March 19, 2025 • 28 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. This week, Michael sits down with Abdulrazak to discuss his writing, the phenomenon of tourism and his latest book.
Reading list:
Paradise, Abdulrazak Gurnah, 1994
By the Sea, Abdulrazak Gurnah, 2001
Desertion, Abdulrazak Gurnah, 2005
Theft, Abdulrazak Gurnah, 2025
Eurotrash, Christian Kracht, 2024
You can find these books and all the others we mentioned at your favourite independent book store.
Socials: Stay in touch with Read This on Instagram and Twitter
Guest: Abdulrazak Gurnah
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
One of my favorite videos on YouTube that I periodically
delight myself by rewatching is this BBC report about Doris
Lessing being told that she's won the Nobel Prize for Literature.
In it, she climbs out of a black cab, absolutely
laden with these bags of groceries and looking deeply fatigued
even before she clocks the reporters coming at her with
(00:21):
microphones and cameras. She looks confused, even irritated, and asks
who they're there to photograph, and one reporter replies, we're
photographing you.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
Have you heard the news.
Speaker 1 (00:33):
You've just won the Nobel Prize? At eighty eight years old,
and with no fucks to give, Lessing's shoulders slump even
further than they already were. She drops her groceries and
with an impressive eye roll, she simply says, oh, Christ, perfection.
That's how to receive a Nobel prize. No notes, the
(00:53):
Nobel is a funny prize. It's this rarefied, generally hyper
literary Scandinavian panel who ye're on year, ignore the predictions
and the gambling odds, and anoint a literary worthy with
their garlands. Writers receive the recognition, not for a single work,
but for a body of work, or in the case
of Bob Dylan, just to piss the literary world off.
(01:15):
My favorite thing about the Nobel Prize for Literature is
how often it favors writers outside the anglosphere, perspectives and
voices that the English language world only encounters in translation,
people like Olga Tokuchuk or Annie Orno. For those keeping score,
Patrick White is the only Australian born writer to win
the prize, back in nineteen seventy three. John Kurtseyer, now
(01:38):
based in South Australia, is also a previous winner, and
every year we're subjected to endless think pieces devoted to
predicting that former read this guest Gerald Manane is a
shoe in to win. Speaking personally, I think Alexis Writer
and Helen Ghana might both be more plausible prospects at
this point, but one way or the other, for a writer,
(01:58):
it's an accolade that typically is more transformative than Doris
Lessing's experience of being inconvenienced on her own doorstep. Tanzanian
born London based writer Abdul Raza Gerna was awarded the
Nobel back in twenty twenty one. Over four decades, he's
published short story collections and essays, but he's probably best
known for his extraordinary novels, including nineteen ninety four's Paradise,
(02:22):
which was on the Book A shortlist, two thousand and
one's by the Sea, and two thousand and five's Desertion.
He's a gorgeous writer. It's hard to think of many
who have so evocatively explored stories of refugees and human displacement,
the long shadow of colonialism, and the heartbreak of exile.
(02:43):
His latest novel, Theft, he began writing before his life
was reshuffled by the Nobel win and it follows three
very different young people whose lives intersect and are then
thrown into disarray following a shattering false accusation. It's a
sharp and moving reminder that, as nice as the recognition
provided by awards might be, true writers take the barrage
(03:05):
of external interests in their stride. They walk on past
cameras and microphones alike, carry their shopping inside, and get
back to the desk to write. And Abdul Razak Gerner
is a true writer. I'm Michael Williams, and this is
read this show about the books we love and the
Nobel Prize winners behind them. I might start with what is,
(03:34):
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 were writing theft.
Speaker 3 (03:51):
No Actually, OK, I can say without any sort of
pretense it 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
(04:15):
my sort of slight anxiety as they're 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,
(04:38):
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 1 (04:48):
Tell me about that process or that feeling of a
liveness when it comes to writing a book. How much
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
(05:11):
of this book is that what's alive? Is it that
you can return and see those people.
Speaker 3 (05:16):
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
(05:38):
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.
Speaker 2 (05:51):
That's a life.
Speaker 1 (05:52):
That's a nice thing. So I'm not static that there
is that kind of a desire to kind of push
forward and for motion.
