money gets used to build flash
hotels rather than money gets used to build better hospitals
and better schools.
Speaker 2 (23:47):
And there is culturally an idea about the tourists. And
I think it's Felsia's mother who has this amazing speech
about tourists, kind of furious about them, that culturally the
idea that it's superficial engagement with the place to be
a tourist, that you're you're there in a purely kind
of extractive sense without actually engaging. And it's struck me
(24:10):
reading the book that to a certain extent, the argument
seems to be that the tourist is almost the opposite
of the novelist, That the novelist tries to build something
and plant something and engage at a kind of deep
level from the roots up, whereas a tourist is there
taking what they can and skidding across the surface.
Speaker 3 (24:31):
Sure, I mean we're all we are all tourists, of course,
one way or another. But I think sometimes the relationship
between the tourists and the local person or the native
culture is so unequal that you can go in and pretend,
you know, like you go into these all inclusive sort
(24:52):
of places, A lot of tourists go to those places
and answer. But they go to their hotel by the beach,
they get taken on bus tours to this, to that that,
they get sent back to the hotel and they don't
really see anything. It's not so easy to be able
to do that if you if you're a tourist saying
in the UK, because you're not in that position of
an unequal power. You have to be on the underground,
(25:13):
you have to rub shoulders with people, you have to
hail a taxi, you know, sneered out by the waiters
and that kind of thing. But I think I tried
to do that to show how disengaged the tourist is,
and of course in the mother's outbursts at the end
is to have somebody say, you know, this is what
do they want here? Why don't they have beaches in
(25:35):
their own countries? Where do they come here?
Speaker 2 (25:37):
It feels like a very as far as albust good,
feels like one that you have either heard on many
occasions or maybe even outed yourself.
Speaker 3 (25:46):
I certainly apparently on many occasions, definitely, especially when when
something unpleasant has come about has happened, as in this case,
why did they come here?
Speaker 2 (26:00):
Yeah? But even then you're undercut it. There's a wonderful
idea about all ages. Imagine they knew what was of
value and now no longer do that. That this is
that we all have this kind of failure to see
the ways in which we're guilty of some of the
same things.
Speaker 3 (26:17):
Yes, although of course that is aspirational talk. There is
an argument about that because I think it's some mother
who says that, or the father, and it's Fauzier who says.
Speaker 4 (26:27):
But that we need them.
Speaker 3 (26:29):
Yeah, you know, they bring money, so we need them.
So both sides, you know, there is an argument to
be made on both sides.
Speaker 2 (26:40):
Abdul Razak Gerner's latest novel, Theft, is available at all
good bookstores. Now.
Speaker 1 (26:50):
Thank you so much for listening to another special episode
of Read This. We'll have another episode of Read This
to share with you next Sunday. As always, if you
want to dive further into Read This, you can search
for it where if you listen to podcasts, there are
more than eighty episodes in the archive for you to enjoy.
See you next week.
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