Abdulrazak Gurnah moved to the United Kingdom from Zanzibar in the 1960s. He is the author of 11 novels, two of which were nominated for the Booker. He was awarded the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature for “uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fates of the refugee”. He lives in Canterbury.
Displays of hospitality
Abdulrazak Gurnah, the 2o21 laureate of the Nobel Prize for Literature, is a giant of letters. He sits down with his friend, Nadifa Mohamed, for a conversation about his new novel, Theft, which follows the lives of three young people in 1990s Zanzibar.
Photography by Jack Orton
NM I will be interviewing you about Theft in Oslo next month. That will be more of an interrogation, and this one is the easy one, over lunch – so I want to talk about food in the novel. There’s one meal in particular, steamed fish with a bit of ginger, served with green mango by Badar, with the lady of the house’s help. Tell me about that dish.
AG It’s a very simple poached fish. You simmer a little bit of fish stock, put the fish in, put the mango in at the same time. Maybe you cut it not so thin, but a wedge, with a little bit of chilli and salt.
NM Do you cook?
AG I cook, but I don’t cook that dish because I can’t. You have to have the right fish and the mango has to be green, neither of which is always available.
NM Something that struck me about the book was that I could tell you were travelling a lot while writing. You seem conscious of hotels and how they operate: what’s said or unsaid, the people that work in them. I wondered if some of the politics of being who you are and where you’ve come from fed into the novel, and your own experience of being a traveller, but on the other side?
AG When I wrote the book, I hadn’t stayed in a hotel like that, where houses have been turned into hotels. There was one in particular that I had lunch in around 2016, when it was still in the process of being refurbished. Before, the place had been a haberdashery belonging to an Indian family; now, it was a restaurant belonging to a white American who had been living in Zanzibar for a few years, and this was his second restaurant. He offered to give me a tour of the building while they were still doing it up and I saw the inside, with rubble everywhere. It was still beautiful, even though it was in that state.
NM I would have thought that Zanzibar had already experienced a lot of touristification.
AG There were some of those hotels near the sea, but not in the middle of the town, because those ones catered for low-budget tourists. What has happened more recently is that the ones in the town have become boutiques. In the end, I did stay in that very same one, once it had been refurbished in 2022 or 2023. I can’t remember what it was called – The Spice Inn, or that sort of thing. I called it the Tamarind, but by then, I had already written the book. I imagined those encounters with the people who worked there from what little I knew. It was very interesting for me to go back. Actually, I was laughing to myself while I was staying in that place last year. I suppose it was exactly how I thought it would be.
NM I went into the novel cold and I assumed, for the first 50 or 60 pages, that it was set in the 1950s or 1960s – but then there was a mention of a word processor, and I was suddenly plunged into the 1990s. It was disturbing because there was a level of poverty and disconnection from the rest of the world that I didn’t want to believe was still alive in the 1990s.
AG For the latter half of the 1980s, I was in Zanzibar fairly regularly. One of the more shocking things I found, which I wrote about in the novel Admiring Silence, was that the toilets didn’t work, every single one of them. There was no water because the pumping station had broken down, and there was no money to replace it. The administrative system couldn’t look after people’s essential needs. There were shortages of almost everything you could think of, including chilli. Things began to change, of course. My cousin was an academic in Papua New Guinea and he decided at the age of 52 to retire and return to Zanzibar. His father was quite reasonably well off, and he was able to reclaim some of the properties that the government had taken away, and he returned with the intention of starting a computing business. He purchased some computers in Hong Kong on the way back, and he set up a little business consisting of a little computer room, which was still then a novel idea. So in other words, even in 1990, people in Zanzibar were already aware of and using computers.
Admiring Silence was Gurnah’s fifth novel, and was published by The New Press in 1996. The plot follows an unnamed Zanzibari man living in England, after fleeing there in the early 1960s. In England, he becomes a teacher and has a daughter, but after spending 20 years in the country returns to his mother in Zanzibar. There, he finds a home he is no longer native to.
Nadifa Mohamed is a Somali-British novelist and critic. She’s the author of Black Mamba Boy (2010), The Orchard of Lost Souls (2013), and The Fortune Men (2021), for which she became the first British-Somali novelist to be shortlisted for the Booker Prize. She lives in London.
NM How have you been coping with the world as it is right now?
