Who is Abdul-Razak Gürna?
This is a question that the whole world has been asking since the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature was drawn.
His name never appeared on the online hit Nobel Prize in Literature odds list, searching the world Chinese books, and only two short stories were translated into Chinese.
Refugees, or immigrants?
Scholar, or writer?
Africans, or Arabs?
This article takes you deep into Abdul-Razak Gürna, his people, his writings, and the complex cultural context behind them.
Who is Abdul-Razak Gürna?
So, who is Abdul-Razak Gurna?
A Tanzanian writer, born in Zanzibar in 1948 to a native of Hadhramaut, Yemen. Strictly speaking, at the time of his birth, the state of Tanzania had not yet been established. Many people think that Gürna is just a Zanzibar and cannot be regarded as a Tanzanian. So, when the Tanzanian government first issued a speech saying, "Your victory belongs to Tanzania and Africa," many Zanzibars said that the Tanzanian government was putting gold in its face.
The peaceful liberation of Zanzibar from British colonial rule in December 1963 and the subsequent revolutions in which the regime of President Abid Karumi led to the oppression and persecution of citizens of Arab descent and massacres. As a victim minority, Gurna was forced to leave his family in the late 1960s after completing his studies and fleeing the then-fled-just-founded Republic of Tanzania. It was not until 1984 that it was possible for him to return to Zanzibar and meet his father shortly before his death. Gulner received his Bachelor of Education degree from the University of London in 1976 and has since worked as a secondary school teacher. From 1980 to 1982, Gurna returned to Africa to teach at Bayer University in Nigeria, where he studied for a phD at the University of Kent, where he received his degree in 1982 and taught at the University of Kent in 1985. Gurna was very active in the British literary scene, he studied literature and also created literature, and his academic coverage was extensive, and before his retirement he was professor of English and postcolonial literature at the University of Canterbury Kent, where he taught the course "Colonial and Postcolonial Discourse", focusing on writers such as Soyinka, Ngugi, Naipaul and Salman Rushdie. He edited two collections of African literature that were influential, and was also the deputy editor of the famous British literary journal Voyager.
Gulner has been writing literature since 1987 in the genre of novels and short stories, and has published ten novels and a number of short stories so far. In his novels, the protagonist basically enters a new social environment, resulting in the fragmentation of the original social identity and self-identity, reflecting the pain and identity crisis brought by colonialism and diaspora. This is directly related to his upbringing with the Swahili culture represented by Zanzibar.
What did Abdul-Razak Gürna write about?
Gurna's works depict the transformation of East Africa from the pre-colonial period to the post-colonial period, and provide an in-depth portrayal of the psychology of different ethnic groups in flux, which has become an excellent window for understanding East Africa. He is adept at portraying character relationships, showing how different characters cross barriers to establish connections across barriers in terms of losing their sense of belonging to the nation-state or facing unstable relationships within their families.
Memory of Departure (1987)
Gurna's first novel, Memory of Departure (1987), in which the protagonist, Hassan Omar, lives with his family in a poor harbor village, surrounded by a vicious cycle of violence and despair: his father is drunk and tyrannical, his sister is rash and lascivious in order to escape life, his brother dies without learning and unskilled, and his mother resigns himself to fate. Eventually, Hassan left home for Nairobi, Kenya, to join his uncle. There he discovers a larger world in which there is both cruelty and hope and redemption, a way for him to escape his past life and self-hatred from which he cannot extricate himself. Hassan's coming-of-age ceremony has a hidden meaning: the ambitions and dilemmas of the protagonist reflect the struggle of Third World Africa for independence from colonial shackles and poverty and backwardness.
Pilgrim's Way (1988)
The second novel, Pilgrim's Way (1988), tells the story of Daoud, a Muslim student, who travels from Tanzania to his "holy land", England, but experiences racist abuse by the skinheads and others, is disillusioned to find himself confronted with a culture characterized by localism and racism, and has to seek solace in his memories of Africa.
