Life Takes Over

Samuel Rutter interviews Abdulrazak Gurnah on colonial legacies and the direction of contemporary literature, in a preview of LARB Quarterly no. 45: “Submission.”

By Samuel RutterJuly 5, 2025

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This interview is a preview of the LARB Quarterly, no. 45: Submission. Become a member for more fiction, essays, criticism, poetry, and art from this issue—plus the next four issues of the Quarterly in print.

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IN LATE APRIL 2025, Abdulrazak Gurnah arrived at the Reykjavík International Literary Festival. Over five days, a mix of writers from Nordic countries (Pajtim Statovci from Finland, Kuluk Helms from Greenland) and the rest of the world (Anne Carson from Canada, Hervé Le Tellier from France) gathered for a series of events held across the city, culminating in a “Book Ball” where a half dozen Icelandic debut authors took the stage, in a surprisingly polished cover band.

Gurnah, who was born in Zanzibar in 1948, is the author of 11 novels and several volumes of short stories and criticism. At a time when literary fiction is dominated by an insistence on the authorial first person, or at least a squirrelly undermining of that authorial figure, it is a welcome caesura to spend time with Gurnah’s work, where the personal and the historical are blended without complication in crisp, almost furtive prose. In 2021, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature “for his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents.” This has long been true: his 1994 novel, Paradise—short-listed for both the Booker Prize and the Whitbread Prize in the UK—is the tale of a journey inward, both spiritually and geographically, to remote lands west of Lake Tanganyika, drawing equally from the literary wells of Salim bin Abakari and Joseph Conrad.

Questions of cosmopolitanism, representation, ordinary characters, and colonialism came up time and again in my own conversation with Gurnah, who publishes in English but grew up speaking Swahili, when I met with him in a hotel overlooking a busy shipyard.

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SAMUEL RUTTER: We’re meeting at a literary festival in Iceland, where it’s hard to escape the influence of fellow Nobel laureate Halldór Laxness, who became something of a figurehead for the nation’s literature and, so it seems, felt altogether comfortable with the burden of representation that entailed. Do you feel that, in being the first Nobel Prize winner in literature from Tanzania, you’re no longer just the spokesperson for Abdulrazak Gurnah—that, to some extent, the role of ambassador to a whole literary tradition has been thrust upon you?

ABDULRAZAK GURNAH: Well, the simple answer is no, I don’t feel that way. But there was a side to your question about whether this new role has been thrust on me. I could say it has been, but rather gently. It hasn’t been too bad in the sense that I have been entertained by officials of the state, including the president of Zanzibar, which would never have happened without the Nobel. One direct result that I’m pleased about is that translations of my novels Theft (2025) and Paradise into Swahili are being prepared and will be coming out in the next couple of weeks or so.

In your early twenties when you turned toward literature, were there figures who loomed large in your imaginary?

I didn’t come to the idea of writing for public consumption, as it were, until relatively late, as a result of moving to the UK in my twenties. Quite simply, I don’t think there were those kinds of role models available for me to say I want to be like him or her. In my life, there weren’t so many writers—there were bank clerks, teachers, working people. I didn’t know that somebody could have a career as a writer. If anything, I was a student of African writing, so I certainly was interested in reading the writings of that generation that came just before me, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and so on, but I’m not sure I can say they were a model of what to be like or not to be like.

Do you think could you become that sort of a figure for a new generation of writers? Will young novelists in Africa or elsewhere look at your body of work and feel they want to write toward it, or perhaps against it?

I think that’s the natural cycle, isn’t it? No matter who the writer is, readers who engage with or identify with a work and its particularities might, at some point, think This is the way forward, and then 10, 15 years later, it goes the other way.

In your Nobel citation, the Academy noted your “uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents.” I’m interested in this idea of there being a gulf: a kind of empty space (geographically, a body of water) that separates two places, two cultures. Is this an accurate way of describing your work? Do you see yourself as moving through a gulf between cultures?