Speaker 2 (05:59):
That's it.
Speaker 3 (06:00):
There is something to continue with, you know, So it's
it doesn't feel as if it's kind of running into
the ground or something like that.
Speaker 2 (06:09):
So there was that sense.
Speaker 3 (06:10):
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 starts the
core idea, and many of the things that end up
(06:30):
being the novel are not there already, but there 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 1 (06:43):
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 Zenz and what it was
about the kind of nineteen nineties into the turn of
(07:04):
the millennium that so captured your imagination that you knew
that was a period in life and zens about that
you wanted to explicitly write about.
Speaker 3 (07:14):
Yeah, 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
(07:39):
experienced 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 2 (07:59):
Did not work for Tanzania anyway.
Speaker 3 (08:02):
The excesses of the revolution designs but had quietened down.
And one of the biggest factors, and this was tourism.
You don't want to have people being restreated and whatever
when you have tourists around, because they won't come back.
Speaker 1 (08:19):
It does take the edge of the cocktail.
Speaker 3 (08:23):
Yeah, it does, 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
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.
Speaker 2 (08:44):
What is possible and what the future should hold.
Speaker 3 (08:47):
So it's a period of possibilities. But possibilities can also
be seductive. They can seduce people from acting with integrity
if you like, and or strength and others into saying no,
this is what I think is the best thing to do.
Speaker 2 (09:00):
So I wanted that sort of suggestion of things.
Speaker 3 (09:03):
Opening up, but also opening up in ways if were
not always as clean as they looked.
Speaker 1 (09:10):
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 2 (09:28):
Can I just change that word exile?
Speaker 3 (09:30):
Yes, I don't like to use that word because I
don't think it 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
(09:51):
choose exile rather than prison or being shot or whatever
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 honorable, dignified,
(10:14):
indeed an admirable position. I don't blame that for what
I did, which was to leave in order to improve
my life.
Speaker 1 (10:23):
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 2 (10:36):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (10:36):
Well, I did what I did because I was eighteen
years old and didn't know what I was doing. I'm
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,
(10:58):
or what you don't know you you act because certain
situations are intolerable.
Speaker 2 (11:04):
No, I don't want to live like this. So yeah,
as soon as I left.
Speaker 3 (11:08):
One of the first questions I asked myself when I
arrived in England was what have I done?
Speaker 1 (11:13):
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 (11:28):
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
(11:50):
did that feel when I return? Yeah, So the very
first time I returned show was after about seventeen years
of being away, because like I said earlier, knew new
leaders and so there was an amnesty it is okay,
everybody who left can return if they want.
Speaker 2 (12:04):
To, and so I went.
Speaker 3 (12:06):
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
(12:27):
was incredible, and sure I was able to just come back,
go back rather and feel at home, and subsequent returns,
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, have
(12:49):
you said your prayers today? And I said no, not yet.
She said, well, you got to the mosque. Now I
say your prayers. And I felt like I was a
he seen me for seventeen years. The first thing he
says is have you said your prayers?
Speaker 2 (13:03):
Go to the mosque?
Speaker 1 (13:05):
Reverting to type with one's parents is exactly is a
great privilege.
Speaker 3 (13:10):
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 one
almosts 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 I'm not.
Speaker 1 (13:33):
When we return, we discussed the three characters of the
heart of Theft, and Abdul Razak shares the problematic phenomenon
of tourism in his hometown of Zanzoma.
Speaker 2 (13:43):
We'll be right back.
Speaker 1 (13:54):
So coming back to theft, of the kind of central
characters Kareem and was one of them prominent in the
conception of this book or was it the interplay between
the three of them that was your kind of insighting idea?
Speaker 3 (14:10):
Yes, but it was the starting point. 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 os Man. I think that's where I started.
But because the starting point was the accusation or theft,
(14:31):
so that was the starting point of the injustice of that,
and it did how somebody in his situation.
Speaker 2 (14:38):
Powerless to resist.
Speaker 3 (14:40):
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 was thinking, well,
how what are going to be.
Speaker 2 (15:01):
His options as he were?
Speaker 3 (15:03):
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 he
really might spoil for the reader.
Speaker 1 (15:15):
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
(15:37):
particularly interesting idea in this book.
