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. As usual, I'm joined by Michael to tell me a little bit more about the episode.
Hi, Michael, Ruby Jones.
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.
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, 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? 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 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 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 get greater awareness, greater recognition, and that's super exciting.
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.
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
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.
Coming up in just a moment, Zanzibar is still home for abdul Razak Gurna.
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.
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 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. 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.
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 of this book is that what's alive? Is it that you can return and see those people.
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 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.
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.
That's it.
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.
So there was that sense.
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 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.
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 millennium that so captured your imagination that you knew that was a period in life in Zanzeba that you wanted to explicitly write about.
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 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.
Did not work for Tanzania anyway.
The excesses of the revolution in signsbag had quietened down.
And one of the biggest factors, and this was tourism.
You don't want to have people being mistreated and whatever when you have tourists around, because they won't come back.
It does take the edge of the cocktail.
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 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 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.
So I wanted that sort of suggestion of things.
Opening up, but also opening up in ways that were not always as clean as they looked.
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?
Can I just change that word exile? Yes, I don't like to use that word.
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 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, indeed an admirable position. I don't blame that for what I did, which was to leave in order to improve my life.
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?
Yeah?
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
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?
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?
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
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.
Want to, and so I went.
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 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, 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.
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?
Reverting to type with one's parents is exactly is a great privilege.
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 I'm not.
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.
We'll be right back.
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 interplay between the three of them that was your kind of insighting idea?
Yes, better 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 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 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 was thinking, well, how is he what are going.
To be his options as he were?
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.
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 particularly interesting idea in this book.
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 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 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, 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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?
How can it be dealt with? You know what I mean?
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, particularly the mother. And naturally, you know, in a novel, you've got to have a romance going on somewhay.
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.
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
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 those six and so we see how people cope.
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.
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 of her, you think, maybe slight condescension, she's an intellectual.
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 it very gracefully, very sharply.
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 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.
But there is another way in which, as I said earlier, it forces.
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 of behavior and so on that people are drawn into.
Less so now than I think at first.
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 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.
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.
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 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.
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 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, 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 their own countries? Where do they come here?
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.
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?
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.
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.
But that we need them.
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.
Abdul Razak Gerner's latest novel, Theft, is available at all good bookstores. Now.
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.