My work might seem that way from the point of view of the Academy, but it’s perhaps a little bit melodramatic. It might seem that there is a gulf between, I suppose, European culture and so-called other cultures. I like to use the term “cosmopolitan” to do away with this binary, which is not historically how European scholars consider the term. I like to think that there are many different cosmopolitan centers around the world, and I think the Indian Ocean is one of those. It has been so before the appearance of any Europeans in that part of the world and continues to be so. You can add to this, let’s say, the Chinese sphere of influence, which has its own cosmopolitan connections. Then there’s the Middle East … There are several different cultures, languages, cuisines, stories, and so on that communicate and overlap with each other all the time, that have been doing so for centuries. So the idea of a “gulf” as something that separates one block here and another block there, with a kind of chasm in between? I don’t really subscribe to that. I think that there are complicated, interweaving points of connection between different places. So somewhere like Bombay was a lot “nearer” to me as a child in Zanzibar—even though it was a long way away—than, say, Madagascar, which was geographically closer, because of the way culture moved around the Indian Ocean.

The way ideas and culture circulate between cosmopolitan nodes leads me to wonder about your work through terms like “diaspora” and “exile”—in an academic context, these terms can sometimes be misused as catchalls to describe so-called colonial subjects who bring the margins of the empire to the center.

If you’re suggesting that these terms are somehow misused or not used with enough nuance or accuracy, I completely agree. For example, I have never described myself as an exiled writer, although sometimes I’ll be introduced as such. I’m not living in exile. I think of exile as a consequence of taking a political position which is not tolerated where you are from, and therefore you go into exile to save your skin. Alternatively, you’re forced to go. You’re forced into exile. In either case, there’s a principle behind it. My leaving Zanzibar when I was 18 years old was not because my life was in danger. It was not because I held any particular political position—it was because I wanted a better life. I wanted to study; I wanted to fulfill myself. So, I’m not a refugee, and I’m not an exile. When it comes to the idea of diaspora, then that really has become a bit of a shorthand, one of those clichés. It has a very specific meaning, which relates to the expulsion of a people. But it has become a bit of an academic cliché to speak of people who have formed a community elsewhere, away from their places of origin, as a diaspora.

Did you find a Tanzanian or a Zanzibari community when you moved to the UK?

I live in a small town called Canterbury. As far as I know, there is no other Zanzibari or Tanzanian there, but there might be some students who come and go. There is a community in London, you know, and strangely enough there’s quite a community in Milton Keynes.

I’m interested in how that relates to the question of language. Swahili is your first language, but you write your novels in English—a language that has become an international lingua franca. At the same time, there is no one version of English, and writers from the former Commonwealth, for example, may still have cause to feel that their particular touchstones, and their English, are a small part of a large culture. Did you ever feel, or were you ever made to feel, that while English belongs to you, you were coming at it from a few rows back?

On the question of language, it’s really a lot simpler than you make it sound … For a start, it’s not really a choice. By which I mean—and I like to use a sporting analogy here—you don’t come out and say, “I’m going to be a high jumper.” It’s not something you become; you have to have whatever it is that makes a high jumper. Even if you are an athletic sort of person, you don’t choose it—

Not to disparage high jumpers, but is that the form they aspire to, that they are called to? Did they not perhaps start out as sprinters?

But all the same, it’s still not really a choice. You have to have the equipment, the right balance of mind and body or whatever. And it seems to me that language is a little like that. There is only a certain amount of writing you can do because you have an interesting idea. And this is probably not what we think of as literature: it’s not literature just because you have an idea. You must also have an intimate connection with the language, whichever language it is. An example I often turn to when this question comes up is Joseph Conrad [who was born in a Polish region of today’s Northern Ukraine and grew up speaking Polish at home]. At 17, he joins the French Merchant Navy, and speaks French, like a lot of Polish aristocrats did. Another 10 years pass, and he joins the British Merchant Navy. And then he starts to write, in English. And he’s only just learned English. Why? Because that’s the language where he felt that kind of intimacy. He didn’t write in Polish or French, except to write letters, which are a different kind of intimacy.

I can go back to the age of nine or 10 at school when none of us could speak English, where we were learning the language, and even then, we were learning a very crude and elementary kind of English. But somehow it was very easy for me to write in English. And it just went on like that. For me, the idea of writing is intimately connected with an inner comfort in the language in which you write.