Speaker 3 (15:39):
Yes, indeed, one of the reasons we're 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, trying to understand all the time.
(16:02):
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.
Speaker 2 (16:14):
But he doesn't.
Speaker 3 (16:15):
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 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 many
in my books, I'm always interested in how people manage
(16:36):
to draw back from a traumatic situation, At a situation
which is which is oppressing, 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 his ambition, et cetera. Somebody like Whether
(17:00):
doesn't move on but kind of calmly tries to understand.
Speaker 1 (17:06):
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,
(17:28):
you know, the steadiness that that not being reactive, that
not defining yourself in opposition to the things that happen
to you can be a virtue in and of.
Speaker 3 (17:39):
Itself, 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 I can sometimes work to disarm.
Speaker 1 (18:04):
Tell me about the kind of third key figure in
the present day narrative or the latter narrative of the book, Fausia.
Tell me about her and where she came from and
how you say her.
Speaker 3 (18:16):
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
(18:38):
the anxieties and difficulties that the parents had for this boy,
this young man growing up. I think it was about fourteen,
and so I became interested in the idea, well, what
are the symptoms, what is it?
Speaker 2 (18:51):
How can it be dealt with? If you know what
I mean?
Speaker 3 (18:54):
And in the circumstances of a place like Zanziba, where
we're 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?
Speaker 2 (19:10):
So that first gave me from.
Speaker 3 (19:13):
There, but it also gave me Faxia's parents in to
see how they might cope, particularly the mother. And naturally,
you know in a novel you've got to have a
romance going on somewhere.
Speaker 1 (19:24):
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 (19:37):
Absolutely okay, So it was obvious that this young woman
was going to be part of the relationship with either
possibly with 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
(19:58):
or kind to each other or 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 which to explore
capacity for compassion and kindness and empathy and all of
(20:18):
those six And so we see how people cope.
Speaker 1 (20:22):
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
that idea that there is stuff that you give up willingly.
Speaker 3 (20:44):
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 in all of these ways.
So Farsier is also, of course a dutiful daughter as
well as you know, clever and interested young woman. As
Karim says of her, you think, maybe slight condescension, she's
(21:09):
an intellectual.
Speaker 1 (21:11):
Coming back to the thing that you flagged before about
Zanzibarron 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 it
(21:35):
very gracefully, very sharply.
Speaker 3 (21:37):
I think, Well, of course, I know that tourism is
a problematic phenomenon, and I know that very well, whereas
anser base can sern. But that wasn't the show I
was interested in here, or rather, what I'm interested in
is also in a kind of marginal way, the way these.
Speaker 2 (21:55):
Become disruptive forces. There is a way in which they're very.
Speaker 3 (21:58):
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. But there is
another way in which, as I said earlier, it forces
the administration, like the government, to provide a more peaceful environment.
(22:24):
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
of behavior and so on. The people are drawn into
less so now than I think at first. You know,
(22:45):
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 Zanziba. In
the nineties it was very much people who are low
budget or whatever the phrase is, whereas now people come
(23:08):
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 there, but it's more restrained, I think. But
(23:29):
what the most corrupt part of it is the way
I wish money money gets used to build flash hotels
rather than money gets used to build better hospitals and
better schools.
Speaker 1 (23:40):
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 a superficial engagement with the place to
be a tourist, that you're there in a purely kind
of extractive sense without actually engaging, and it's struck me
(24:04):
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 (24:25):
Sure, I mean 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
(24:46):
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,
to 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're a tourist, saying
the UK, because you're not in that position of an
unequal power. You have to get on the underground, you
(25:07):
have to rub shoulders with people, you have to hail
a taxi, you know, sneered up 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 their
(25:28):
own countries? Where do they come here?
Speaker 1 (25:30):
It feels like a very as far as albust good,
feels like one that you have either heard on many
occasions or maybe even out of yourself.
Speaker 3 (25:40):
I certainly aparaly on many occasions, definitely, especially when when
something unpleasant has come about, it has happened, as in
this case, why did they come here?
Speaker 2 (25:53):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (25:54):
But even then you're undercut of there's a wonderful idea
about all ages. Imagine they knew what was a 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 (26:10):
Yes, although of course that is as an aspirational took.
