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
microphones and cameras. She looks confused, even irritated, and asks who they're there to photograph, and one reporter replies, we're photographing you.
Have you heard the news.
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 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. 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 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, 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, 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. 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 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, 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.
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 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, 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 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 a life.
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.
That's it.
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.
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 starts 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 Zenz 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 and zens about 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 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.
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 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 with integrity if you like, and or strength and others into saying 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 if 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 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 honorable, 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. 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, or what you don't know you 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 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.
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, 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. 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?
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 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.
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.
We'll be right back.
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?
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, 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 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 he 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 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. 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 many in my 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 his ambition, et cetera. Somebody 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 opposition 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 I 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, Fausia. 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 it 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? If you know what I mean?
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?
So that first gave me from.
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.
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 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
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 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 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 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 an intellectual.
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 very gracefully, very sharply.
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.
Become disruptive forces. There is a way in which they're 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. The 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 Zanziba. 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 there, but it's more restrained, I think. But 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.
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 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 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, 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 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 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 out of yourself.
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?
Yeah?
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.
Yes, although of course that is as an aspirational took.
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 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 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 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 him returning to his beloved Eilish Lacy and even more beloved in a scorthy.
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? 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.
Am I jumping on the.
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.
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.