Rajasthan
Never Thought Of Publishing When I Started Writing: Nobel Laureate Gurnah | Jaipur News
Jaipur: Sketching a quick portrait of his initiation into writing at the ongoing Jaipur Literature Festival, Nobel laureate Abdulrazak Gurnah revisited his early days in the UK where he landed as 18-year-old boy.
Talking about how he started writing, Gurnah said that initially it was not for others, let alone the thought of publishing it. He said he was unsettled by the thought of ‘what have I done’, the decision to leave Zanzibar.
“I was young, untraveled, unskilled and poor 18-year-old boy in this country which does not want me. The need to understand that feeling of having lost, the hostility, adventure, all of these, I was trying to work all that out that started me off writing. But I was not writing, it was not writing, rather trying to work things out and reflecting, not intended for anybody to see. Sometimes, writing starts like that,” said the author at the Jaipur literature festival.
He said he just scribbled and found pleasure in the activity as he poured out all the self-pity and misery. But he said at some point he started fictionalizing it as if he was telling somebody else’s story.
“When you start fictionalizing, you innovate, enhance, diminish, or whatever. But none of these were intended for writing. But then slowly, the ambition stirred and I wanted to do something with these writings,” he said.
It took him a very long time to find a publisher. He had written two novels but were not published. That did not hold him back writing his watershed novel Paradise.
Talking about the historical novel, Gurnah said, “Leaving Zangibar was such a traumatic decision. Because the only way you could leave was illegally. So, you know you would not be able to go back because you broke the law as you are not allowed to leave. In 1984, there was an amnesty, and we were allowed to go back. I took that opportunity,” said Gurnah.
The trigger for Paradise was his father. “He was quite old. I thought he would have been a child when European colonialism took a grip on our part of the world. That interested me. A child seeing the world, his culture, and society changing before him. That was the thought. It was a moment of encounter with European colonialism. The implications and consequences I started thinking about. By then I had written two novels, none of them were published yet. But optimism was there.”
In fact, later Gurnah wrote Afterlives which in some way is a sequel to Paradise.
Talking about how he started writing, Gurnah said that initially it was not for others, let alone the thought of publishing it. He said he was unsettled by the thought of ‘what have I done’, the decision to leave Zanzibar.
“I was young, untraveled, unskilled and poor 18-year-old boy in this country which does not want me. The need to understand that feeling of having lost, the hostility, adventure, all of these, I was trying to work all that out that started me off writing. But I was not writing, it was not writing, rather trying to work things out and reflecting, not intended for anybody to see. Sometimes, writing starts like that,” said the author at the Jaipur literature festival.
He said he just scribbled and found pleasure in the activity as he poured out all the self-pity and misery. But he said at some point he started fictionalizing it as if he was telling somebody else’s story.
“When you start fictionalizing, you innovate, enhance, diminish, or whatever. But none of these were intended for writing. But then slowly, the ambition stirred and I wanted to do something with these writings,” he said.
It took him a very long time to find a publisher. He had written two novels but were not published. That did not hold him back writing his watershed novel Paradise.
Talking about the historical novel, Gurnah said, “Leaving Zangibar was such a traumatic decision. Because the only way you could leave was illegally. So, you know you would not be able to go back because you broke the law as you are not allowed to leave. In 1984, there was an amnesty, and we were allowed to go back. I took that opportunity,” said Gurnah.
The trigger for Paradise was his father. “He was quite old. I thought he would have been a child when European colonialism took a grip on our part of the world. That interested me. A child seeing the world, his culture, and society changing before him. That was the thought. It was a moment of encounter with European colonialism. The implications and consequences I started thinking about. By then I had written two novels, none of them were published yet. But optimism was there.”
In fact, later Gurnah wrote Afterlives which in some way is a sequel to Paradise.