AG It’s fine, it’s okay. [Laughing]. It’s absolutely fine, I’m perfectly at ease. But do you mean worried about the world, or worried about what’s going on in my world? I’m distressed by what’s happening in Gaza. Then, on the other hand, you have to switch off what’s happening in the United States; at least, I feel I have to. Not everybody in the US is an arsehole just because they’re led by an arsehole. I would imagine there are a lot of people who think they won’t go back there. It’s a very divided country. But there are some very strong, good and hard-working people in terms of their commitment to ideas.
NM What your work has focused on, and what I’m interested in as well, is frontiers and who you are when you cross a frontier. There’s a very demeaning conversation that Saleh has with Edelman in your novel By the Sea when he arrives in Britain to claim asylum. It’s not just what papers you carry but as if everything you’ve ever said or thought – who you are in a much more entire way – that’s being detained or brutalised in some way.
By the Sea (2001) follows Saleh Omar and Latif Mahmud, two men trying separately to enter the UK, one on a fake passport, and one on a student visa. When Saleh and Latif meet in an English seaside town, a story is unravelled.
AG I don’t think that there is anything new going on, in that regard. It feels familiar. In fact, if anything, it feels that there is now a greater resistance to it from within these societies here, as well as the US and parts of Europe. I remember when there was absolute silence, when there was no recognition of what the issue was. Now, it seems to me that there is a recognition.
NM But maybe that recognition has made the counter-response more aggressive.
AG Possibly. But I like to think that this is a defensive position now, a position of being resentful and angry because there is a sense of vulnerability, whereas before there was total assurance.
NM I think it’s a much more conflicted public space when it comes to race and migration.
AG So I see that, therefore, as an advance from a position of consensus, there was no issue. There is an issue now. There is a debate where there wasn’t one before.
NM But I think both the US and UK, which are racist societies historically, were, up until the 20th century, quite undecided about immigration. You could land in England with no passport and just be absorbed into society, and the same was true of the US for a long period of time. So the past 100 years has been a working out of the terms of letting in people like you and me.
AG And the Chinese and the Indians and the West Indians and everybody.
NM We are here, multi-generationally. Now, the expectation is greater. Now, the resentment is greater. That’s the thing that scares me.
AG It doesn’t seem that way to me. I compare it to what was there before, even in this particular landscape, in this particular country. Now, certain things cannot be said or done publicly. Or, they can be said, but with opprobrium following.
NM Not with Trump.
AG Well, I’m talking about here, in England.
NM I think it’s definitely slipping, and I think the Labour Party, all of the political parties, have slipped.
AG Very likely. But this is a debate back and forth, back and forth. Don’t give in.
NM I have given in.
AG Stop this. That’s the whole point. This is a decades-long thing that people have been doing. We’ve all been through all this.
NM I hear you – my dad must have experienced crazy things in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, too. But maybe I’ve got used to thinking of those decades as less enlightened, benighted in some way. I don’t think we’re better now.
AG No, we’re not, but there is something different. Now, there is speaking, there are positions. I overheard somebody walking around the country yesterday, who said, “Look, I have nothing against people of a different culture.” There would not have been any hint of apology or any awareness, indeed, that there is anything to apologise for, in the 1960s.
NM I remember being young in the 1980s and early 1990s and the excitement of seeing someone Black on TV, never mind Somali. You would get calls saying, “Have you seen so and so? Have you watched so and so?” But back to you. Where are you going next, apart from Norway? I’m travelling less because I have a cat. But I am travelling still. I’m still working on a book about Ibn Battuta. So I went to Sri Lanka in January, climbed a mountain, Adam’s Peak, which Ibn Battuta climbed in the 1360s, or something like that. Then, Uzbekistan at the end of summer, and Spain to a Sufi retreat, where I’m going to do a womb-healing course.
AG Really? What’s wrong with your womb?
NM Nothing. But why not? It’s a Sufi, New Age-y place. I needed something interesting to write about. But otherwise, I just like somewhere relaxing and warm. That’s my thing. I’m an Indian Ocean person. That’s what the Ibn Battuta book has taught me: drop me off anywhere along that Indian Ocean coast and I feel at home. Weather, clothing, culture and food.
AG Have you been to China? The most famous Chinese seaman is a man called Admiral Zheng He.
NM He was Muslim. I was listening to a podcast about him just the other day. He wasn’t even a sailor; he was a bureaucrat, but he was super good at organising expeditions of dozens of ships across the world. Another thing I’ve found out recently is that the English were pirates to the Somalis before the Somalis were pirates to the English, and they attacked a city called Maydh in northern Somaliland in the 1500s.