Dottie (1990)
The third novel, Dottie (1990), is a history of women's upbringing. Dotty's childhood was not happy, she weaves a warm and loving story for her name, but knows nothing about the origin of the name, little about her family history, and the suffering of her ancestors when they made their home in Britain. At the age of 17, she took on the responsibility of caring for her younger siblings and was bent on reuniting her family. However, when the frivolous sister Sophie leaves and the ignorant younger brother Hudson is caught up in the crime, Dotty is forced to start thinking about her future. With shattered memories, she began to carve a path for her life.
Paradise (1994)
The fourth novel, Paradise (1994), is widely regarded as his masterpiece, and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Whitblade Prize in 1994. The novel takes place in East Africa during World War I. At that time, East Africa was completely divided by the European colonial powers, the British colonists expelled the indigenous people, and the Germans planned to build a railway across the East African continent to transport the wealth plundered by the colonies. In order to pay off the debt, the protagonist of the novel, Yusuf, is sold by his father as a contract laborer at the age of 12. Young Yusuf was sent to work in the shop of the wealthy merchant Aziz, where he was exploited and enslaved. After a little longer, Yusuf followed Aziz's caravan around. In his eight years of business life, he came from the countryside to the coastal city, witnessed the strangeness of urban life, personally experienced the harsh social reality and the cold of the world, and grew from a child to a youth. He saw tribal strife, superstition, disease, and a rampant slave trade in Africa. He recognized the complex relationship between master and servant, merchant and villager, Islam and animism, and witnessed the catastrophe that colonialism had brought to Africans. This novel can be seen both as a coming-of-age novel and as a historical novel that tells the history of African colonization from the perspective of Africans, subverting the history of Africa inscribed by Eurocentrist ideology to a certain extent.
Admiring Silence (1996)
The fifth novel, Admiring Silence (1996), which depicts the suffering of a man caught between two cultures, can also be considered his autobiography. An unknown African university student flees his hometown of Zanzibar to teach at a secondary school in London to escape political persecution. Married an English woman and had a daughter. He had to deal with racial discrimination from whites and the ambivalence of his own integration into British society. In order to let others know more about himself, he kept creating, hoping to establish his identity through his works. In Britain he had little to no connection to his hometown, and 20 years later, Tanzania's political climate changed and he was given a chance to return to his homeland. However, this return made him realize that he had become an outsider in his hometown. Through this homecoming trip, he realized that he had undergone a substantial change in himself, that he did not belong to Either Tanzania nor the United Kingdom, and could only seek living space as an "exile" between the two cultures of Britain and Tanzania.
《海边》（By the Sea, 2001）
The sixth novel, By the Sea (2001), a shortlist for the 2001 Booker Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Award, tells the story of Saleh Omar, a middle-aged man who came to Britain from Zanzibar in search of political asylum in the late 20th century. Upon arrival at London's Gatwick Airport, he was subjected to discrimination and xenophobia from the British, detained for failing to provide a reason to seek asylum, and airport staff used the opportunity to check their luggage by stealing a mahogany box of spices from Omar, symbolically stripping him of the memory of his homeland. He can only carry the memory of his hometown, floating in this foreign land in Britain.
Desertion (2005)
The seventh novel, Desertion (2005), a shortlist for the 2006 Commonwealth Writers' Award, tells the story of the tragedy of love across generations across races and cultures. The novel is divided into three parts, the first of which takes place in Kenya in 1899. The British writer Pierce was in distress in the desert and was found and rescued by the Muslim youth Hassanali. After being rescued, Pierce visits the door to say thank you, meets Hassanari's sister Rihanna, and the two fall in love, despite colonial and religious restrictions. As a result, Rihanna was expelled from her home and exiled with Pierce. The latter two parts, which take place in Zanzibar in the 1950s, tell the story of the brothers Amin and Rashid. Brother Amin is in love with Pearce and Rihanna's granddaughter, Jamila, but is forced to break up with Jamila due to her parents' resolute opposition, living in fear and remorse caused by "abandoning" each other. Younger brother Rashid was awarded a scholarship to study in Britain, "abandoned" his home in turmoil, experienced racist alienation in London, and lived a life of "second-class citizen".
