Review:Â Love after atrocity: A Nobel winner's new novel crystallizes the pain of colonialism
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Loading... - Bright Makeme
- 19 Sep 2022
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We read books in translation, in part, to learn about other cultures. The best of them take us beyond literary tourism and into the history that shaped those cultures — the good, bad and ugly. Often it’s the shame and wreckage left behind by colonialism, as in Nobel laureate Abdulrazak Gurnah’s new novel “Afterlives,” in which the horrors of Germany’s imperial takeover of vast swaths of Africa resulted in the first genocide of the 20th century.
Gurnah, born on Tanzania’s province of Zanzibar, fled political unrest for the United Kingdom in 1964 as a teenager. He began writing in English, rather than his first language of Swahili, adding a layer in his careerlong drive to reveal the hybridity inherent in migration — which Gurnah believes is fundamental to the modern world. While his books may center on particular African communities and events, what has earned him the highest of accolades is his attention to universality.
“Afterlives” covers decades in the lives of its three main characters, Khalifa, Afiya and Ilyas. They each experience various kinds of deprivation, salvation and injustice in the aftermath of colonialist brutality. The novel also hews close to some of the German occupiers. It would be easy to make them caricatures, a mass of Colonel Klink-like goose-steppers; the material is all there, from their calling Tanganyika “Deutsch Ost-Afrika” to their schools and “crenellated fortresses.”
But Gurnah not only holds himself back from lampooning the Germans — he also makes sure we see how desirable their station could seem to the young men who made up their Schutztruppe, African troops who fought against their own countrymen. In Namibia, the 1904 German-driven genocide against the Hereros, Namas and Sans leaves the ground beneath everyone’s feet politically and morally broken and literally filled with blood and bones. Across the continent in what was then Tanganyika, the atrocities are nearly as dire — and equally debilitating. Read More…
