In 2021, the award of the Nobel Prize in Literature made Abdulrazak Gurnah the world’s second-best-known Zanzibari – after a certain Farrokh Bulsara, aka Freddie Mercury. Forgive the flippant comparison, but the pop world’s perplexity over Queen’s vocalist’s origins feels germane to the quest for a coherent self and story undertaken by the Nobel laureate’s chief characters. Born in 1948, in what was still the ancient, British-protected sultanate of Zanzibar, Gurnah has, over 11 novels, done more than explore ‘the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents’ (as the Nobel citation primly put it). His fiction shows that the shocks of power and history can make an exile of anyone, even in our home and in our skin. We all need to find or build a sturdy house of stories to safeguard us from ‘the mercy of accidents and chance’ (as a character in Theft thinks).
Easier said than done. Although many Gurnah novels travel far and wide – to England in particular – as war and revolution shake East Africa, in Theft we stay on the island of Zanzibar or in Dar es Salaam, over the water. As ever, the author sketches his historical backdrop with a light pencil. His time frame extends from the murderous Zanzibari revolution of 1964, which sent many Arab- or Indian-descended islanders into exile, to the pre-millennium tourism boom that fills the haunted streets of Stone Town with pleasure seekers.
Gurnah’s three principals grow through these decades. In typically poised, elegant and unshowy prose, he traces their search for a fuller life, either despite or because of ‘the larger matters that loomed over their world’.
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