Afterlives
Author: Abdulrazak Gurnah
Publisher: Bloomsbury, USA
This year’s Nobel laureate in literature is, without a doubt, a worthy prize winner. However, many probably want to cover up their ignorance of Abdulrazak Gurnah by quickly reading a few of his books. The latest book, Afterlives, is a good start. It picks up the thread from his most famous book, Paradise (1994). As for this title, the point soon becomes clear: The European colonial masters did not come to a paradise they turned into hell. They came to a hell they turned into an even worse hell. This is Gurnah’s general and personal theme throughout the authorship.
His life, in short, tells of the will to survive and a purposeful life course. Gurnah was born in Zanzibar, where he belonged to the Arab-Islamic minority. In 1968, at the age of twenty, he fled to Britain, where he wrote novels on colonialism and worked as a professor of English and postcolonial literature.
Annihilation
In Afterlives, we become acquainted with «the imperial protective troops» in the German colony of Southwest Africa (now, Namibia). Since 1884, Southwest Africa had been in German hands. In historical records, we find here, for example, Commander Lothar von Trotha, who is attributed primary responsibility for the first genocide of the 20th century on the Herero and Nama peoples. Diary entries from the military archives state that murders were a «daily food and a Sunday afternoon pleasure for the German crews. Trotha: «Keeping track of anything other than the flow of blood is wrong.» His original plan, to put down the Herero uprising by «only» expelling the natives failed. And to cover up his military failure, he resorted to his ultimate means – annihilation.
Gurnah describes the war scenario leading up to World War I: In addition to the great colonial powers, there were «South Africans, Belgians with their Force Publique, and a bunch of other European volunteers who thought killing was an adventure and were happy to serve the great conquest and empire machinery.»
Gurnah never falls into any cliché. The colonial masters are not made solely responsible for the misery. The victims in the author’s world lived in slave-like, humiliating conditions where the crude, dehumanizing capitalism of Arab and Indian merchants ruled. When the young boys of the villages volunteer for military service with the Germans, we understand them despite their brutality towards their own. The training is tough, but the hope for protection, schooling, and small privileges. And Askari do not carry heavy loads during army marches (as long as there are others to do so). This is how they are encouraged not to desert.
A dystopia that easily brings to mind Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.
Stories and descriptions of destiny
The author does not present a politically correct anti-Western image. He will not be perceived as a political activist. He wants to be what he is – a narrator. And Abdulrazak Gurnah tells us this in an almost provocatively simple way. The word choice is unpretentious, so only they can afford who has nothing to prove. The text conveys seamless transitions between micro and macro planes. It alternates between sober reports («The German leadership saw that the uprising could not be crushed by military force alone and went on to starve the people to death») – and dialogues, where we get close to the people. Commander: «I was born into a military tradition, and this is my duty. That is why I am here – to take possession of what rightfully belongs to us since we are stronger.»
Place descriptions become destiny descriptions: «The sunset gives the landscape a friendly face, right? And yet it is a landscape where you know that nothing significant has ever happened. It is a bland place on humanity’s list of great feats.
«But no place is so bland that it can not contain love. It slowly sprouts between young Hamza and Afiya: «Her kanga had slipped down behind his head and hooked himself to a hairpin or a brooch, and he saw more of her than he had seen up close before. «The two young people have each undergone suffering that could easily have been overcome, but they hardly know it themselves, for lack of a basis for comparison. Nevertheless, they find each other, love each other and carry on the family. Gurnah portrays hope in the dark – in a dystopia that easily brings to mind Joseph Conrad and his famous novel Heart of Darkness.
The white European is always in danger of getting stuck in his own self-sufficient mania.
An African perspective
In Gurnah’s cosmos, we search in vain for explanations – «less is more.» He lets us find the questions ourselves – what is civilization, what is belonging, how much can a human being endure, and who are the wild, the heartless? We must look for the answers. A quote finds its way to memory: The Jew Shylock defends his humanity in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice: «When you stab us, do we not bleed? When you tickle us, do not we laugh? When you poison us, do not we die? And when you do us wrong, shall we not take revenge? If we are like you in the other, we must also be like you in this.»
The white European is always in danger of getting stuck in his self-sufficient mania. For what can be saved when one of the consequences of colonialism is ignoring the African perspective? And how can we remember something when we do not know what has never been written down? Gurnah makes his contribution to joining the pieces. Today’s broad debate about where the stolen art treasures from the «third world» belong demonstrates at least a hesitant approach to the split between «the others» and «we.» Here Gurnah has a head start – he belongs to both camps.