The Last Gift (2011)
The eighth novel, The Last Gift (2011), focuses on the impact of immigrant experiences on immigrants themselves and their descendants, showing the identity crisis brought about by ethnocentrism in delicate brushstrokes. The protagonist, Abbas, is an engineer who came to England from Zanzibar 43 years ago and met his half-blood wife, Mariam. For years, Abbas was tight-lipped about his experience before coming to Britain. At the beginning of the novel, Abbas suffers a stroke due to diabetes, fears that he will soon die, and tells his family his secret as a "last gift" in a fragmented form of recollection. As a descendant of immigrants who grew up in Britain, his son Jamal could not be fully accepted by British society because of his skin color, and could not find a sense of belonging; his daughter Hannah changed her name to Anna and tried to transform herself into an Englishman in all aspects, but her white boyfriend Nick's family and relatives and friends still believed in their racial superiority and sneered at him.
Gravel Heart (2017)
The ninth novel, Gravel Heart (2017), takes place at the end of the 20th century and tells the story of Salim's move from Zanzibar to England to reflect on his parents' divorce. For 7-year-old Salim, his indifferent father, his adored uncle, his cherished books, everyday life in government schools and Quran lessons seemed like the unshakable pillars that underpinned his little universe. But in the 1970s, the winds of change blew in Zanzibar: Salim's father died suddenly, and the island was rife with violence and corruption in the aftermath of the revolution. Years later, when he arrived in the strange and hostile London, he began to understand the tragic core of his family's history.
Afterlife (2020)
His tenth novel, Afterlife (2020), published last year, is set against the backdrop of the Magimagi Uprising in the early 20th century, with four protagonists living in German-occupied East Africa. In April 2021, the novel was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction. When the protagonist of the story, Elias, was a young boy, he was taken away from his parents by German colonial forces. Years later, he joined the German army to fight his people, and when he returned to the village, he found that his parents had died and his sister Afia had been sent away. Meanwhile, another young man, Hamsa, also returned. He had nothing but clothes on his body, and all he sought was a job to make ends meet, a safe life, and Affia's love. Fate has bound these young people together, and their lives, jobs and loves have been shrouded in the shadow and darkness of war on another continent.
Gurna's novels mainly tell the story of African immigrants, deeply analyze the pain and confusion they suffer in the face of the pervasive colonial and racist remnants of contemporary society, and map the fragile side of contemporary British society with alienated characters. In Gulner's novels, fragmented narratives traveling through time and space replace traditional linear narratives, just like the lives of his characters in a dislocated, diaspora state. In the context of globalization, dispersion refers to a phenomenon of transnational mobility that includes multi-directional cultural migration and intermingling, as well as the ability to occupy different cultural spaces. This mobility is not a simple movement of people, it has a worldwide cultural significance, constituting a chained and interactive global cultural and social relationship.
How to better understand Gulner's work?
To understand Gurna's work, we must first understand the history of Zanzibar.
Map of Tanzania
Tanzania is divided into two parts: the mainland region, that is, Tanganyika, and the island region, that is, Zanzibar, including Angguja Island/ that is, Zanzibar, Pemba And more than 20 small islands.
Coastal areas of East Africa
Around the fifth century AD, the inhabitants of the Arabian Peninsula began to migrate to the coastal belt of East Africa, including Zanzibar, to escape the chaos of war.
At the end of the seventh century, Suleiman, the Sultan of Persia, fought with the Sultan of Oman, and the Omanis were defeated. The Persians drove large numbers of Omanis out of the Arabian Peninsula, and the coasts of East Africa, including Zanzibar and Pemba, became their first choice.
