I look at immigrant literature in the Nobel Prize

Source: People's Daily Overseas Edition

Why was this year's Nobel Prize in Literature awarded to Abdulrazak Gurnah, an unpopular writer?

The award speech said: "In recognition of his uncompromising and compassionate insight into the impact of colonialism and the fate of refugees in the gulf between culture and the continent." "The choice of him reflects the Nobel Prize's focus on immigrant literature.

Originally from Tanzania, Gürner is currently a writer living in the UK writing in English and a professor at the University of Kent. In other words, Gulner was an immigrant writer. The 2001 award winner V· S. Naipaul and Kazuo Ishiguro, who won the 2017 award, are both immigrant writers.

The critic Zhang Feng wrote an article titled "Wandering Between the Center and the Edge: The Diaspora of Abdul Razak Gürna," which points to a common trait among immigrant writers: the wandering, restless sense of diaspora.

The state of immigration itself places intellectuals in a relationship of cultural contradictions—a state of never being fully adapted, always feeling alien to the indigenous, chatty, familiar world... This state of affairs suspends immigrant writers, making it impossible for them to return to a previous, perhaps more stable, sense of home. In order to obtain this feeling of home, the Russian-American writer Nabokov almost completely eliminated traces of russia from his early years and became a rather American writer.

By Naipaul, Kazuo Ishiguro, Gürna, and others, "exile" became "exile", and the decline in the emotional dimension of words meant that the situation of these immigrant writers had improved, but they still wandered between the center and the edge, but the degree and feeling were reduced.

Anders Olsen, Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy and Chairman of this year's Nobel Prize in Literature Selection Committee, said: "In Gürna's literary world, everything is changing – memory, name, identity. This may be because his creation cannot be completed in any definite sense, and in all his works presents a never-ending exploration driven by the enthusiasm of the wise. ”

Memories, names, identities, and themes that almost all immigrant writers constantly write about. Milan Kundera describes immigrant writers as acting like acrobats, walking on tight ropes between two languages, and for him, identity is important. When was he most himself? Is it self-expression in the language he spoke originally, or in the language of his host?

The Bulgarian-born French writer Julia Christeva expressed the feeling of tearing that hovered between two languages, a feeling that Christeva portrayed as pain and alienation, explained in terms of a cultural concept, the "other." This concept involves the correlation between social identity shaping and subject status.

The concept can be traced back to Hegel. Hegel argues that human consciousness cannot recognize itself without the recognition of the other. In this regard, "diaspora" is an emotional characteristic that is common to all human beings, and each of us is looking for our own homeland.

In today's globalized world, the flow is accelerating, and immigrant literature may appear more widely. The question of modernity is a much bigger topic, so let's stop there.