Abdulrazak Gurnah won the Nobel Prize for 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.”
Since this bestowal occurred in 2021, following the global protests unleashed by the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, may we call his the first Affirmative Action Nobel Prize? I do not know, as I have never read a word by him until yesterday.
I have read books by V.S. Naipaul (A House for Mr Biswas and A Bend in the River) and Saul Bellow (Mr. Sammler’s Planet and Ravelstein), and find them quite good.
Gurnah says he can no longer tolerate reading a word by either of them.
“At a certain point of reading him, I thought, ‘It’s true, this guy is a racist,’” he told an audience at the Edinburgh International Book Festival about Naipaul. “And I can’t read him any more.”
Naipaul archly called the fatwa on Salman Rushdie “an extreme form of literary criticism” and famously said of his Trinidadian homeland, “I was born there, yes. I thought it was a great mistake.”
Gurnah cited Bellow’s remark, “When the Zulus produce a Tolstoy we will read him,” as evidence of his racism. He once read the Canadian-American author with great admiration, he says, but — no more.
In my limited experience with Naipaul and Bellow, neither seemed likely candidates to don a white hood on the weekends. Perhaps upon graduating from dabbler status to reading a third or fourth book by them, I reach the grim conclusions that Gurnah did.
Bellow, the son of Lithuanian-Jewish immigrants to Montreal from St. Petersburg, who later moved to Chicago, and Naipaul, an Indian born in Trinidad who moved to England, where he married a fellow Oxonian from the Midlands before a second marriage to a Pakistani woman from Kenya, do not seem like racists out of central casting. Maybe imagining racists as coming straight from central casting amounts to racism.
Surely anyone who reads Naipaul grasps his dim view of postcolonial nations. It was better, the message drips from the page, when the Europeans ran this place.
Is that racism or merely an opinion based on experience that Gurnah resents? Ditto for Bellow’s dim assessment of African novels.
Like Naipaul and Bellow, Gurnah’s travels, and those of his forebears, strike as complicated. He fled Tanzania at 18 when the locals tired of Arab rule. He went to England, where he remains.
Why do the colonized essentially set up colonies in the homelands of the former colonists?
Gurnah condemns Naipaul as a racist for depicting the liberation of imperial outposts as steps backward. Does not Gurnah’s choice of an adopted homeland affirm Naipaul’s words? If liberated Samchuckistan arrived as an improvement upon the place after the outsiders went home, why do the colonized essentially set up colonies in the homelands of the former colonists?
Intellectuals notice words. When you notice intellectuals’ actions, they might call you nasty names — like racist.
The glaring action here involves not an Arab fleeing Africa for England once the Africans took it back, but instead the showy political commitments that govern Gurnah’s reading habits. He cannot read two writers whom he long described as great because they issued comments and wrote prose that offends his ideological outlook.
This says more about Gurnah than it does about Bellow and Naipaul.
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