In 975, the Persian Prince of Shirazi, Hassan ibn Ali, in order to escape the war, dragged his family to the coast of East Africa, exchanged a large amount of cloth for a foothold, and let his children and grandchildren marry the families of indigenous chiefs to connect their feelings. Over the generations, the Ali family relied on intellectual and cultural superiority to gradually unify the East African coastal islands and the mainland coastal lowlands from Lam Island in the north to comoros in the south. With Kilva as its capital, the Sangzi Empire was established and ruled for more than 500 years. Zanzibar and Pemba were important territories of the Empire.
In 1503, important East African ports, including Zanzibar and Pemba, fell into Portuguese hands.
In 1643, the fading Portuguese were driven out of the Arabian Peninsula by the emerging Sultanate of Oman. After the victory of the Sultan of Oman over the Portuguese, he established thousands of common coastal lowlands and overseas territories of coastal islands stretching from Mogadishu in the north to mozambique in the south. It is also a direct testimony to the disgraceful history of the Arab slave trade.
In 1832, the then Sultan of Oman, Said, moved the capital to Zanzibar, first, the strategic location here is important, the harbor is suitable for docking large tonnage ships, and there are a considerable number of Omani garrisons stationed here, the second is that the commercial advantage is obvious, there was no Suez Canal at that time, European merchant ships to the Indian Ocean and the Far East must pass through the east coast of Africa, Zanzibar has fresh water and food supplies. The Sultan was a man of great talent, encouraged the development of agriculture, encouraged Arab emigration to Zanzibar, and had good relations with the British. After his death in 1856, 36 children became a hidden danger of Zanzibar's division.
Since 1890, the British colonial administration has continued to use local tribal forms of rule. San was divided into seventeen tribes at the time, and during World War II, food and clothing were distributed according to race, and Asians had a higher status than Africans. In the 1950s, the upper echelons of Arabs gradually woke up to the danger of inter-ethnic hatred. In 1954, the Executive Council presented the British with a comprehensive solution to the Zanzibar problem, which was rejected by the British. The Arabs themselves formed associations and resisted participation in the activities of various committees. In 1955, a number of peasants formed the Zanzibar National Party, which aimed to unite peoples, eliminate racism and strive for independence. The Arabs' Association has failed to coordinate with the party. The Nationalists' mass base grew stronger, and this development made the Arabs realize that even if the British were gone, they might not necessarily replace them. Later, the African Shiraz Party was formed, which worked mainly among Africans and Persians. In any case, the political arena at that time was turbulent, but it was an indisputable fact that the Arabs were gradually losing power.
When the British colonists left Zanzibar, what was left was the political structure of a minority of Arabs dominating the majority of Africans, which inevitably led to the Arabs, although they had the inertia of long-term rule, but experienced the national independence movement, and the Africans, who accounted for the majority of the population, were not able to accept such a distribution of power, so it inevitably led to revolution.
On the morning of 12 January 1964, Johann O'Kelo, a member of the African Shiraz Party, mobilized some thousand revolutionaries to start a rebellion, and the rebels defeated the police force and misappropriated their weapons, overthrowing the Sudan and its Government and forming a new One. Retaliation was subsequently taken against civilians of Arab and South Asian descent on the island, with many Arab and South Asian women gang-raped, property looted and nearly 20,000 dead. A large number of Arabs began to flee (it is worth mentioning that there is also a Swahili enclave in the south of present-day Oman, where the fleeing people settled). It can be said that with the birth of the new country, the good life of the Arabs in the local area is over.
After a brief history of Zanzibar, we need to further understand the Swahili culture that was co-bred between Zan and the coastal region of East Africa.
Gurna was An Arab Zanzibar, but in reality, a mixed-race Zanzibarian like him was actually Swahili.
What is Swahili?
