Literary Domain Of Abdulrazak Gurnah

This year Nobel Prize for Literature has been awarded to Novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah. Swedish academy acknowledges his achievement of ‘uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents’. Abdulrazak Gurnah was born in 1948 on the island of Zanzibar, Africa. He has emigrated to Britain as a student at the age of 20. He has done his Ph.D. at the age of 34. He was Professor and Director of Graduate Studies at the University of Kent’s Department of English. According to the literary critics, he is ‘one of the most subtle and perceptive writers of our postcolonial world and its uprooted lives’. For decades, his novels have created an intoxicating, complex tapestry out of the experiences of colonialism, revolution, exile, and migration.

Rootless Literature And The Imperialist Languages Of Colonial Hangover

Those of us, the Indian citizens who are writing poetry in English is actually creating a rootless literature. Not only us, those of the African poets writing in English or French and Italian, Portuguese or Dutch are also creating rootless literature. We the people with the colonial legacy like to carry forward the imperialist language, which had ruled us for centuries. Unfortunately, this has now become the Indian tradition of the educated mass. None of us can deny this truth. Yet we like to feel proud enough to write in English, the language of Shakespeare Milton Dickens. But most of the time we forget that actually we can never write anything in English as a British who lives in his or her home land. Even if we try to match them literary, we have to live in England for few generations. Only after then with complete assimilation with the British society and its climate one can create literature in English which would not be rootless. Yes, in our pursue to reach a wider and international audience we have forgotten that literature depends not only the language itself. It depends also on the land of that particular language. From where a particular language originates. Literature is all about the tradition of a particular community, its culture and customs. Its own regional climate, its history and mythologies. And the heritage of a nation and its nationality. Without all these, literature becomes rootless.