AG Sure, because they operated in the Indian Ocean attacking the Portuguese, attacking anything.
NM But the Indian ships were the most valuable because they’d go piled high. And this particular pirate, he not only raided their whole fleet but attacked the women and brutalised the women of the court, which caused a big ruckus.
AG I was reading something by J.M.G. Le Clézio called The Prospector. Have you come across Le Clézio? He’s Mauritian or French-Mauritian. The prospector of the title is supposed to be some kind of ancestor of his and he made a novel out of it. He talks about pirates a lot because it’s that period at the turn of the century.
NM Madagascar was a big hideout for them.
AG Absolutely, as was Mauritius, and those tiny little islets. The Prospector is about a mythical hoard of pirate gold, or something like that, that this early 20th century ancestor is trying to find. His father was obsessed with these maps, which he inherited. He goes to an island called Rodrigo, which is quite large, and the story is that the hoard was buried there. In the process of this search, he becomes a bit of an academic, and that’s how you get the history of piracy in the Indian Ocean. It’s very interesting.
NM I’ve been to Mauritius. Have you? If so, what did you think?
AG Interesting, but Mauritius is a place like Fiji, which was transformed first as a result of colonialism and then globalisation. Indentured workers came there to work on the plantations, replacing the African people who were already enslaved. The continuation of the supremacy of Indian culture and society left the Creole exactly where they were before. The planters are still planters and still well off, and the Indians are now rich, but the Creoles are still their servants.
NM Then you have the tourist class as well. I could feel some of that tension when I was there, because of the massive resorts that swallow up vast areas of the land.
AG Well, I was there as an external examiner for the MA in literature, so I didn’t have anything to do with the dirty tourists. I stayed in a hotel in the middle of the island, which is nearest to the university. One morning, I came down to breakfast, and there’s a crowd of people, about 15 or so, who look very much like Zanzibaris. And as I walked past, I heard Swahili, and I stopped and I said [reports an exchange in Swahili]. They were from the Comoros, but they speak Swahili there as well. They were delighted because for the Comorians, Zanzibar is still almost a place of myth. You know, people from Zanzibar – perhaps the Somalis do this as well – wear kofia, so they were there in kanzu and kofia, but they couldn’t have been Somalis. It’s something to do with the physiognomy, you know you can see. I was talking to somebody in Cambridge at an event, where she was working. I said, “Excuse me, are you from Kenya?”
NM I can tell Kenyans. Can you tell Zanzibaris?
AG I probably can. But you know, they could be from Mombasa, or somewhere along the coast, or indeed from the Comoros.
NM My dad was so good at telling Somalis. He could tell them from behind at 20 paces. But tell me – how’s your new garden?
AG At the moment, gardening requires almost 100% dedication, so it’ll be nice to get back to that. This will be the first summer we’ll be spending there.
NM Have you seen Ian McEwan’s garden? It’s extravagant – he’s got an infinity pool, as well as orchards and all sorts of things.
AG We’re not in that league yet.
NM The kids have got me into this idea of side quests – things that take you off for a while, before you come back to your normal life. Do you have any side quests?
AG Get a bit of rest. Just get a bit of rest and do ordinary things. .
Thanks to Clipstone restaurant, London W1W 6BB, where Nadifa Mohamed and Abdulrazak Gurnah had lunch.
Theft by Abdulrazak Gurnah(Bloomsbury, 2025)
An excerpt from Theft by Abdulrazak Gurnah
What are you called? she asked.
Badar, he said.
She nodded and said, That’s a nice name. Sit for a moment while I finish this.
She was making sesame bread, spreading the soft dough with her right hand and handling the skillet with her left, with which she also scattered a handful of sesame seeds into the pan. She rinsed her right hand in a bowl of water by her feet and wiped it on her dress, ready to scoop another handful of dough. She did this methodically, unhurriedly. He liked sesame bread, its plumpness and slight stickiness when warm, but he had not seen it being made before or realised how messy the process was. He stood watching, so absorbed that she had to tell him again to sit down.