The African civilization gradually formed by the Bantu black civilization as the main body of the East African coastal city-states absorbing the influence of foreign cultures is the Swahili civilization. Swahili culture was formed by the impetus of the Indian Ocean monsoon trade, and its growth process was the process of exchange and integration of ancient Asian and African civilizations, including African native culture, Arab-Islamic culture, Persian culture, Indian culture, Southeast Asian culture and so on. This is the culture created by the ancient merchants, adventurers, missionaries, and travelers who crossed the ocean in history through thousands of years of exchanges, and it is also the crystallization of the cultural integration of the ancient Asian and African peoples. So fusion is the first characteristic of swahili civilization. They are also reflected in Gürner's work.
In Seaside, Gurna gives a brief history of the Swahili region, telling the story of "thousands of [...] Merchants from Arabia, the Gulf, India and Sindh and the Horn of Africa" who "came to our place with the Musim wind". He wrote:
They've been doing this every year, for at least a thousand years. In the last months of the year, the wind steadily blew across the Indian Ocean towards the Coast of Africa, where currents obligatorily provided a passage to the port. Then, in the first few months of the new year, the wind turned and blew in the opposite direction, ready for the merchants to hurry home. It all seems to have been intentional [...]. For centuries, fearless merchants and sailors [...] Every year, I went to the coast on the eastern side of the continent, where there were pointed points that could accept the Musim wind a long time ago.
……
They brought their goods, their God and the way they saw the world, their stories, their songs and prayers, and a rare sense of studiousness. They also brought with them their hunger and greed, their fantasies, their lies and their hatred. Some of them left their lives behind, taking with them what they could buy, trade, or take away, including those they bought or kidnapped, leaving them slaves on their own land. After such a long time, the people living on that coast hardly knew who they were, but they knew how different they were from those they despised, and they all knew enough about themselves and for the descendants of the inhabitants within the continent.
Then the Portuguese bypassed the continent and rushed out of that unknown, insurmountable ocean, unexpectedly and catastrophically [...] They carried out frenzied religious destruction of islands, ports and cities, and were thrilled by the cruelty of the inhabitants they plundered. Then the Omanis came here, drove them away in the name of Allah, and brought money from the Indians, followed by the British, followed by the Germans and the French, and others with financial means.
In fact, they are no more Omani than I am, except that they have an ancestor who was born there. They didn't even look any different from the rest of us, maybe slightly pale or slightly dark, maybe their hair slightly straight or slightly curly. Their crime is Oman's disgraceful history in these places, and this is their original sin. In other respects, they are natives, citizens, civilians, they are the sons of natives.
We consider ourselves a moderate people. Arabs, Africans, Indians and Comorians live together, with quarrels and intermarriage. Civilization is who we are. But in reality, far from us, we are locked in our historical slums in our respective yards, killing each other, full of intolerance, full of racism, full of old grudges. And politics brings everything to the public.
Swahili culture is not far away.
For example, in "The Lion King", Pengpeng and Ding Man sing "Hakuna Matata", which means "no trouble" in Swahili.
Amani of beyond, singing amani nakupenda, is a Swahili word meaning "peace, I love you".
The Maccover name safari is swahili for travel.
The theme song of the game Civilization IV, baba yetu, is a Swahili hymn.
