Long before he won a Nobel Prize, this author lugged bodies around in a hospital

Each week, Benjamin Law asks public figures to discuss the subjects we’re told to keep private by getting them to roll a die. The numbers they land on are the topics they’re given. This week, he talks to Abdulrazak Gurnah. The Tanzanian-British writer, 76, is the author of 11 novels. He has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize, Orwell and Commonwealth Writers’ prizes, and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2021. His latest novel is Theft.

Abdulrazak Gurnah: “Many statues celebrate people who are not – it seems to me – worth celebrating.”Credit: Getty Images

POLITICS

In 1964, there was a violent uprising in what’s now Tanzania. Several years later, you and your brother left for England. Tell me about that journey. We left Zanzibar after finishing school. We wanted to continue studying; that wasn’t possible any more. It was impossible to get travel papers at that time, for some reason, unless they wanted to throw you out of the country. We weren’t in danger – it was really to improve our lives – but being separated from your home and people, being strangers in a place you don’t know very much about, being young and poor – those are things we found out about.

You’ve publicly criticised the common practice in Western publishing of putting non-English words in italics. Why? Many of the places, people and societies I write about are multilingual. People speak more than one language, even if they don’t speak all of them properly, fluently and fully; they might speak a bit of English, Swahili, Arabic and perhaps even an Indian language. So to italicise is to say, “This is a foreign word”: it exoticises the word. But there isn’t always an English equivalent. You can also put in the word and somehow indicate what it means by context. So I leave the word there and make sure the sense of it is clear.

There are debates over whether statues of historical figures who’ve caused harm should be toppled. You once said, “I don’t care if they topple statues or not, but the symbolism is good … and if it provokes all these right-wingers to come out and cry? Good.” Can you expand? At the time, people – including then-prime minister Boris Johnson – made a very loud fuss about the fact a statue had had some paint thrown on it. Many statues celebrate people who are not – it seems to me – worth celebrating, figures who are often representative of reprehensible politics because they were defenders of slavery or colonialism or war. What all of this toppling expresses is a turning away from that narrative about what’s important and what a society should celebrate.

MONEY

How did you make those early years in England work for you, financially? A bit of luck, a bit of kindness. The people at the guest house – a kind of student accommodation we were in – were kind enough to let us accumulate a bit of a debt. We couldn’t pay them straight away. Then we worked.

What was your work? We started doing bits of farm work – picking strawberries, that kind of thing – and then worked in a factory. But then the money ran out, so we went to work full-time in a hospital in the operating theatres.

Doing what? What do you think? An unskilled young man of 19! We were wiping floors and lugging around bodies; that kind of thing.

That sounds like tough work. Physically, it wasn’t that tough, but it was something to learn. I’d never been inside an operating theatre, let alone as a worker, so it was a whole new different world.

In all of this, where did writing fit in? That period of working at the hospital made me understand that I really didn’t want to do that: what I really wanted to do was to study English. So I went to evening classes, then went on to do an English degree. By then, I was moving towards writing, but I didn’t tell anybody. So, in fact, I was very grateful for that experience of the operating theatre.

Winning the Nobel Prize made you 10 million Swedish kronor (then about $1.6 million) richer. What did you do with the money? None of your business!

Fair enough. But did you at least do something to celebrate your win? It did enable us to move house. Not to a mansion or anything like that, just a small place. And there was no problem with money any more. You think, “Okay, if my family needs something, I can assist.”

SEX

When you arrived in England, did you notice a huge difference between English attitudes to sex and relationships and what you’d known at home? For sure. I grew up in a culture that was 90 per cent Muslim in a family that was relatively pious in the sense that my father was a regular worshipper. One of the first things he’d say is, “Have you said your prayers? Have you been to the mosque?” Never mind sex. When we went to England, the miniskirt was the height of fashion. Young women were wearing these things that barely covered their knickers. It was quite unexpected and strange. There was a lot to learn in that way.

You were in the prime of your youth. How did you navigate the world of dating and relationships? I didn’t put myself out there, but I learned how to relate and how to date, all of those things.

What were your prime assets? Charm, looks, intelligence … all of the above? I didn’t think I had any of those. It took a long time to feel comfortable.

What drew you to your wife, literary scholar Dr Denise deCaires Narain? Well, I’d known her for a while – for nearly 10 years – and we were working together, to some extent, before we got together.

And how long have you been together now? We’re coming up to 30 or so years, but that’s nothing. There are lots of people who’ve been together 50 or more years. Really, we’re still quite young.

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