Speaker 2 (26:14):
There is an argument about that because.
Speaker 3 (26:17):
I think it's some mother who says that, or the father,
and it's Fauzier who says, but that.
Speaker 2 (26:22):
We need them.
Speaker 3 (26:23):
Yeah, you know, they bring money, so we need them.
Speaker 2 (26:27):
So both sides. You know, there is an argument to
be made on both sides.
Speaker 1 (26:34):
Abdul Razaggerner's latest novel, Theft, is available at all good bookstores. Now,
before we go, I wanted to tell you what I've
been reading this week, and it's another book of the
Booker International long List. This one is written by a
guy called Christian Kracht and translated by Daniel Bowles, and
(26:57):
it's got the excellent title of euro Trash. It follows
a writer who's taking his mum a kind of monstrous
figure on a road trip. And it's comic, it's tragic,
it's very effective. It's only a short little book, but
it is a terrific read and kind of dark and weird.
You will enjoy it. And it's readily available in your
(27:17):
local independent bookshop or maybe even in your public library.
Go and have a look, and have a look for
all the other books we've discussed this week. That's it
for this week's show. If you enjoyed it, please tell
your friends and rate and review us. It helps a lot.
Next week I read this. I'm chatting with the wonderfully
charming calm toy Bin whose latest novel, Long Island, as
(27:39):
him returning to his beloved Eilish Lacy and even more
beloved in a scorthy.
Speaker 4 (27:45):
The word sequel only came up when the book was
delivered and people were trying to work out how we're
going to place this book. What's going to jacket was
and the word sequel started And I hadn't really put
a thought into it, in the way that you often
don't put it all into something for a good reason,
because you're avoiding thinking about it. And I know it's
for avoiding thinking. How am I going to justify this one?
(28:06):
I'm not going to say about this business. Oh here
we are again with these characters. And the problem is
that this has been the most successful book of my
commercial So here.
Speaker 2 (28:16):
Am I jumping on the.
Speaker 4 (28:17):
Bandwagon and uh riding it retired horse to death. And
I suppose the first thing is that I got a
lot of energy from the film read.
Speaker 1 (28:28):
This is a Schwarz Media production made possible by the
generous support of our group. The show is produced and
edited by Clara Ames, with mixing by Travis Evans and
original compositions by Zolden Fetcher. Our transcripts are edited by
posey mckacky, thanks for listening, See you next week.
One of my favorite videos on YouTube that I periodically
delight myself by rewatching is this BBC report about Doris
Lessing being told that she's won the Nobel Prize for Literature.
In it, she climbs out of a black cab, absolutely
laden with these bags of groceries and looking deeply fatigued
even before she clocks the reporters coming at her with
(00:21):
microphones and cameras. She looks confused, even irritated, and asks
who they're there to photograph, and one reporter replies, we're
photographing you.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
Have you heard the news.
Speaker 1 (00:33):
You've just won the Nobel Prize? At eighty eight years old,
and with no fucks to give, Lessing's shoulders slump even
further than they already were. She drops her groceries and
with an impressive eye roll, she simply says, oh, Christ, perfection.
That's how to receive a Nobel prize. No notes, the
(00:53):
Nobel is a funny prize. It's this rarefied, generally hyper
literary Scandinavian panel who ye're on year, ignore the predictions
and the gambling odds, and anoint a literary worthy with
their garlands. Writers receive the recognition, not for a single work,
but for a body of work, or in the case
of Bob Dylan, just to piss the literary world off.
(01:15):
My favorite thing about the Nobel Prize for Literature is
how often it favors writers outside the anglosphere, perspectives and
voices that the English language world only encounters in translation,
people like Olga Tokuchuk or Annie Orno. For those keeping score,
Patrick White is the only Australian born writer to win
the prize, back in nineteen seventy three. John Kurtseyer, now
(01:38):
based in South Australia, is also a previous winner, and
every year we're subjected to endless think pieces devoted to
predicting that former read this guest Gerald Manane is a
shoe in to win. Speaking personally, I think Alexis Writer
and Helen Ghana might both be more plausible prospects at
this point, but one way or the other, for a writer,
(01:58):
it's an accolade that typically is more transformative than Doris
Lessing's experience of being inconvenienced on her own doorstep. Tanzanian
born London based writer Abdul Raza Gerna was awarded the
Nobel back in twenty twenty one. Over four decades, he's
published short story collections and essays, but he's probably best
known for his extraordinary novels, including nineteen ninety four's Paradise,
(02:22):
which was on the Book A shortlist, two thousand and
one's by the Sea, and two thousand and five's Desertion.
