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Roman
Publisher:
Gyldendal
Translator:
Kari and Kjell Risvik
Release year:
2021
«Abundant in myths, beliefs and superstitions»
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BOOK: Young Yusuf, the main character in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s novel “Paradise”, sees Europeans for the first time in his life. The two are tall, heavy and have shielded, red faces. One of them grits his teeth in a bite, so Yusuf flees and mumbles the words he has learned to say when he needs unexpected and sudden help from God.
The Nobel laureate’s novel describes colonial era East Africa before the First World War. The Germans are the master people, but the local population along the coast in what is today Tanzania is like a patchwork of different cultures. Swahili people, Arabs, Persians, Indian merchants and savages worshiping spirits and demons living in trees and rocks, according to Yusuf’s father.
Abdulrazak Gurnah, who was born in Zanzibar in 1948 and came to Britain as an immigrant in 1968, has been a professor of postcolonial literature at the University of Kent. His fiction writing has often had autobiographical features, but has also gone deep into the colonial history of East Africa. “Paradise”, which became his biggest breakthrough and was nominated for the Booker Prize in 1994, has the oppression of the German colonial power as a backdrop. The point of view, the gaze, is of course African.
Green terror in Nobel Prize novel
German ghosts
It is no wonder that 12-year-old Yusuf is intimidated by seeing two Europeans at the train station in the city. The rumors have run ahead of them. It was said that the Germans hanged people if they did not work hard enough. Or they cut the balls off them. Someone had seen a German stick his hand into a blazing fire without being burned, as if he were a ghost. Others have heard of the African pigs in South Africa where the intense heat transforms their Dutch brains into porridge, and still others have seen the quarrels in Petersburg where the ice and wind make them scream like jinn.
The Arab and Indian merchants have traveled. One of them, Uncle Aziz, bought Yusuf as a debt slave when his father owed him money. Yusuf is both wise and beautiful, people believe that his mother must have been visited by an angel. He will be a trusted servant and companion on Aziz ‘long journeys deep into Africa. This is towards the end of the time of the great trading caravans.
He is 17 years old when Aziz equips a large trade expedition inland towards Congo and the Great Lakes. They are 45 bearers and servants, musicians and muscle men who go into the inhospitable landscape, notorious for their snakes, lions, insects, disease and warlike tribes. They will sell picks and plows, silk, cotton fabrics and pearls in exchange for ivory and animal skins. People die along the way.
Reply to Joseph Conrad
“Paradise” is often read as a commentary, or kind of response, to Joseph Conrad’s famous “Heart of Darkness” (1902). But Gurnah’s African images are not unequivocally dark. He depicts the beautiful, green lights of the mountains, the waterfalls, shrines and abundant gardens. The richness of nuance is greater here, although Yusuf’s journey is also a defeat. The caravan is “stranded on the brink of nothingness”, they have to turn around and spend five months on the return journey. Then they have lost every fourth man and half of the goods.
The novel’s African gaze on the colonial masters is both realistic, gloomy and macabre. Europeans are camouflaged snakes with poisonous saliva. Their savagery and ruthlessness are widely known. “Come to them with a killer, and their eyes radiate happiness as they rig up the gallows,” it says.
The perspective is interesting, and the story abounds with myths, beliefs and superstitions, elegantly translated by the radar couple Kari and Kjell Risvik. Abdulrazak Gurnah has written ten novels and three of them have so far been translated into Norwegian. “Paradise” tempts to a deeper insight into his writing.
Modern Christmas gospel from Nobel Prize winner
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