Something Old

  Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published four or more years ago.    

“PARADISE” by Abdulrazac Gurnah (first published 1994); "DESERTION" by Abdulrazac Gurnah (first published 2005)

            Last posting, I admitted that I had read too few novels by African authors and decided to mend things a little by reading Tanzanian Nobel Prize-winner Abdulrazac Gurnah’s The Last Gift, and Senegalese Prix Goncourt des Lyceens-winner David Diop’s At Night All Blood is Black (original French title Frere d‘ame). Both of them are very good novels, but one thing nagged at me. Though written by Africans, both novels are set largely in Europe. I wanted to read an African’s novel set in Africa. So I turned to one of Abdulrazac Gurnah’s earlier novels, Paradise, first published in 1994.

            Paradise is set in the very early 20^th century, the heyday of European colonialisation and empire-building. European maps then labelled the country in which the novel is set as German East Africa. Only later did it become Tanganyika and then (with the inclusion of Zanzibar) Tanzania, as it now is. Oddly, though, colonisation is not the main focus of the novel. It is more concerned with the various, and often conflicting, cultures and ethnicities that the country contains. Its focus is on the life of a young man, Yusuf, seen from childhood through puberty to young manhood. In one sense, the chronicle of this young life is presented very much in the style of the earliest of European novels in the 18^th century, such as Daniel Defoe’s many chronicles and tales (Captain Singleton, Colonel Jack, Moll Flanders, Robinson Crusoe etc.). Many characters are introduced, who appear only in part of the narrative; there is a long journey; and adventures and mishaps happen. It is not exactly a picaresque novel – Yusuf is no picaro – but it is nearly so.

A major event shapes the boy Yusuf’s life. Living in  the central part of the country, Yusuf’s father runs a very unsuccessful store. He owes much money to a man whom young Yusuf knows as Uncle Aziz (whether or not he is really Yusuf’s uncle is never made clear). Uncle Aziz, a successful merchant and trader, waives the debt on condition that he can take young Yusuf to be his indentured servant. Yusuf has to farewell his family forever and is taken, by train, far away to the coast (not too far from the island Zanzibar) where he has to toil in one of Uncle Aziz’s stores.  He is put under the authority of the storeman Khalil, an erratic and slightly unhinged fellow who jokes with customers, frets at his lowly status and often takes out his frustrations on Yusuf; yet who sometimes speaks words of wisdom. Yusuf’s language is one dialect of  Swahili (there are a number of Swahili dialects) and he has to learn Arabic as so many of people in the coastal area are Arabs. Nominally most of the country are Muslim, including Yusuf. But later in the novel one of Yusuf’s employers, Hamid, is appalled to discover that Yusuf, now aged 16, can barely read and has never studied the Koran. Hamid sets him to work studying (between his onerous tasks) and learning verses of the Koran by heart. For a while, Yusuf is very pious – or at least seems so – diligently visiting the mosque and saying his prayers; though the implication is that this is as much to earn favour with his employer as it is real piety.

So much for the general situation of Yusuf’s life. The three long central chapters (of this six-long-chapter novel) follow Yusuf as he is taken on the long trading expedition into the western-most part of the country, even further west that the central area where Yusuf was born. It is here that there is what amounts to an adventure rapidly turning into a disaster. A village they pass through has been burnt to the ground by marauders. They cross a river that is infested with crocodiles. A tribal woman is killed by a crocodile and a local tribal chief (they are designated as “sultans” in this novel) demands reparations because the woman’s death must be the result of the traders bringing bad luck. Everything goes wrong for the traders – disease, hunger, sickness. One “sultan” steals all their trading goods, and when they finally stumble back to the coast, the traders have made no profit.