He's a gorgeous writer. It's hard to think of many
who have so evocatively explored stories of refugees and human displacement,
the long shadow of colonialism, and the heartbreak of exile.
(02:43):
His latest novel, Theft, he began writing before his life
was reshuffled by the Nobel win and it follows three
very different young people whose lives intersect and are then
thrown into disarray following a shattering false accusation. It's a
sharp and moving reminder that, as nice as the recognition
provided by awards might be, true writers take the barrage
(03:05):
of external interests in their stride. They walk on past
cameras and microphones alike, carry their shopping inside, and get
back to the desk to write. And Abdul Razak Gerner
is a true writer. I'm Michael Williams, and this is
read this show about the books we love and the
Nobel Prize winners behind them. I might start with what is,
(03:34):
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 were writing theft.
Speaker 3 (03:51):
No Actually, OK, I can say without any sort of
pretense it 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
(04:15):
my sort of slight anxiety as they're 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,
(04:38):
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 1 (04:48):
Tell me about that process or that feeling of a
liveness when it comes to writing a book. How much
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
(05:11):
of this book is that what's alive? Is it that
you can return and see those people.
Speaker 3 (05:16):
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
(05:38):
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.
Speaker 2 (05:51):
That's a life.
Speaker 1 (05:52):
That's a nice thing. So I'm not static that there
is that kind of a desire to kind of push
forward and for motion.
Speaker 2 (05:59):
That's it.
Speaker 3 (06:00):
There is something to continue with, you know, So it's
it doesn't feel as if it's kind of running into
the ground or something like that.
Speaker 2 (06:09):
So there was that sense.
Speaker 3 (06:10):
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 starts the
core idea, and many of the things that end up
(06:30):
being the novel are not there already, but there 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 1 (06:43):
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 Zenz and what it was
about the kind of nineteen nineties into the turn of
(07:04):
the millennium that so captured your imagination that you knew
that was a period in life and zens about that
you wanted to explicitly write about.
Speaker 3 (07:14):
Yeah, 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
(07:39):
experienced 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 2 (07:59):
Did not work for Tanzania anyway.
Speaker 3 (08:02):
The excesses of the revolution designs but had quietened down.
And one of the biggest factors, and this was tourism.
You don't want to have people being restreated and whatever
when you have tourists around, because they won't come back.
Speaker 1 (08:19):
It does take the edge of the cocktail.
Speaker 3 (08:23):
Yeah, it does, 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
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.
Speaker 2 (08:44):
What is possible and what the future should hold.
Speaker 3 (08:47):
So it's a period of possibilities. But possibilities can also
be seductive. They can seduce people from acting with integrity
if you like, and or strength and others into saying no,
this is what I think is the best thing to do.
Speaker 2 (09:00):
So I wanted that sort of suggestion of things.
Speaker 3 (09:03):
Opening up, but also opening up in ways if were
not always as clean as they looked.
Speaker 1 (09:10):
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 2 (09:28):
Can I just change that word exile?
Speaker 3 (09:30):
Yes, I don't like to use that word because I
don't think it 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
(09:51):
choose exile rather than prison or being shot or whatever
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 honorable, dignified,
(10:14):
indeed an admirable position. I don't blame that for what
I did, which was to leave in order to improve
my life.
Speaker 1 (10:23):
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 2 (10:36):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (10:36):
Well, I did what I did because I was eighteen
years old and didn't know what I was doing. I'm
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,
(10:58):
or what you don't know you you act because certain
situations are intolerable.
Speaker 2 (11:04):
No, I don't want to live like this. So yeah,
as soon as I left.
Speaker 3 (11:08):
One of the first questions I asked myself when I
arrived in England was what have I done?
