The migrant dilemma and winning the Nobel Prize for Literature
Published on: Sunday, November 06, 2022
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'Most of the time I lived in UK in a small town called Canterbury. There was not much multiculturalism. The varsity had many students from all over the world. I didn’t directly experience multicultural Britain which in any case is probably not as simple as it sounds.
But from a distance I was, of course, aware of the various movements going on, the resistance that the people from the West Indies, Africa or other parts of the southern part of the globe were putting up with their treatment in the UK. Which they saw as kind of parallel with what was going on in the US, South Africa and so on.
There was a way in which you felt a sense of political community if you like with the other anti-colonial mix if it was exactly theoretically colonial civil rights movement or anti-apartheid.
In that respect, it did give me or people like me a sense of being part of a wider sentiment of resistance. Winning the Nobel Prize for Literature
I don’t know how the Swedish Academy does its business. Nobody in the line ever said I was a candidate when they announced it.
Some were candidates every year and perhaps they deserved it but the Swedish Academy had other ideas and decided I deserved it.
Who am I to argue. I was having tea after lunch, the phone rang from somebody I did not know. I didn’t recognize the number.
He said you won the Nobel Prize for Literature. I said it was some kind of a joke. I didn’t believe it. Within a few minutes the announcement appeared on TV.
It is wonderful to be awarded something everybody in the world knows. The best part is to see how much joy it brings to many people. The number of calls, emails not only people I know, many I don’t know. People in Zanzibar were overjoyed.
People in parts of the Middle East were so happy that somebody with Arab ancestry got it. People in Britain were very pleased. Happy to be all of that. Celebrations here and there. Then what follows after that, everybody wants to hear from you.
Inspirations for my writing
I write as well as I can. To get to an idea. To be truthful to that idea, to put it across, make it beautiful. It all kinda of work together. I said truthful as I believe that is important. As close as you can get to an experience you are trying to explore. I don’t mean ‘true’ as in not lying.
True to get to the right feel for whatever it is. The rest of it must be (to) just keep your mind’s eye clear so that you can see and understand what it is (you are) trying to write. And something you hear in your head.
That is to say you can hear if the wording is wrong. I can hear it in my head. So pay attention to these responses that you are trying to say. That you are trying to explore.
Where the ideas come from?
I came from a small island (Zanzibar) on the edge of the African continent. Journeys have always been part of what I experienced or grew up.
I lived a few yards from the port and when these ships arrived from Somalia, Muscat, from the window of the house I lived I could see the sea and port.
The sea was always present and the other places were also not very far. Their (sailors) way of talking about Basra, Calcutta wasn’t strange.
Exotic places didn’t seem that way. They seem like places you have been to.
By The Sea (one of early novels) developed some years ago when Afghanistan was at war before the Taliban. A plane was hijacked from Kabul to England. It stopped at Cyprus to refuel. Eventually it landed in London.
The hijackers gave up and said they were requesting asylum. The passengers were allowed to disembark. The next day the whole plane requested asylum. I wondered what a guy of 60 (one of the ‘hostages’) was doing seeking asylum at his age.
As a six-year-old refugee
At that time I would be nervous about the term ‘refugee’. Because it would seem a noble word. To me a refugee is someone who has suffered political imprisonment and to claim to be one, of course, when you are well and healthy was a kind of melodrama.
To say you are a refugee and to make a claim that you left because you refused that particular political situation. In most of us, as an 18-year-old, it was not a matter of life or death.
It was a matter of wanting to be fulfilled. Everything was closing in. No possibility of studying anymore, authoritarian almost to the point of ideology.
At 18, you think ‘I’’m getting out of here!’ Like so many of these people risking their lives. I think it is that kind of feeling or desire to say, ‘it’s not that I will die, if I stay here where I am but I want better. I think I can find it somewhere else’.
The white officer at the counter discourages the old man from seeking refugee status, saying he is better off being looked after in his own country.
But actually this white officer’s parents themselves (came as) refugees (earlier). I wrote that 20 years ago as a start of a whole series of reactions to responses to non-whites. A racism that is the force behind it.
In Europe, (there is an) equally strong, almost paranoid response to migrants. It seems every now and then you get asked ‘has it been better since you came to the UK in the 1960s ?’. Yes in some ways.
In the 1960s those great (prejudices) to appear as a Caribbean, Indian and Pakistani migrant. That gradually for various reasons subsided.
Now you have children of these Indian migrants running the British Government.
But, on the other hand, another few years you get another panic because now it’s the Roma (gypsies) from Eastern Europe. Another few years, it is Syrians. And it looks like even when things appear to have improved, this response again and again is the same.
And the response is from the authorities and not just from the ordinary people. The press is also orchestrating this to make sure the hostility continues. My own feeling is that writing about it in various fiction and even journalism bridges a gap.
That is to say many of the people who react with the same kind of hostility to asylum seekers, instead of saying this is wrong, say nothing.
They do that because they do not have the knowledge to say ‘this is not right. ’ Because they only hear one voice, which is the voice of the hostile press. This is where fiction can bridge that gap.
There are different kinds of colonisations. East Germany in itself was abused or suppressed by Soviets. What does a person do?
All a person can do is gain an understanding so that we can be humane in our response and not be persuaded by the orchestration of hostile reactions, that it is possible to overcome these fixed positions.
There is something tragic about it as well. Supposing you know something is wrong and in reality you can do something about it apart from just share the pain that others feel.
I’m interested in how we live. People who are displaced from ancestral places maybe because its part of my experience in life.
I do think it also has larger ramifications. If you are aware of the place you were born and lived because those places live on in your imagination.
Coming from a place where you cannot go back to which you think of as home and at the same time not belong to a place where you came from. This is the migrant dilemma.
Millions are in that situation for all kinds of reasons. When you say can’t go back, it doesn’t necessarily mean you are forbidden from going back. All kinds of reasons that prevent people who made that decision to migrate from going back.
By the time you are ready to go back, that is to say you are ready to say you came (back) as a success. By that time your life has changed and all sorts of things that bind you to this other place that’s really not home but is.
How I began writing novels
There was a certain point. I was writing things without necessarily thinking I was writing a novel. Reflecting on things, remembering things. I think of writing as a particular kind of activity and writing anything even as a child.
As a particular kind of activity which required an idea prior to drafting, thinking through it and organizing. I was just writing but at some point I thought what it might do.
I just wrote and eventually I had something that looks like a draft. Then you spend years trying to get someone to publish it. It took 12 years finishing my first novel and getting it published.
I was also learning and doing other things. It was a way of learning to write and because the way the system works in the UK, if you don’t have an agent to represent your work, it will go to a slush file.
Process of writing various drafts. Sent it to another publisher. If these people had refused it, I would have put it under the bed and forget about it. But they did.
Lack of recognition for African writers
I don ‘t think it’s a case of few African writers. I think so far as mainstream publicity in UK is concerned, it’s certainly not the case that African writers were not busy. The 12 years, what has changed is that now you have many more writers.'
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