When Yusuf recalls the journey to the interior, it is like a nightmare “So often on the journey he felt he was a soft-fleshed animal which had left its shell and was now caught in the open, a vile and grotesque beast blindly smearing its passage across the rubble and thorns. That was how he thought they all were, stumbling blindly through the middle of nowhere. The terror he felt was not the same as fear… It was as if he had no real existence, as if he were living in a dream, over the edge of extinction. It made him wonder what it was that people wanted so much that they could overcome that terror in search of trade… he had seen sights which nothing in him could have predicted.” (Chapter 5, “The Grove of Desire”, part 1)

Most notable is the fact that the traders regard the tribes near Lake Tanganyika as alien superstitious barbarians. They are as unknown to the people on the coast as they would be to the average European. “On one side, the level plain stretched away. Behind the mountains, he was told by the others who had been here before, lived the dusty warrior people who herded cattle and drank the blood of their animals. They thought war was honourable and were proud of their history of violence. The greatness of their leaders was measured by the animals they had acquired from raiding their neighbours, and by the number of women they had abducted from their homes. When they were not fighting, they adorned their bodies and hair with the dedication of brothel queens…” (Chapter 2 “The Mountain Town”, part 4). Thus Yusuf is told. This reader found the journey something like Conrad’s Heart of Darkness in its travel deep into unknown and alien territory. I now discover that one reviewer made the same connection, but was quickly slapped down by another who said that this was an unseemly Euro-centric interpretation…

In the novel there are only a few occasions when German colonisers loom large, but they are there in the background. In one phase of the journey, the African and Arab traders are enjoying themselves in the sight of a picturesque waterfall. A servant appears and tells them they have to leave because “Bwana” (meaning a German official) doesn’t want them there. In another episode, a German official, backed by armed men, actually helps the journeying traders by getting handed back to them the trading goods that have been stolen by the “sultan”. But the travellers most often criticise their German masters:

“Everywhere they went now they found Europeans had got there before them, and had installed soldiers and officials telling people that they had come to save them from their enemies who only sought to make slaves of them. It was as if no other trade had been heard of, to hear them speak. The traders spoke of the Europeans with amazement, awed by their ferocity and ruthlessness. They take the best land without paying a bead, force the people to work for them by one trick or another, eat anything and everything however tough or putrid. Their appetite has no limit or decency, like a plague of locusts. Taxes for this, taxes for that, otherwise prison for the offender, or the lash, or even hanging…”(Chapter 2 “The Mountain Town”, part 5)

Simba Mwene, an African guide, told “stories of the Germans. He spoke admiringly of their sternness and implacability. Every infringement was punished, however much the victim begged for mercy or promised to reform… ‘With us, if a culprit shows repentance we find it hard to punish him, especially if the sentence is severe. People will come to beg and plead for him, and we all have loved ones who’ll mourn. But with the German it’s the opposite. The more severe the punishment, the more firm and unforgiving he is…’ ”  (Chapter 3 “The Journey to the Interior”, part 4) The greatest crime of the German rulers comes at the end where, in 1914, the First World War is breaking out and Germans are marching through the country kidnapping Africans and dragooning them into the army.

Paradise has many colourful characters – the severe Mohammed Abdalla who shouts orders at the porters on the interior expedition. The foul-mouthed Greek-Indian driver who shouts filth at the porters. The blasphemous Indian Kalasinga who likes to throw scepticism at the more devout Muslims.

But a question must be asked. Why is the novel called Paradise, especially as most characters are living hard and unpleasant lives? The nature of paradise is quarrelled over by devout Hamid and sceptical Kalasinga, one seeing it as heaven and another seeing it merely as a place of comfort on Earth (Chapter 2 “The Mountain Town”, part 7). But it has to be remembered that the word “paradise” originally, in the Persian language, meant a walled garden, a place to retreat and enjoy, blocking out the imperfect world. This surfaces in the last chapters of this novel. Yusuf has been growing up. He is a very handsome young man. Adults (male and female) often take a sensual interest in him – and though, like any other young man, he dreams of women and sex, he remains a virgin. But when he returns to the coast, he looks after a walled garden so well that the mistress of the house, mature in age, begins to take a very close interest in him and tries to seduce him. He turns her down. Scorned, she cries rape to her powerful husband and Yusuf has to run for it – run into uncertainty. At which point you get the reference, don’t you? This is a replay of the story of Joseph (Yusuf to Muslims) which first was written in the last chapters of the Book of Genesis in the Hebrew Bible. The Muslim version of the story of Joseph / Yusuf may be found in Chapter 12 of the Koran, as I confirmed when I consulted my copy of the Koran. The Bible and Koran versions of this story are similar, but there are some specific details found only in the Koran and I conclude that it was this text which Abdulrazac Gurnah used.