Speaker 1 (11:13):
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 (11:28):
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
(11:50):
did that feel when I return? Yeah, So the very
first time I returned show was after about seventeen years
of being away, because like I said earlier, knew new
leaders and so there was an amnesty it is okay,
everybody who left can return if they want.
Speaker 2 (12:04):
To, and so I went.
Speaker 3 (12:06):
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
(12:27):
was incredible, and sure I was able to just come back,
go back rather and feel at home, and subsequent returns,
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, have
(12:49):
you said your prayers today? And I said no, not yet.
She said, well, you got to the mosque. Now I
say your prayers. And I felt like I was a
he seen me for seventeen years. The first thing he
says is have you said your prayers?
Speaker 2 (13:03):
Go to the mosque?
Speaker 1 (13:05):
Reverting to type with one's parents is exactly is a
great privilege.
Speaker 3 (13:10):
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 one
almosts 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 I'm not.
Speaker 1 (13:33):
When we return, we discussed the three characters of the
heart of Theft, and Abdul Razak shares the problematic phenomenon
of tourism in his hometown of Zanzoma.
Speaker 2 (13:43):
We'll be right back.
Speaker 1 (13:54):
So coming back to theft, of the kind of central
characters Kareem and was one of them prominent in the
conception of this book or was it the interplay between
the three of them that was your kind of insighting idea?
Speaker 3 (14:10):
Yes, but it was the starting point. 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 os Man. I think that's where I started.
But because the starting point was the accusation or theft,
(14:31):
so that was the starting point of the injustice of that,
and it did how somebody in his situation.
Speaker 2 (14:38):
Powerless to resist.
Speaker 3 (14:40):
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 was thinking, well,
how what are going to be.
Speaker 2 (15:01):
His options as he were?
Speaker 3 (15:03):
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 he
really might spoil for the reader.
Speaker 1 (15:15):
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
(15:37):
particularly interesting idea in this book.
Speaker 3 (15:39):
Yes, indeed, one of the reasons we're 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, trying to understand all the time.
(16:02):
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.
Speaker 2 (16:14):
But he doesn't.
Speaker 3 (16:15):
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 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 many
in my books, I'm always interested in how people manage
(16:36):
to draw back from a traumatic situation, At a situation
which is which is oppressing, 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 his ambition, et cetera. Somebody like Whether
(17:00):
doesn't move on but kind of calmly tries to understand.
Speaker 1 (17:06):
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,
(17:28):
you know, the steadiness that that not being reactive, that
not defining yourself in opposition to the things that happen
to you can be a virtue in and of.
Speaker 3 (17:39):
Itself, 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 I can sometimes work to disarm.
Speaker 1 (18:04):
Tell me about the kind of third key figure in
the present day narrative or the latter narrative of the book, Fausia.
Tell me about her and where she came from and
how you say her.
Speaker 3 (18:16):
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
(18:38):
the anxieties and difficulties that the parents had for this boy,
this young man growing up. I think it was about fourteen,
and so I became interested in the idea, well, what
are the symptoms, what is it?
Speaker 2 (18:51):
How can it be dealt with? If you know what
I mean?
Speaker 3 (18:54):
And in the circumstances of a place like Zanziba, where
we're 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?
Speaker 2 (19:10):
So that first gave me from.
Speaker 3 (19:13):
There, but it also gave me Faxia's parents in to
see how they might cope, particularly the mother. And naturally,
you know in a novel you've got to have a
romance going on somewhere.
Speaker 1 (19:24):
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 (19:37):
Absolutely okay, So it was obvious that this young woman
was going to be part of the relationship with either
possibly with 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
(19:58):
or kind to each other or 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 which to explore
capacity for compassion and kindness and empathy and all of
(20:18):
those six And so we see how people cope.
Speaker 1 (20:22):
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
that idea that there is stuff that you give up willingly.
Speaker 3 (20:44):
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 in all of these ways.
So Farsier is also, of course a dutiful daughter as
well as you know, clever and interested young woman. As
Karim says of her, you think, maybe slight condescension, she's
(21:09):
an intellectual.
Speaker 1 (21:11):
Coming back to the thing that you flagged before about
Zanzibarron 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 it
(21:35):
very gracefully, very sharply.