Gurna's work documents the history of the Swahili coast: the cultural entanglements of the monsoon trade, the disgraceful slave trade, the idea of portuguese, Omani, German and British unification, national independence and the Zanzibar Revolution, and so on. Looking back at these histories from the perspective of his coastal inhabitants, he tells the stories of Africa in the Indian Ocean, which are based on a multicultural fusion, rich in color, and at the same time cohesive into a new cultural form. In all of his works, Gurna strives to avoid the general nostalgia for more primitive pre-colonial Africa. His own background was a culturally diverse island in the Indian Ocean, with a history of the slave trade, various forms of oppression under the rule of a number of colonial powers such as Portugal, India, Arabia, Germany and Britain, and trade links with the entire world. Before globalization, Zanzibar was an international society. In a series of interviews with Muslim writers curated by Claire Chambers, Gürner once said: "East Africa is a very fragmented society, people come from different places, have different languages and religions, people negotiate with each other and live together. I believe it is a tolerant, even enviable society in which there is not a single dominant group. In the novel, however, Heaven is presented ironically because it is suppressed and defeated. In addition, I would like to show that there is also an ugly side to this paradise of goodwill, courtesy, and peaceful coexistence, which is the oppression of other groups. ”
On the other hand, the influence of Arab-Islamic culture on Swahili culture should not be underestimated. Even the word "Swahili" itself comes from arabic, meaning "coast." During the Middle Ages, with the expansion of the Arab Empire, Islam and its culture spread widely in East Africa, affecting all aspects of society. Scholars and merchants played an important role in the spread of Islam. Islamists in East Africa converted to Islam and went to North Africa, the Sham region, and the Arabian Peninsula to study Arabic and sharia teachings. Merchants exchanged textiles, jewelry, porcelain, and other products from the Arab region— and even further afield to India and China— with local gold, wood, leather, spices, etc. Through the frequent exchanges of commercial trade, there has been a deeper level of exchanges and communication between Arab Muslim merchants and local residents, and a large number of Muslim merchants have occupied the central coastal cities of Mogadishu, Bulava, Malindi, Mombasa, Kilwa, Mozambique, Sofala, etc. from north to south, and the influence of Islam has been increasing. It was in the interaction and integration of Arab and Persian Muslims with the local indigenous peoples that the mixed-race Swahili gradually expanded into an ethnic group. Swahili also matured as a practical means of communication throughout the coast, and these historical facts eventually led to the formation of The Swahili civilization with Islamic characteristics.
Arab Islamic culture contributed to the formation of commercial city-states and unified multi-ethnic states along the coasts of East Africa. Arab immigrants mixed with the locals, expanded maritime trade, and at the same time carried out large-scale agricultural production, introduced new crop varieties, and gradually formed the civilization of the East African city-states. The integration of The Arab culture brought about by Islam with the original local culture has enabled the indigenous culture of Africa to achieve a higher level and richer development.
Gurna himself has said that while in Zanzibar he had little access to Swahili literature, Arabic and Persian poetry, especially One Thousand and One Nights, was his literary initiation, as well as the Quran. And in 1964, when Africans celebrated the new independence of the Zanzibar state, Abdul Razak Gürna and his family became strangers to their homeland. As a persecuted ethnic group, he fled Zanzibar for England as soon as he completed his studies, so diaspora became an indispensable theme in his work.
Swahili civilization is not a pure maritime civilization, in fact, it is a civilization in the gap between the sea and the inland. Because the coast lies between the inland and the ocean, it does not belong inland and does not belong to the ocean. From its point of view, both the ocean and the interior are full of hostility. In the novel Paradise, although the caravan trade established mature channels of communication between the coast and the hinterland, the inland areas remained mysterious. The coastal inhabitants who were relocated to the slopes of Kilimanjaro looked deep inland toward the Great Lakes region, and they mentally depicted the world as they knew it: to the east and to the north, the farthest east was The land of China, and to the north was the walls of Gog and Marg. But the West (the Great Lakes Region) is a land of darkness, a land of ghosts. It was known as the "barbarians", while its inhabitants were ravaged by slavery. On the other hand, the sea is equally prohibitive, with elves and monsters often appearing (cf. Sinbad's Adventures in One Thousand and One Nights). Gürna called the oceans "unparalleled desolation and hostility."
For Gürna, the coast thus became a kind of "place that produces special historical insights." Here, every present moment is filled with a double past on both sides of the coast and complicated by this mixed creative culture." Far from being a pure land without history and without exploitation, the coast is a place of history, which in turn tells the story of both the ocean and the hinterland. These stories, conceived in the cracks, have become the stories of the coasters themselves.
How to understand Gurna's award in a contemporary context?
