Leaving and Arriving

Max Callimanopulos examines Nobel laureate Abdulrazak Gurnah’s new novel “Theft.”

By Max CallimanopulosMarch 18, 2025

• Fiction

• Cultural Studies

“LEAVING. I’VE HAD years to think about that, leaving and arriving,” Latif, a Zanzibari emigre, tells us in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s 2001 novel By the Sea. The book describes the complicated friendship between two Zanzibari men living in the United Kingdom, but in these lines, Gurnah might as well be writing about himself. In 1968, Gurnah left his home—the small tropical island of Zanzibar, 20-odd miles off the coast of Tanzania—for Britain. He was seeking asylum: four years earlier, insurrectionists led by a Ugandan bricklayer named John Okello had risen up against the island’s landholding Arab minority in what would probably be called a genocide if it happened today. Okello himself boasted that some 12,000 Arabs were killed. Gurnah, whose people came from Yemen, was forced to flee Zanzibar. He was 18 years old when he arrived in England.

Gurnah has lived in the UK ever since. By all appearances, he gets on quite well there. He earned his doctorate at the University of Kent and has taught English and postcolonial literature there since the early 1980s. In 1987, he published his debut novel, Memory of Departure, and since then has pushed out a book every few years, to modest sales and good reviews. In 2021, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. “I thought it was a prank,” he told The Guardian, reacting to his win. In the speeches and interviews he gives, Gurnah comes across as a thoughtful, well-spoken, sensible man.

But to read four or five of his novels in succession is to realize that this is a writer still wracked by his decision, made 57 years ago, to leave Zanzibar. Without too much thought, you can separate Gurnah’s oeuvre into two strands: his historical fictions—Paradise (1994), Desertion (2005), Afterlives (2020)—set in East Africa of the late 19th and early 20th centuries; and his novels of exile, which typically revolve around East African men who immigrate to the United Kingdom only to find themselves, as one puts it, “a stranger in the middle of nowhere.” All of his novels, however, are inhabited by characters who have lost their homes and left their families, men for whom the pain of departure becomes unspeakably heavy. “I live with a sense of dissembling,” Salim, the protagonist of Gravel Heart (2017), writes in a letter to his father. “I do not know how to speak about the things that sadden me, about the feeling of loss that is with me at all times, the sense of wrong-doing.”

Gurnah has devoted himself to exploring that sense of wrongdoing—the shame and secret loss brought about by exile. In novel after novel, we encounter characters like Desertion’s Rashid, on a scholarship in the UK: “[W]hen alone in the rooms I lived in my student squalor, I wept with grief and guilt for those I had lost.” Marooned in England or adrift in East Africa, Gurnah’s silent, haunted men often realize that their past is more vivid and real than their present. In The Last Gift (2011), he writes of Abbas, another Zanzibari in England: “The longer he lived, the nearer his childhood drew to him, and it seemed less and less like a distant fantasy of someone else’s life.” Homegoing offers few consolations. Waiting in an airport for a flight that will take him back to Zanzibar after 20 years, the unnamed narrator of Admiring Silence (1996) says: “It was like the moment before a persecution.”

So it may come as a surprise to anyone familiar with Gurnah’s fiction that Theft, his latest novel and first since winning the Nobel, finds the author moving away from the forced exiles and fraught homecomings that define his earlier books. A character does visit London once, but only via Google Street View (the avid Gurnahphile will note that this is the first time the search engine is mentioned in one of his novels). This change signals a broader shift—Theft takes place in Tanzania at the turn of the millennium, marking Gurnah’s first foray into 21st-century Africa. After decades spent probing the continent’s past for fresh meaning, Theft is a novel that sees Gurnah beginning to catch up—albeit tentatively—with its present.

“Karim’s mother treated him like a possession she was fond of,” Gurnah writes, “but the details of whose welfare she was happy to leave to her parents.” Despite this unpromising start in life, Karim shines in school and is awarded a scholarship to attend university in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania’s largest city. A scholarship often spells heartbreak for the exiled young men of Gurnah’s novels—think of Rashid, weeping in his dorm—but in Theft, the distances are shorter. Dar es Salaam is only two hours away from Zanzibar. Once there, Karim finds himself “on the threshold of exciting times and a new freedom.” His relationship with his mother (who has moved to Dar herself) improves. He also meets and befriends Badar, a foundling employed as a servant in his mother’s house.

Badar is a typical Gurnah protagonist—shy, silent, wounded, rather passive, and almost creepily observant: “In his own way, Badar liked being without, he liked wearing shabby secondhand clothes because it reminded him of his lowly condition and allowed him to indulge in warming self-pity when he needed to.” Rejected by his own family (“Your people did not want you,” he is bluntly told), Badar attaches himself to Karim. It’s a slightly lopsided friendship: Karim has a cavalier attitude to their relationship, but Badar weeps “silent tears” when the older boy graduates and moves back to Zanzibar. Nevertheless, when Badar is accused of stealing, Karim invites him to move into his apartment. Karim and his new wife Fauzia have room for one more. Badar wastes no time hopping on the ferry to Zanzibar: “Once again Badar found that the direction of his life had changed without any effort on his part.”