You left Zanzibar at 18, and you have not lived there since. How has that distance—both temporal and geographical—suffused your writing?

After I left Zanzibar at 18, I was not able to return for 17 years, as it turned out. So, the idea of “home” became almost an impossibility. I left at that young age because it seemed like the right thing to do, but it was also a very reckless thing to do, because I didn’t really understand the consequences. During that period of not being able to go back, I had to negotiate another idea of where I might fit in. Did I want to stay in the UK? Did I want to make a life somewhere else? I couldn’t go back, so I had to go somewhere. But in the meantime, life takes over. You have no money, so you have to work. I know how that goes. Then you meet somebody, you get married, you have a baby, you have more kids, etc. Life takes over. And by the time it’s actually possible, when you have the independence—financially as well as otherwise—to make these kinds of big decisions, your circumstances are pretty well settled.

“Life taking over” is an excellent way of describing a certain type of character who recurs in your fiction. I’m thinking of Hassanali in Desertion (2005), Saleh Omar in By the Sea (2001): characters who—despite, or even because of, their best efforts—find themselves drawn into events they’d rather avoid. More often than not, these characters don’t have grand plans or a desire to surge forward on the front lines of history. What draws you to these characters?

They’re just like most people I know. Life is contingent. You make plans; maybe if you’re lucky, those plans work out, but they don’t always work out seamlessly. The truth is that for most people, whatever life brings, they have to somehow engage with it and negotiate with it and find a way toward the plans they might have. That’s how it goes, even for people whose lives have been bombed to hell but who survive. So, they travel from Syria to Germany and they open up a bakery, and maybe that’s not how they saw their life unfolding, but I’m interested in their resourcefulness. Now, if you’re already born into a fortune or an army or a throne, you won’t have to do those sorts of things. But most people are not, they’re not “little people” but they’re not heroes either, they’re just people doing whatever they can to cope. So, those are the people I write about.

And yet these characters cannot help but be drawn into the grand narratives of history, even at the margins. If we go back to the example of Conrad and Heart of Darkness (1899), I’m thinking here about how King Leopold II is little more than a face on a coin, and then there are the bankers, and so on down through Marlow and Kurtz and the sailors and Africans who are doing the actual “work” of colonialism in the novel’s depiction of the Congo. This is a major theme in your novels, particularly Afterlives (2020): Ilyas is an African character who ends up volunteering for the German Schutztruppe during World War I, effectively inscribing himself in an imperial conflict where no side has the best interests of Africans at heart. How do these individuals find themselves drawn into the maw of colonial destruction?

That’s very interesting. Colonialism wasn’t a big faceless thing. It was people who did it. And so there are two questions involved: for one, how did these individuals do what they had to do, and not have a sense of the injustice that they were involved in? And two, how can ordinary people actually embrace the other story, the lie that Europeans were there to bring civilization, to improve the lives of people, and so on? If you and I were part of that enterprise, how would we have explained that to ourselves? So that’s the officer, Ilyas, in Afterlives, who is a figure of that kind.

On the other hand, so many of the people who fought in that war in particular, but also in the Second World War, were “volunteers” of a kind. I’ll put “volunteers” in inverted commas, because sometimes they were volunteered rather than volunteering. But in any case, they weren’t conscripts; they were mercenaries. There were mercenaries fighting for colonial administration, killing, you might say, other Africans. How did that happen? The answers to those kinds of questions now seem so clear, but they are not, from a novelist’s point of view.

Could this have something to do with the idea of submission? More broadly, submitting to one’s fate, letting life take over, but in the context of colonial conflicts, acknowledging or accepting power through violence?

Submission is a recognition of powerlessness. And it has its nuances when it comes to birth and colonialism, too, because in many historical colonial contexts, subjects of the empire were not in fact citizens, and did not share their rights. Now, of course, there are people who live in postcolonial contexts as citizens of a state and still do not enjoy their full rights, and find themselves powerless against various forms of authoritarianism. Rule by decree was the norm under colonialism, and rule by decree is the case in many postcolonial states still. On the face of it, what has changed is that the people who are running the country now look more similar to you. Nonetheless, they rule without consulting. So, you submit; what else can you do? You get by.

