Abdulrazak Gurnah, born in Zanzibar and who has lived in England since 1968, has won the Nobel Prize in Literature. This is big. It is a time to celebrate, especially as Bhakti Shringarpure, co-founder of Radical Books Collective, has argued in a post on our site, Gurnah is only the 6th African to win the prize since its inception in 1901: "... he is also only the fourth Black writer to have won the prize. Unlike the Booker Prize which has historically scored well on the diversity points, the Nobel has always favored the whitest and the most European of all literature."
The first African to win the prize was Wole Soyinka in 1986; 35 years ago. In between, the Egyptian Naguib Mahfouz won in 1988, then the two white South Africans—Nadine Gordimer (1991) and J.M. Coetzee (2003). Doris Lessing, who was born in Rhodesia (later Zimbabwe), was the last African to win the prize in 2007.
Initial appreciations of Gurnah's win, particularly on social media, have played up Gurnah's identity. His Africanness and Blackness. That is fine, but Gurnah is from Zanzibar, an island nation (now in a confederation with Tanzania) that is at the crossroads of the Indian Ocean, Arabia, and Africa. And, as a Tanzanian friend reminded me, yesterday Tanzanians and Zanzibaris exchanged words online over who could claim him.
And, amid the celebrations, some hard questions also confront us.
In another post for us, Nicole Rizzuto, an Associate Professor of English at Georgetown University, writes how Gurnah has rebelled throughout his writing career against being pigeonholed. That Gurnah's "... novels offer a running commentary and a skepticism toward the cultural politics of packaging African stories for global circulation and consumption." As for Bhakti, she asked: "Gurnah's win pushes us to think about the role of the LitNobel and prizes, more generally, and the way in which they construct what we think of, read, engage with, and buy as African literature today."
One small footnote: a less widely circulated fact about Gurnah is that his working life as an academic (he is now retired and lives in Brighton on the English coast) was spent as a scholar of literature and, that among others, he has done close readings of the novels and short stories of the South African writer, Zoe Wicomb. Congratulations!
– Sean Jacobs
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