Professor Abdulrazak Gurnah is the author of 10 novels and numerous short stories and essays. He won the 2021 Nobel Prize in literature, and was one of the key stars at Dhaka Lit Fest this year. I caught up with Professor Gurnah to talk about where his stories come from, the immigrant experience, and the idea of coming home.
The Last Gift is an absolute gut-punch of a novel. I wanted to ask you about the character of Abbas. You were around Abbas's age when the book came out, and it was just so pure and authentic, and so beautiful -- did it come from a personal experience?
No. Not “not at all,” but I didn't go through those experiences of running away from a marriage, then living with a family and not telling them my full life. I didn't have a seizure. Any of those things. None of those things happened in my life.
Recently I wrote a piece about you, called “Abdulrazak Gurnah and the stories we don't tell,” and the theme that came out for me is that Abbas has a stroke and he is immobilized and there is a lifetime of stories in him which he cannot tell. Even his own wife does not know what he went through. I think one of the most powerful things that you do, as a novelist, is tell stories that have often not been told. Can you tell me as a novelist where that comes from, what drives you to that sort of thing?
Experience, really. What I write about often comes from an idea, or something of an encounter. Let me tell you about The Last Gift, since that's what you've been focusing on in our conversation. I'd written an earlier novel called Admiring Silence. Have you read that?
No. Not yet …
I mention that because there's a connection. In that, the person who is the central figure in the story talks about the absence of his father, and that his father, his real father, ran away. He disappeared. And they don't know where he went. So he'd never met his father. But that's not the point of the novel. Many years later, I kept thinking about him. What happened to him? That father who disappeared. So that was the beginning of thinking about Abbas. What would have happened to a man who abandoned his family? Why? Why is that? Why would he ever abandon his family? What do you do later? So that's the first thought. Then the second thought I had was the second-generation, if you like. Migrants, children of migrants. And I wanted to write about that. Both because I have children of my own who have grown up in the UK, and I was thinking about them as well. Most of all, I was thinking about … in 2007 a series of suicide bombs were blown up in London. One of those bombers made a video … in this video he talked very passionately about his Pakistani ancestry, and he was brought up in a secular way, therefore he was denied his religion. He felt something had been stolen from him. I know it doesn't make sense, but this was why he was going into a suicide. So I was also interested in that notion of what happens to people who are brought up, as not only children of migrants, but children who somehow -- to make their life easier, don't get the full depth of their culture. So all of these were the ideas, I didn't have to use my own life.
Usraat FahmidahThat is something that really resonated with me. It was personal when I read it. My own father is your age, and it's a strange situation because I live here, but my father lives in Canada. I always feel that second-generation immigrants like Jamal and Hanna in that book often see their parents as kind of an embarrassment. They kind of put a band-aid over it all: Hanna changes her name to Anna and tries to be more British than her parents. It's such a beautiful and painful theme to see and understand. Is that a driving theme for you? Do you feel that there are things that you have to communicate to your children that they will never understand?
They understand, but you know, it's obviously a phenomenon. Not just about my children. We are trying to understand the dilemmas of people growing up with parents who are migrants so in that respect … those kinds of issues come up, like Hanna. Of course, in order to make It dramatic, you're writing a novel, you take it to a point where Hanna actually changes her name, where she is embarrassed by her parent.
One last question. Is there a homecoming? Abbas, when he was dying, felt that he needed to go back to something. Back to his childhood. There's this desperation to tell the story. Is it ever possible, or does the story die with you?
In fact, many people have told me, who have read the novel, they found it moving in this way, because “I had the same experience with my father.” When my father died I was living in England, I was nowhere near him but people tell me they have had that experience. Their father died a few months ago. It was like that, it suddenly opened up. People talk of their parents suddenly opening up when they are near death.