I’ve heard you describe memory as “the hinterland of […] imagination.” I’m interested in this idea of hinterland and memory and how it relates to what is available to you as a writer, and what is not. As I’ve been reading through your novels, I’ve noticed there’s a fairly even split between what might be called “historical fiction,” which here means novels set in a time entirely before your birth, and those that that take place within your lifetime, and then there are those that span the two epochs, which we might call “living memory.” How do you navigate this hinterland of memory?

There are two different things at play here that we sometimes think of as if they’re the same. One is “memory” and the other is “remembering.” One is willed, where you want to remember something, or you want to investigate something from the past, and therefore you read about it, you research, you prepare. You could say that the war episodes in Afterlives, for example, fall into this category. It’s something I always wanted to write about, because I had heard stories. I didn’t live through that time, but I heard stories, and it was always something that I wanted to look into further, for precisely the questions we were talking about earlier: how did these people end up as mercenaries in a colonial war? That’s what I describe as “remembering.” And then there’s memory, over which we have no control. Even if you don’t want to remember something, it comes.

It seems to me that this is very fruitful terrain, it’s what I mean by “hinterland.” When you come across these rather snaggy, difficult, painful things that you think of as memory, it’s rich ground for a writer. In the end, both are hinterlands in a sense: what I am interested in knowing more about, and also what I can’t shed. It’s voluntary and involuntary.

And let me follow up on that idea of wanting to investigate, as a writer, something that has its origins in a story you heard. The question might be whether the stories we’re told are also part of our memory, our collective culture? Of course. When people ask, “Is this writing biographical?” I have to say, “Yeah, well, you know …” Experience is not just what I live through myself, what I hear, what I gather from other people’s accounts, what I read about. It’s also what I might imagine, to fill in the gaps in between all those things. It’s all part of my life.

I’m drawn to the idea of the novel as a container for all those things: the things you’ve heard, the things you invent, the things that interest you. What drew you to the novel as a form?

I actually used to write plays when I was a student. I studied drama, as well as English. I wrote plays, I acted in plays, but then what I found difficult about plays is that you have to rely on other people. And because none of us were professional, then, other people inevitably let you down. At the very last minute, on the day of dress rehearsal, somebody suddenly develops a horrible migraine, and they can’t get out of bed. Then who’s going to take over now? Me? But when you’re writing prose—writing fiction in particular—you have the sense of controlling the progress of what you’re writing. You don’t have to rely on anybody else. You have scope as well as time to develop an idea. But then you have to give it to the editor, who makes you undo it all!

Every generation seems to wring its hands about the novel, wondering if its moment has passed, if it’s up to the challenges of the times. Do you think the novel is still the literary form to meet the moment?

It seems that way to me. Particularly as students of literature in English, we sometimes think that the first novel ever written was, I don’t know, Robinson Crusoe or something like that. But the more you think about it, and the more you learn, you realize that’s not true. Think of all the novels written in other languages. About a year ago, I went to China for the first time, and you can still find paper books of Confucian thought from about 300 BCE, and then there was the first Chinese novel, which appeared in the 14th century. This is nonsense, this idea of the death of the novel. It’s a contemporary anxiety, contemporary to every age, it seems, but particularly to the 20th century. Because there was a heightened competition with other media, the anxiety then became about whether electronic media like TV or film would replace the novel. Nonsense. There’s no reason why you can’t have all these things going on at the same time.

I read a lot of contemporary books by English and American and African writers, and I’m very excited by some of the authors we call “young”—they must be about 40, but I guess that’s young compared to me. It’s very pleasing to me that there are so many young writers from Africa nowadays, particularly woman writers. To worry about the death of the novel is nonsense, because really there are so many good writers.

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Abdulrazak Gurnah is the 2021 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. He is the author of 10 previous novels, including Afterlives (named one of the best books of 2022 by The New York Times, The Washington Post, Time, and The New Yorker), Paradise (short-listed for the 1994 Booker Prize), By the Sea (long-listed for the 2001 Booker Prize and a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize), and Desertion (2005). Born and raised in Zanzibar, he is professor emeritus of English and postcolonial literatures at the University of Kent. He lives in Canterbury, England.