Afterlives by Abdulrazak Gurnah: Entrancing storytelling and exquisite emotional precision

Abdulrazak Gurnah’s new novel is a tender account of the extraordinariness of ordinary lives, says Jane Shilling
Afterlives: Abdulrazak Gurnah
Mark Pringle
Jane Shilling10 September 2020

In concert halls, museums, public institutions and city streets, a passionate debate is taking place about colonialism and the value of individual lives. It is a question that Abdulrazak Gurnah has repeatedly addressed in his long career as a novelist.

Gurnah’s latest novel is set in East Africa, from the late 19th to mid-20th century, when ”The Germans and the British and the French and the Belgians and the Portuguese and the Italians and whoever else had already had their congress and drawn their maps and signed their treaties”, and resistance to colonial rule was put down with exemplary savagery(the Germ ans hanged one tribal leader in 1888, and sent the head of another to Germany as a trophy).

A small coastal port, somewhat removed from the worst of the conflict, is home to Gurnah’s three protagonists, who are linked by ties of friendship and family. Khalifa, a former bank clerk turned merchant, has lived in the town since childhood. His home is the fixed point from which his friends, Ilyas and Hamza, depart and return in elliptical orbit.

Ilyas and Hamza are lost boys. When Ilyas ran away from home, aged 11, he was kidnapped by an askari - an African soldier serving with the German forces - and sent to work for a German farmer, “a learned man, a restrained man”, who gave him an education and secured a job for him at a sisal factory in Khalifa’s town. From there, encouraged by Khalifa, he returns to his parents’ village, where he finds his ten-year-old sister, Afiya, orphaned and living with neighbours.

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Hamza was bonded as a child to a merchant by his father in payment of a debt. He, too, ran away, and in the years before the outbreak of war in 1914, both young men join the German army as volunteers. News of Ilyas intermittently reaches Afiya - now living with Khalifa and his wife, Bi Asha - then dwindles to perplexing silence. Hamza, meanwhile, is chosen by a German officer as his batman and grievously wounded in the last days of the war. After a period of convalescence with a German pastor and his kindly wife, years of wandering bring him back to the town of his childhood. A stranger there, recognised by no one, he eventually finds shelter, work, friendship, love - a home.

Gurnah, who was born in Zanzibar, is emeritus professor of literature at the University of Kent. His novels repurpose the sturdy elements of 19th-century fiction - orphans and runaway children, businessmen wily and otherwise, complicated wills, fortunes gained and lost, stolen caskets, unexpected letters - to fiercely original effect.

A tender account of the extraordinariness of ordinary lives, Afterlives combines entrancing storytelling with writing whose exquisite emotional precision confirms Gurnah’s place among the outstanding stylists of modern English prose. Like its predecessors, this is a novel that demands to be read and reread, for its humour, generosity of spirit and clear-sighted vision of the infinite contradictions of human nature.

Afterlives by Abdulrazak Gurnah (Bloomsbury, £16.99)

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