Zhang Feng
At 13:00 local time on October 7, 2021 in Stockholm, Sweden (19:00 Beijing time), the Swedish Academy awarded the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature to Tanzanian writer Abdulrazak Gurnah.
Associate Professor Zhang Feng of the School of English at the University of Foreign Chinese in Beijing published an article entitled "Walking Between the Center and the Periphery: An Overview of Abdulrazak Glena's Diaspora Writing" in Trends in Foreign Literature (No. 3, 2012). It is authorized to be published in The Paper. Another note: Zhang Feng translated him as "Gelner".
Abdulrazak Gurnah
When one thinks of contemporary British immigrant writers, one often thinks of Salman Rushdie, V. Sau Naipaul, known as the "Three Heroes of Immigration.". S. Naipaul) and Kazuo Ishiguro, but in addition to these literary giants, there are many outstanding immigrant writers who deserve our attention, including the African-American novelist and literary critic Abdulrazak Gurnah (1948-).
Born in Zanzibar, Tanzania, in 1948, Gerner spoke Swahili and immigrated to The United Kingdom in 1968 to escape civil unrest. Coincidentally, the year coincided with Enoch Powell, a Member of the Conservative Party of England, delivering his infamous racist speech "Rivers of Blood." Göllner received his Bachelor of Education degree from the University of London in 1976 and has since taught at Astor Secondary School in Dover, Kent. From 1980 to 1982, Gerner returned to Africa to teach at Bayer University in Nigeria, where he studied for a phD at the University of Kent, earning his degree in 1982 and teaching at the University of Kent in 1985. Currently, Gerner is Professor of English and Postcolonial Studies at the University of Kent, where he teaches the course "Colonial and Postcolonial Discourse" and studies postcolonial literature related to Africa, the Caribbean, India and other regions. He edited two volumes of Essays on African Writing (1993, 1995), published a series of essays on contemporary postcolonial writers and their creations, studied writers such as Naipaul, Rushdie, Wole Soyinka, and published The Cambridge Companion to Salman Rushdie. 2007）。 He is also the associate editor of wasafiri, a prestigious British literary journal.
After Gulner won the Nobel Prize in Literature, his work will become an important list of recent major bookstores
Gerner began writing literature in 1987 and has published eight novels to date, mainly on the suffering and identity crisis caused by colonialism and diaspora. English literary critics praised Gerner's work, believing that he had both Naipaul's sharp style and the poetic language of Ben Okri, and in his works readers could taste the coexistence of beauty and pain. Gerner's novels have a strong autobiographical color and are closely related to their own experiences of diaspora. Like other writers who were forced into exile, Gerner had hidden mental wounds that were difficult to heal. In his novels, it is not difficult for the reader to find a contradictory mentality: on the one hand, out of dissatisfaction and even hatred for some unsatisfactory aspects of the African homeland, the exiles hope to find spiritual sustenance in Britain; on the other hand, because of the unshakable foundation of African culture and the exclusion of British society, it is difficult for them to integrate with British culture and social customs, so they have to summon out those memories buried in the depths of the soul after suffering, and constantly negotiate between the present and the past, reality and memory. Trying to find a balance.
Gerner's first three novels, Memory of Departure (1987), Pilgrim's Way (1988), and Dottie (1990), document the experiences of immigrants in Britain from different narrative perspectives, exploring the impact of migration to a new geographical and social environment on the identity of characters. In The Pilgrim's Way, for example, When Muslim student Daoud arrives from Tanzania as his "holy land", Britain, he is disillusioned to find himself confronted with a culture characterized by localism and racism, and has to seek solace in his memory of Africa.
Paradise (1994)
The fourth novel, Paradise (1994), is widely regarded as Göllner's masterpiece, and was shortlisted for the 1994 Booker Prize and the Whitblade Prize. The story 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 did not know this. He was sent to work in the shop of his "uncle", the wealthy merchant Abdal Aziz, where he was exploited and enslaved. After that, Yusuf followed his uncle's caravan everywhere. During his eight years of business life, he moved from the countryside to the coastal city, from a simple lifestyle to a complex lifestyle of an urban merchant, from a child to a youth. He witnessed tribal strife, superstition, disease, and a rampant slave trade in Africa, and experienced first-hand the harsh social realities and the harshness of the world. 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. "Paradise" is both a coming-of-age novel about Yusuf and a historical novel about the process of African colonization from an African perspective, subverting the history of Africa inscribed by Eurocentrist ideology to a certain extent. The title of the novel is ironic, and critics often compare Paradise to Joseph Conrad's Center of Darkness, viewing the former as a postcolonial recollection of the classic texts of English literature.