The Nobel Prize in Literature says this: "The 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to Abdel-Razak Gürna for his firm and compassionate insight into the impact of colonialism and the situation of refugees caught between different cultures." ”
Gurna's fluid characters find themselves between cultures and continents, between past lives and what is emerging; a situation of insecurity that can never be resolved. This situation is also the most typical theme of diaspora literature. The homeland that cannot be returned and the society that cannot be integrated are disasters that will inevitably be faced by all times, all nationalities, and all kinds.
Diaspora literature/immigrant literature is a complex field of pluralistic characteristics, due to the length of time of immigration, regional differences, differences in life experience, especially in the "cultural identity" of the huge differences, the literary ideas of the writer's works, the events expressed, the social content of the story and the literary view, there are great differences. Different writers have formed very different writing ideas:
First, the "memory" and "experience" writing of some writers has become a relatively fixed model, and the works and real life, local experiences are basically separated.
Second, the "spirituality" and "self-creation" writing of some writers has become a habit, the work comes from inspiration, using the writer's self-feeling consciousness to create, and life experience becomes the material for self-play.
Third, the "photo" and "real life" writing of some writers has become a "mission", and the works are "localized", with the spirit of local writers' consciousness.
In the creative process, the most important confusion of the writer is manifested in two aspects:
The first is to stick to the immigration mentality and look at reality with the other eye.
In many literary works, the writer's worldview presents a pattern - how I can use my own cultural and historical life background to write about the feelings of life in a new country, some people say write about the conflict and understanding between the two cultures. In an objective sense, the essential concept that the writer adheres to is objectively still the "wait-and-see" writing feeling. This phenomenon of writing accounts for a considerable amount in immigrant literature and may continue to be experienced for a long time.
The second is who I belong to, either one or the other
With the deepening of life in the new region, some writers have developed "anxiety" in their own writing, and they find that their literature has been excluded from "one or the other", showing the alternative characteristics of discrete literature. In the works, on the one hand, he tries to express his identification with the culture of the home country, on the other hand, he follows the mainstream ideology of the West, panders to the local readers to question and expect the original culture, and criticizes the weaknesses of their own nation. The reality of this objective existence impacts the writer's thinking. This anxiety, which exists in a distinct feature, is the ambiguity of one's own cultural identity, subjective confusion caused by geographical and temporal effects. Some works express this sentiment, but in fact, as the writer's own ideological boundaries, do not cross into another cultural area.
Exile is an important theme in Gurna's novels, which focus on describing how characters construct new homes and find a sense of belonging during migration, portraying the influence of colonialism and the historical legacy of the Indian Ocean trade and slavery. His works depict the transformation of East Africa from the pre-colonial period to the post-colonial period, and the psychology of different ethnic groups in flux is deeply portrayed, and it has become an excellent window for understanding East Africa.
Gulner himself was a professor of literature, and he studied how others told stories, so he also embodied this research in his own work. Immigration is actually a cross-cultural symbol. Immigrants do not belong to either the original cultural context or the new cultural context. The Nobel Prize itself is also paying more attention to the problems brought about by cross-culture in the context of globalization. The most concentrated problems brought about by cross-culture are reflected in immigrants, so the Nobel Prize will pay more attention to immigrant writers. This is an important issue in the current era of globalization, and it is also an important literary motif.
Finally, the main way for foreign literary works to be known to the outside world is through the recommendation of publishers. In the early days of reform and opening up, a large number of literary works in indigenous African languages were translated into Chinese, which were basically government-led translation work. However, since the 20th century, when domestic publishers introduce foreign literary works, they pay more attention to the topicality and economic benefits of their works, coupled with the current situation of the publishing industry, which will lead to a more conservative choice of publishers. It's always good to have one more Nobel Laureate in Literature in Africa, after all, even though Soyinka, Mahafuz, Gordimer, and Kudu have all taken glory on behalf of the African literary scene, the most answered question I, as a student of African literature, is still the most answered question: "Is there literature in Africa?" ”