Speaker 3 (21:37):
I think, Well, of course, I know that tourism is
a problematic phenomenon, and I know that very well, whereas
anser base can sern. But that wasn't the show I
was interested in here, or rather, what I'm interested in
is also in a kind of marginal way, the way these.
Speaker 2 (21:55):
Become disruptive forces. There is a way in which they're very.
Speaker 3 (21:58):
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. But there is
another way in which, as I said earlier, it forces
the administration, like the government, to provide a more peaceful environment.
(22:24):
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
of behavior and so on. The people are drawn into
less so now than I think at first. You know,
(22:45):
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 Zanziba. In
the nineties it was very much people who are low
budget or whatever the phrase is, whereas now people come
(23:08):
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 there, but it's more restrained, I think. But
(23:29):
what the most corrupt part of it is the way
I wish money money gets used to build flash hotels
rather than money gets used to build better hospitals and
better schools.
Speaker 1 (23:40):
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 a superficial engagement with the place to
be a tourist, that you're there in a purely kind
of extractive sense without actually engaging, and it's struck me
(24:04):
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 (24:25):
Sure, I mean 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
(24:46):
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,
to 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're a tourist, saying
the UK, because you're not in that position of an
unequal power. You have to get on the underground, you
(25:07):
have to rub shoulders with people, you have to hail
a taxi, you know, sneered up 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 their
(25:28):
own countries? Where do they come here?
Speaker 1 (25:30):
It feels like a very as far as albust good,
feels like one that you have either heard on many
occasions or maybe even out of yourself.
Speaker 3 (25:40):
I certainly aparaly on many occasions, definitely, especially when when
something unpleasant has come about, it has happened, as in
this case, why did they come here?
Speaker 2 (25:53):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (25:54):
But even then you're undercut of there's a wonderful idea
about all ages. Imagine they knew what was a 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 (26:10):
Yes, although of course that is as an aspirational took.
Speaker 2 (26:14):
There is an argument about that because.
Speaker 3 (26:17):
I think it's some mother who says that, or the father,
and it's Fauzier who says, but that.
Speaker 2 (26:22):
We need them.
Speaker 3 (26:23):
Yeah, you know, they bring money, so we need them.
Speaker 2 (26:27):
So both sides. You know, there is an argument to
be made on both sides.
Speaker 1 (26:34):
Abdul Razaggerner's latest novel, Theft, is available at all good bookstores. Now,
before we go, I wanted to tell you what I've
been reading this week, and it's another book of the
Booker International long List. This one is written by a
guy called Christian Kracht and translated by Daniel Bowles, and
(26:57):
it's got the excellent title of euro Trash. It follows
a writer who's taking his mum a kind of monstrous
figure on a road trip. And it's comic, it's tragic,
it's very effective. It's only a short little book, but
it is a terrific read and kind of dark and weird.
You will enjoy it. And it's readily available in your
(27:17):
local independent bookshop or maybe even in your public library.
Go and have a look, and have a look for
all the other books we've discussed this week. That's it
for this week's show. If you enjoyed it, please tell
your friends and rate and review us. It helps a lot.
Next week I read this. I'm chatting with the wonderfully
charming calm toy Bin whose latest novel, Long Island, as
(27:39):
him returning to his beloved Eilish Lacy and even more
beloved in a scorthy.
Speaker 4 (27:45):
The word sequel only came up when the book was
delivered and people were trying to work out how we're
going to place this book. What's going to jacket was
and the word sequel started And I hadn't really put
a thought into it, in the way that you often
don't put it all into something for a good reason,
because you're avoiding thinking about it. And I know it's
for avoiding thinking. How am I going to justify this one?
(28:06):
I'm not going to say about this business. Oh here
we are again with these characters. And the problem is
that this has been the most successful book of my
commercial So here.
Speaker 2 (28:16):
Am I jumping on the.
Speaker 4 (28:17):
Bandwagon and uh riding it retired horse to death. And
I suppose the first thing is that I got a
lot of energy from the film read.
Speaker 1 (28:28):
This is a Schwarz Media production made possible by the
generous support of our group. The show is produced and
edited by Clara Ames, with mixing by Travis Evans and
original compositions by Zolden Fetcher. Our transcripts are edited by
posey mckacky, thanks for listening, See you next week.
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