Ambivalence and Re-enchantment: Moments of Learning in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Fiction

Abstract

Abdulrazak Gurnah opens his Nobel Lecture with the statement: ‘Writing has always been a pleasure!’ This focus on the writing experience is, for Gurnah, clearly connected to a school context, where teachers give students a task, and the students turn their attention to writing. In this lecture I want to focus on how these moments of learning are depicted in Gurnah’s fiction. I want to point to three aspects of learning that you can detect throughout his writing. The first aspect concerns the struggle for the right to education, often connected to an older generation, particularly women, and the way this struggle is carried over into the next generation in the form of expectations from the elders who had to sacrifice so much for their desire for learning. The second aspect concerns the ambivalence connected to colonial education and the way the characters grapple with the awareness of the intricate connections between this learning and the subjugation and vilification of the victims of Europe’s expansion. The third aspect concerns the context of the coexistence of several languages and the need for translation and can be found in the rather unexpected context of romantic love and love letters. This aspect makes us aware of the intriguing fact of that the stories and dialogues that we as readers mostly encounter in English only are to be found in a multilingual context where all characters communicate in other languages than English. The moments of learning here involve a subtle and careful crossing of language boundaries where the characters know that much is at stake. All these aspects involve enchantment but in very different ways. The struggle of the early generations points to a movement away from stories of wonderful events involving magic, princesses and kingdoms towards the idea of gaining all these wonders through an investment in the self through education. The magic and the enchantment remain but are displaced away from stories towards the promises of self-improvement and change as a way of escaping oppressive power structures. In contrast to the idea of disenchantment developed by Adorno and Horkheimer, Gurnah’s novels point to how the re-enchantment through self-improvement comes with an acceptance of the world view of the conqueror and a realization that the culture and the learning one is reaching for also contain the sources of the vilification of the self.

Bio

Maria Olaussen is Professor of English at the Department of Languages and Literatures at the University of Gothenburg and a research affiliate of Stellenbosch University in South Africa. She has published widely on African literature, Indian Ocean Studies, Gender and Slavery Studies. With Tina Steiner she co-edited Critical Perspectives on Abdulrazak Gurnah (Routledge 2023), a republication of special issue of English Studies in Africa (2013). Among her publications on Abdulrazak Gurnah are the articles “Europe in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s novel By the Sea” (2009), “Shifting Paradigms: The Indian Ocean World in Adbulrazak Gurnah’s Paradise and Desertion” (2012), “The Submerged history of the Indian Ocean in Admiring Silence” (2013). Her forthcoming article on “Slavery, Peonage and Unfree Labour” in the Cambridge UP handbook series on African literature also discusses Gurnah’s novel Paradise.