And what does the notion of paradise mean in this novel? I can only conclude that it is ironical. With the debts imposed on characters, with the friction between ethnicities, with the pressure of colonial overlords, with the exploitation of indentured labour, with the looming world war - the notion of paradise is far, far away from the quotidian reality of life. But at least, with young Yusuf running away from trouble, there is the possibility that he has the nous to make a reasonable life for himself. In spite of everything, this is not a work of gloom.

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If Abdulrazac Gurnah’s Paradise had something to say about colonialism, his 2005 novel Desertion presents us with a problem that may be even thornier – namely, the inter-relation of different races. Desertion has two time frames. The first third of the novel is set in the year 1899. The remainder of the novel is set in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

In 1899, an Englishman called Martin Pearce stumbles, dehydrated, into a village in Kenya. He is a traveller, an “Orientalist”, bereft of nearly all possessions. He is taken in by a merchant family of mixed Indian and African descent and falls in love with a woman of the family called Rehana. Pearce is a thoroughly decent man, sympathises with the African and Indian people, understands their customs and traditions and truly loves Rehana. Indeed (as we discover only much later in the novel) he has a child with her. And yet, without any explanation, he deserts her and disappears completely from the novel. Could it be that an “Orientalist”, obsessed with what is exotic, can in fact be less interested with real living people?

Flash forward to the 1950s and early 1960s. Zanzibar is in turmoil, going through a revolution and the British are withdrawing from Tanganyika which will soon become Tanzania. The focus now is on a family of two brothers and a sister living in Zanzibar. They are good Muslims and obedient to their parents. The youngest brother Rashid is totally focused on winning a scholarship to an English university. Rashid (who narrates most of the novel in the first person) is a good scholar and he wins his scholarship to the University of London. Off he goes to England while his family tell him that it would be safest for him to stay in England given what violent warring there was in their own country.

Rashid’s older sister Farida is a dressmaker. One of her clients, Jamila, has an affair with Rashid’s older brother Amin. But Jamila is of a different social class from the family, she is more worldly than the family, not a devout Muslim and is soon being socially shunned by Amin’s family and their circle. Indeed, given Jamila’s social life, dining with sultans and European officials, she is regarded by Amin’s family as being little more than a whore. Reluctantly Amin breaks off his affair with her.

And it is at  this point that we understand how the novel is stitched together. For it turns out that Jamila is in fact the grand-daughter of the forsaken Rehana and the absconding Pearce. With the exception of one chapter, this whole story is told by Rachid, who has pieced together the story of Martin Pearce and Rehana through notebooks kept by his brother Amin. It is now clear why the novel is called Desertion. Martin Pearce deserts Rehana. The English desert a country which it promised to protect. Amin deserted the other Rehana. And, of course, most important of all, Rachid has deserted the country and culture that nurtured him. He settles in to an academic life in England, and as the years go by he becomes more and more alienated from his family and its beliefs. He almost becomes an Englishman.

It would be easy to suggest that in this novel Abdulrazac Gurnah is considering his own situation – Tanzanian by origin, British academic by choice – and offering a critique of his status, cut off from his roots and assimilated into European norms. Yet it is more than that, for it is as much about the pain of leaving a certain culture, even if one does not wish to return to it. At one point, Rachid refers to Othello, and wonders if love between different ethnicities is always awkward.

There are certainly some sharp critiques of colonialism in this novel. In the 1899 section of the story, there is a British official who treats Rehana’s family with great injustice because he refuses to believe that they are telling the truth over a matter of theft as their very ethnicity means they can’t be telling the truth. When Rachid is first introduced to an English university, he and other “foreign” students are welcomed with a very patronising speech  where the speaker tries to ingratiate  them as “jolly good fellows”. But it is not colonialism that drives this novel. It is that sense of loss. That sense of desertion.