All this takes nearly 200 pages. Having thoroughly acquainted us with Karim, Fauzia, and Badar, along with their parents and a host of aunts, uncles, and more distant relatives, Gurnah rather reluctantly dedicates Theft’s third act to watching them fall apart. Badar, no longer a servant, has found a job as the assistant manager of a boutique hotel in Zanzibar’s Stone Town. It’s the 1990s. “With tourism there were, suddenly, thousands of strangers, mostly Europeans, who did not speak Kiswahili and who went about their pleasures with frowning intensity.” One of these Europeans is a girl (given the startlingly manly name of Jerry Bruno) who arrives at Badar’s hotel with the vague goal of “digitaliz[ing] government records.” She’s cute, and although the two engage in lighthearted flirtation, he declines her dinner invitation by suggesting she go instead with Karim, who has become something of a big man in the local Development Office.

Karim and Fauzia have also become parents to a fussy baby: “Nasra’s screaming was becoming unbearable. Night after night he was able to get only three or four hours sleep, listening for the little catch in Nasra’s breathing that was the beginning of a yell.” Unable to sleep, Karim lies there fantasizing about Jerry and “the delicacy of her face, her eyes, her hair. Even her voice had something thrilling in it, an energy, self-assurance.” Her self-assurance proves irresistible to him, and the two embark on an affair that quickly becomes serious.

Gurnah is often compared to V. S. Naipaul, and while Theft’s sentences do bring to mind Vidia’s (or Shiva’s) uncluttered prose, the comparison is one that should be drawn gingerly. Their similarities might be more biographical than literary: both hail from small islands that were British possessions, and both migrated to the metropole when they were 18 years old. But it is difficult to imagine Gurnah describing Zanzibar, as Naipaul cynically described Trinidad in a letter to his sister, as “the most amusing island that ever dotted a sea.”

Naipaul’s true feelings about the Caribbean island were certainly more complex than those he evinced in his letters, but his drive to escape the island’s provincialism has no analogue in Gurnah’s fiction. I am hard-pressed to think of another writer alive who has so reliably and rewardingly returned to their place of origin in their work. Reading Theft, one has the sense that Gurnah is more determined than ever to recreate Tanzanian life on the page—more so, in fact, than he may be in shuttling Karim, Fauzia, and Badar through its plot. To this end, Gurnah frequently wanders away from the trio to describe things like the dresses—“with ruffled sleeves, with stitched lace around the neckline and sometimes around the waistline”—that Fauzia’s mother Khadija makes, or to linger over the shelves of a grocery store:

All the goods in the shop were tinned or dried. The pulses and grains were arranged in a row of boxes in front of him, rice, millet, lentils, red and white beans, making a pleasing color pattern. Tins of tomatoes and butter and sardines were on shelves behind him as were tins of jam, labeled with pictures of yellow and red fruits.

Gurnah’s penchant for generous scene-setting results in many of Theft’s lovelier passages, but its limitations are noticeable. While he remains keenly aware of the “social obsequiousness, the medieval religiosity, the historical mendacities” (as he puts it in Desertion) intrinsic to the Swahili coast, he is slightly less sure-footed when confronted by the island’s contemporary realities. Occasionally, Theft is injected with some clunky historical context:

It was the early nineties, and the government was now fully awake to the possibility of tourist money, so foreign exchange regulations were relaxed to allow foreigners to come and spend their cash and to encourage foreign investment to provide for their comforts, and to enrich the revolutionary barons with well-earned commissions.

Zanzibar has been transformed by its tourist economy, and although Gurnah seems interested in writing about this, he tackles the changes wrought on the island since the 1960s rather hesitantly.

Gurnah also seems curiously uninterested in Karim and Jerry’s affair, even as it heats up. Things come to a head when the lovers book a weekend trip to Dar es Salaam—“You have to live your life and I don’t think you’ll find it here,” Jerry tells Karim, in the breathless self-affirming language of the 22-year-old voluntourist—but Gurnah modestly shies away from describing their tryst. What do they do in Dar? What do they talk about? And what does Jerry think about her affair with an older, married African man? We are never told.

Perhaps Gurnah is wise to redirect his attention to Badar and Fauzia, left to deal with the consequences of Karim’s dalliance. Literature is awash in hazily realized African characters; it is refreshing to meet “some tourist vagabond” from Europe, as Fauzia’s mother describes Jerry, who is as ill-defined as the volunteer work she has come to Zanzibar to do. The reader interested in liaisons between European women and African men might satisfy their prurience by picking up Doris Lessing’s The Grass Is Singing (1950) or Nadine Gordimer’s The Pickup (2001); better yet, find a copy of Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North (1966), which might just be the last word on that subject. Gurnah, having made a career of writing about people living on the edges of the Western imagination, deftly points Theft away from such well-worn novelistic terrain. As Jerry flies away, we’re left with Badar, Fauzia, and something rare in contemporary literature: a happy ending.