Admiring Silence (1996)
The fifth novel, Admiring Silence (1996), depicts the suffering of a man caught between two cultures, because each culture denies him because of his association with another. The protagonist and narrator is an unnamed African college student. To escape political persecution, he fled his hometown of Zanzibar to teach at a secondary school in London. Later, he married an English woman and had a daughter. This seemingly warm, romantic story actually hides anxiety and uneasiness. 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 constantly created literary works, hoping to establish his identity. For more than 20 years in Britain, he had little contact with his hometown and was sent under the fence like a refugee in England. Twenty years later, Tanzania's political climate changed and he was given a chance to return to his homeland. Unexpectedly, 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 substantial changes, that he no longer belonged to Tanzania, that he could not fully integrate into British society, and that he could only seek living space as an "exile" between the two cultures of Britain and Tanzania.
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. As soon as he arrived at London's Gatwick Airport, he was subjected to discrimination and xenophobia from the British. U.S.C.I.S. officer Kevin Edman's fear and disgust for the outsider overflowed: "Sir, those of you who have poured in here have not considered the harm of doing so. You don't belong here, and our values are not the same at all. We don't want you here. We will make your lives hard, make you angry, and even use violence against you. Why do you have to make us do this, sir? Omar was detained for failing to provide a reason to seek asylum, and Edelman used the opportunity to check his luggage to steal Omar's most precious possession, a mahogany box of spices, symbolically stripping him of the memory of his homeland. He was like a rudderless boat, floating on the surface of the English sea. Unlike the image of Africa created in the travel writing of Europeans during the colonial period, "The Seaside" tells its own story from the perspective of an African and shows the reader a Britain from the perspective of the "other".
Desertion (2005)
Desertion (2005), the seventh novel, was shortlisted for the 2006 Commonwealth Writers' Award, and 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, traveler, and Orientalist Martin Pierce was in distress in the desert and was found and rescued by the Muslim youth Hassanari. After being rescued, Pierce went to the door to say thank you, met Hassanari's sister Rehana, and the two fell in love at first sight, despite colonial and religious restrictions. For this reason, Rehana was expelled from her home and went into exile with Pierce; the latter two parts take place in Zanzibar before gaining independence in the 1950s and tell the story of the brothers Amin and Rashid (the first-person narrator in the novel). His brother Amin is in love with Jamila, the granddaughter of Pierce and Rehana, but is forced to break up with Jamila due to the firm opposition of her parents, 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". By telling two forbidden love stories, "Abandonment" makes a serious inquiry into the nature of love, race, and empire, and explores the impact of colonialism on people.
The eighth novel, The Last Gift (2011), continues the theme of immigration, but unlike previous novels, it focuses on the impact of immigrant experiences on immigrants themselves and their descendants. The protagonist is Abbas, a 63-year-old African-British engineer who came to England from Zanzibar 43 years ago and met his mixed-race 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 the UK, his son Jamal could not find a sense of belonging because of his skin color, which was difficult to fully accept by British society; his daughter Hanna changed her name to Anna and tried to transform herself into an Englishman in all aspects, but the family and relatives and friends of her white boyfriend Nick still believed in racial superiority, sneered at him, humiliated and blamed him. "The Last Gift" shows the identity crisis brought about by ethnocentrism with delicate brushstrokes, triggering people's reflection on the reality of contemporary British society.
Overall, Gerner's novels focus on the story of African immigrants, delves into the pain and confusion they suffer in the face of the colonial and racist remnants that prevail in contemporary society, and map the fragile side of contemporary British society with alienated characters. The ambivalent attitudes of immigrant writers toward Britain are often expressed in the form of deviations in their creations. In Gerner's novel, fragmentary stories traveling through time and space replace traditional linear narratives, and this rupture aptly represents the state of life of characters in a dislocated, diaspora state. In the context of globalization, diaspora means not only the subjugation, displacement and displacement of Jews or forced migration due to human trafficking, but more importantly 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. Diaspora is a cultural position that wanders between the center and the periphery, neither dependent on nor clinging to the periphery. To borrow the words of Homi Bhabha, this "third dimension" characterized by "confounding" implies an epistemological advantage, a dual perspective of "both inside and out", which provides a creative and subversive writing space.
（附：英文标题：Wandering between the Center and Margin: An Overview of Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Diasporic Writing）
Editor-in-Charge: Zhang Zhe