Review: Desertion by Abdulrazak Gurnah

From my Substack: 

When Abdulrazak Gurnah won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2021, he was comparatively little-known. I must confess that I had never heard of him. This is despite the fact that I am an ardent fan of English literature and am also deeply interested in issues of colonialism. I have read most of the fiction concerned with British colonialism in South Asia including Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, Scott’s The Raj Quartet and Forster’s A Passage to India. Perhaps part of the reason that I was not familiar with Gurnah’s work was that I have not focused much on Africa as a region (except for North Africa, which can be said to be more of an extension of the Arab world than the African continent proper). However, even within the domain of African fiction, Gurnah is an author that is unfamiliar to most readers. For example, school curricula in the US often include Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country. I very much doubt that any curricula so far has included Gurnah’s works. Hopefully, that will change now that he has received the Nobel Prize.

Gurnah is a British citizen of Zanzibari origin. He grew up at a time when Zanzibar was a British protectorate separate from the colony of Tanganyika. After both colonies achieved independence, a revolution overthrew the Arab elite in Zanzibar and the region later merged with Tanganyika to form Tanzania. Gurnah had left to study in the UK before this revolution broke out and he describes himself as a refugee. He completed his Phd in Literature and served as a Professor at the University of Kent, from which he recently retired. His academic work deals with postcolonial literature, including that of Rushdie.

Desertion is set in two time periods– 1899 and the mid-20th century. The novel opens in a small town on the East African coast, north of Mombasa (now in Kenya) with the encounter between a British officer, Martin Pearce, and a “native” woman, Rehana Zakariya. Rehana’s brother, Hassanali, finds Pearce in a state of collapse and brings the injured man home. There, he is tended to by Rehana and by Hassanali’s wife. When he recovers, he comes to thank Hassanali and is attracted to Rehana. She, in turn, is also attracted to him and they begin an affair. These details are recounted to us by the narrator, whom we later learn is a young man called Rashid, who is a Zanzibari academic living in Britain. In the modern portion of the novel, set as Zanzibar is about to become independent, Rashid’s brother Amin enters into a relationship with a woman named Jamila, who turns out to be Rehana’s granddaughter. This relationship is not acceptable to Amin’s family, partly because Rehana had been the mistress of an Englishman, and they force Amin to stop seeing Jamila. Rashid learns the details about this much later when he receives Amin’s notebooks.

The novel provides a look at Zanzibari society– a part of the world that most readers will be unfamiliar with. It is a surprisingly cosmopolitan region, with people from the Arab world (since it was part of the Omani Empire for a long time) and sailors from India. In fact, Rehana herself is the illegitimate daughter of an Indian sailor and his African lover. This is another reason why Amin’s family don’t want him to enter into a romantic relationship with her descendent. As a South Asian, I was particularly intrigued by the various Indian influences on East Africa. Zanzibar is also predominantly a Muslim society and the novel is full of details about prayers and Ramadan.

Another issue the novel deals with is the experience of someone from the ex-colonies when they arrive in the imperial metropole. Rashid receives a scholarship to study in London but when he arrives he is alienated by the racism he experiences there. This is something that has also been referenced in Rushdie’s memoirs where he described leaving a relatively affluent background in Bombay (now Mumbai) to study in a British boarding school. It is also an experience that is described in some detail in Rushdie’s fiction–for example in those sections of The Satanic Verses that take place in the South Asian neighborhoods of Thatcher’s London. For Gurnah’s protagonist, the experience is exacerbated by the fact that, due to the Zanzibari revolution, he cannot even return back to the homeland. The experience of being a refugee and an exile is poignantly described and is one of the reasons the Nobel committee cited for why they gave Gurnah the prize.

In conclusion, Desertion is a novel that deserves to be better known. It provides a fascinating picture of life in British colonial Zanzibar. Since interracial love is one of its major themes, it can be profitably discussed with reference to The Raj Quartet and A Passage to India. I look forward to reading more of Gurnah’s work.