SURESH RAMPHUL
Abdulrazak Gurnah, Tanzanian-born British novelist, won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2021. “Paradise” was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Whitbread Award in 1994. “By the Sea” was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2001, and “Desertion” was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize in 2005.
His books are generally about the clash of worlds, the struggle to find one’s place in the world, identity, immigration, the legacy of colonial rule, exile, the trauma of colonialism, homelessness, and how political turmoil (and corruption) can negatively impact ordinary people’s lives. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for his “uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents”.
In Shakespeare’s “Measure for Measure”, the Duke, disguised as a friar, comes to comfort Bernardine, a prisoner, who is under threat of death. The latter does not consent to die on that day because he has been drinking all night. He wants more time to prepare for the death. On the prisoner’s exit, the Duke comments: “Unfit to live or die! O gravel heart.” (Act 4, Sc 3, line 63). “Gravel” means hard as stone.
Homelessness
The protagonists in “Gravel Heart” (Bloomsbury Publishing, London, 2018), Salim, his father and his mother, are often isolated, confused and unable to make sense of their lives. They are miserable as a result of someone else’s selfishness and malicious decision. One day the father just walks off to live far away in the town. The change that comes over him is sudden and surprising. The boy is intrigued: why has the man left his family and his home? Why is he living alone and in bad conditions? The wife visits him regularly; the boy delivers baskets of food. But real communication has broken down.
His father looks shaggy and beaten. The child feels “he had nothing to do with me” (page 35). The father appears to have lost his mind; the boy is scared. He grows anxious. The father just sits still with his hands folded together, staring out of the window with far-gazing eyes. The boy feels “something shameful was connected to my father”, something that could not be spoken about. The mother says dad has gone away only for a few days. At age 7, the boy can only believe her. He is emotionally affected. It is like he has “slipped over the edge of the sea wall into the black-green water so that my father could not hear my screams” (p 29). The mystery will affect his young mind for a long time to come.
The father feels he belongs to nowhere, neither to his home nor to his new place behind a shop. He is cut off. He has a wife he cannot call his own. His life loses meaning. The boy’s maternal uncle Amir sends him to England to study business. The boy’s heart is not in this subject. He attends school but misses classes, feels adrift. He has friends yet he feels nauseous and nervous. He cannot shake off the past. He cannot explain his parents’ behaviour. What could be the secret of their break-up? The silence surrounding his father is “impenetrable” (p 52). The teenager feels guilty: “I was the debris of their disordered lives”. He weeps for hours in his room. Homesickness consumes him. After 3 years in London, he still feels like a stranger (Gurnah has revealed that he prefers this word rather than immigrant or refugee). He has the feeling “like a lifetime of standing still while debris builds up around me” (p 93).
The shock of arrival
The boy is angry with Uncle Amir for bringing him to England. He wishes he could “liberate himself from the drudgery of my life in London” (p 101). His past sticks to him. To an interviewer who remarked that when a character is in a different location, the author’s writing drifts ineluctably back to Zanzibar, Gurnah said, “We think we’re learning, or understanding or travelling, but really we’re like fowl tied to a stick fixed in the ground.” Just like his father, Salim experiences a sense of loss. Physically he is in England but half of his mind dwells on his father back in Zanzibar.
Later, Salim returns and his father recounts to him how Uncle Amir was arrested one day for allegedly raping the Vice-President’s young daughter. They did not know he mixed with such powerful people. Salim’s mother had met the Chief Protocol Officer, the girl’s angry brother, to know about Amir’s disappearance. The Officer said there was going to be no mercy. However, the next day, he called the woman back to the office and declared that he could release her brother if she agreed to sleep with him until he was satisfied. She visits a dishevelled, disoriented Amir in the jail. He asks her, “Will you do it?” “Oh Amir, you have a heart of stone,” she replies. “How can it be wrong to save a brother’s life?” (p 243) From that day a car would come to fetch her at home. Despite the father’s pleadings, she did not change her decision. She even got a child from the despicable man. That is why he exiled himself from his own home. Though he was living away from his wife, he could not forget that she had betrayed him. The father lived “a life of squalid loneliness and resigned dejection because of love” (p 53).
Salim is confounded and reminds his father of a similar story in “Measure for Measure”. The Duke of Vienna, wishing to test his deputy Lord Angelo, arranges to go on a long journey and leaves the city in his charge. In fact, he disguises himself and hides in a monastery. Angelo has Claudio arrested for living in sin with Juliet, now pregnant. Claudio is to be executed for fornication. His sister, Isabella, appeals for clemency. Angelo is adamant. But the next day he asks her to submit sexually to him if she wants her brother to live. But the Duke will intervene to save her. This story goes back to ancient times. The point is that throughout human history scoundrels have always existed; they are ready to use their position of power to exploit vulnerable victims. Gurnah takes up an old tale and weaves around it contemporary themes, like usurpation, greed, corruption, the erosion of values, and the falling apart of a family. One inevitable question the novel raises is why do people so badly long to possess what they know they are not legally and morally entitled to possess.
Salim will get back to England with the mystery about old family secrets cleared. The book provides us a fascinating glimpse into the idea of always having something to retrieve from a traumatic experience; we are not completely defeated.