The place where he stood, between the kitchen and the back door of the house, was covered with a thinly-woven bamboo roof. There were two chairs and a table beside him, and he wondered if that was where she was instructing him to sit. Instead he sat on the floor, to avoid any possibility of causing offence. Alongside the kitchen and in the same block were three other doors, all closed and two of them bolted, the padlock on the first one hanging open in the latch. Between the two padlocked doors was a concrete trough with a water tap. Beyond the covered yard was the paved garden, with bushes and neat cultivated beds against the surrounding walls. Nearest to him was a bush he had never seen before, covered in blue flowers.
The woman looked up as he sat down. How old are you? she asked.
Fourteen, Badar said, although he was still in his thirteenth year. He was almost at the end of it and felt justified in stealing a march on fourteen.
He sat silently in the yard whose bamboo screen cut out the worst of the early afternoon sun and through which a small breeze blew, and waited. Every now and then the woman looked towards him. She was still smiling, though not at him, perhaps at something else that amused her.
He had an inkling of his situation even though nothing had been said to him. This was where he had been brought to work, probably to serve this woman. He wondered if she was Uncle Othman’s wife, or maybe his daughter. She said something softly, almost a whisper, perhaps speaking to herself. Badar sat in that space between the kitchen and the house, his bundle between his feet, and watched as the woman, now finished with her breadmaking, rose from her stool and went into the kitchen itself with the plate of sesame breads which she put on a tray under a kawa cover. There was another dish already on the tray, and when she lifted its lid Badar smelled a bean stew and his stomach rumbled with yearning. She stood for a moment, her hands idle on the kitchen counter, and then she sighed. Perhaps the sigh escaped her unexpectedly because she glanced quickly towards Badar, but he lowered his eyes before hers could make contact. After a moment, she took the tray inside the house and came out again to fetch a bowl of rice and salad greens.
He heard a man’s voice calling out cheerfully, I’m home. After some considerable time, during which he heard the sound of metal on crockery and the voice of the man who had announced his arrival, the woman came back out with the tray, now carrying dirty dishes, which she put on the table. He saw that in the meantime she had changed into another dress and taken off her headscarf. Later he discovered that the old dress and the checked headscarf tightly knotted at the back of her head were her working clothes. She pointed at the stone trough against the wall of the kitchen block.
That’s where you’ll do the washing-up. The bucket with the soap and the scourer are behind the kitchen door. Come now, wake up, she said, smiling again. Be careful you don’t break anything.
He went to the sink and began to wash the dishes while she went inside to fetch some more. There was some rice left over, which she put in a metal enamel dish, pouring over it what was left of the bean stew. She set the dish to one side on the kitchen counter. She put the rest of the sesame bread in what he thought was a cupboard but later found out was the fridge. She instructed him to stack the wet plates on the table under the bamboo screen to drain. When all this was done, she stood for a moment looking around in case she had missed anything, then pointed at the enamel basin with the rice, which she had put on the kitchen counter.
That’s for you. Eat. I’ll come back just now, she said, heading into the house again.
He sat back down in his spot on the floor and ate. He was very hungry. It was his first meal of the day, and the food was delicious. After he finished eating, he washed the enamel plate and sat down on the floor once more to wait for her return. She came back out soon after that and opened the first door in the kitchen block, the one with the unlocked padlock hanging from the latch. This will be your room, she said, switching on the electric light. Clean it up, but first clean the kitchen and stack the drained dishes on the counter. When the coals have cooled you can clean the brazier and put it away over there in the corner. Make sure you close the kitchen door. After that you can sweep the yard. You’ll find the broom in your room. Now, come with me. The door at the end is the washroom for your use. There is a shower, so get yourself cleaned up after work. You’ll find the key to the door in your room.
By the time he was done, it was mid-afternoon. An empty clay jar stood in a corner of the room with a pair of leather sandals beside it. A bamboo basket with some cleaning rags in it stood beside the door as well as the broom he had used to sweep the yard. Inside a wooden trunk against the back wall, he found a rolled-up mat. He took it out to the yard to shake off the dust and to check for bugs and then spread it out where it would catch the sun. After that, he sat on the trunk in the room at the back of the silent house, excited despite his misery. Distant street noises reached him, and the muadhin’s call to prayers surprised him. He had forgotten how close they were to the mosque.
He was to be their servant boy, their boi, he understood that now. It was so sudden, and no one had explained. In the bundle his mother had given him before he’d left home, he found a vest and a pair of shorts, and some coins in a knotted rag. He was still dressed in his school clothes, a blue shirt and khaki shorts. He used the shower as instructed and returned to the room to wait, not sure what else to do. .