On Wednesday, Dec. 3, Nobel Laureate in Literature Abdulrazak Gurnah visited Swarthmore to discuss his contributions to postcolonial literature and scholarship with Bashir Abu-Manne, Julian and Virginia Cornell distinguished visiting professor of English literature, and Sangina Patnaik, associate professor of English literature. Gurnah’s writings include several widely acclaimed novels, short stories, and critical essays. He is emeritus professor of English and postcolonial literatures at the University of Kent, and arts professor of literature at New York University Abu Dhabi. Wednesday’s talk came as the final event in the Fall 2025 “War, Power, Culture” series, a subsection of the Cooper Lecture Series for the 2025-2026 academic year.
Patnaik began the event with an introduction to Gurnah’s life and literary work. Born to a Yemeni family in Zanzibar in 1948, Gurnah left during the Zanzibar Revolution to pursue higher education at the age of eighteen. He traveled to Canterbury, England, where he eventually earned his doctoral degree in literature for a thesis on the criteria of criticism in West African fiction.
Gurnah’s scholarly and subsequent literary work established him as a pioneering figure in the field of postcolonial studies. His novels, which often feature vivid descriptions of colonial history, explore the personal, interior struggles with displacement, resistance, and complicity brought about by imperial conquest.
Paradoxically, it was Gurnah’s relocation to the heart of the colonial metropole that empowered his early contributions to postcolonial thought. Throughout his childhood, his exposure to literature had been stringently regulated by Britain’s government occupation of Zanzibar. No longer beholden to an educational system predicated upon the justification of foreign rule, Gurnah found himself surrounded by opportunities to expand his intellectual horizons.
“One of the unexpected boons of going to England was that there were libraries and bookshops everywhere. It was then that I began to read just about everything I could find. And this reading absolutely energized my writing.”
The newfound exposure to a diverse literary canon was not the only element of Gurnah’s move that contributed to his development as an author. His sudden separation from Zanzibar, he explained, made him more acutely aware of his African identity than he had ever been before. As he considered the history of his home country from afar, he became increasingly curious — not to mention concerned – by the gaps in his understanding of this history. Fiction writing emerged for Gurnah as a means of confronting and engaging with the questions that he longed to resolve.
“I hadn’t been able to learn or think about the violence of the past when I was growing up. The question became: how would it all have seemed to the people who participated? How was it so easy for this to happen? It was about imagining the moment of the encounter. That was how my writing began.”
Gurnah’s experience with scholarly research developed into an integral element of his process as a writer of fiction. Many of his novels grew out of the hours he would spend perusing historical archives, with characters drawn from the firsthand accounts he uncovered. Ultimately, though, the nature of his work was creative.
“That’s what writers do: you imagine. I watch people — my mother, my sisters, friends — and the rest is trying to enter into how somebody might think. You make it up and try to get as close as possible. And you have to trust your judgment.”
Though this leap of faith necessitates a departure from the more robust credibility of historical scholarship, Gurnah expressed that his most valuable insights about colonial conquest and liberation have come to him through the reading and writing of fiction. Particularly in untangling questions of African complicity in anti-African violence, literature has provided Gurnah with an appreciation for the complex nature of moral “weakness” and “strength.”
“[In some historical fiction about colonization] there’s a kind of simplification of the choices. The bad guys really are bad, and there’s a clear polarization between the hero and the betrayer. I prefer greater ambiguity, and I try to suggest that the choices are not always truly present. Instead, I ask what might compel these people that is beyond, or exerts influence upon, their own agency.”
The nuance and compassion with which Gurnah crafts his novel’s wrongdoers has allowed his work to resonate with an audience that represents a wide range of historical relationships with European imperial conquest. His novel “Afterlives,” which explores German colonialism in Africa, struck a unique chord with readers in Germany.
“More than anything, they were surprised. I had many people tell me that they had not known about this history. I think because there are no true villains in my work, they felt that they had been treated fairly, and they were able to listen.”
Gurnah has remained committed to the appreciation of historical complexity even when this commitment has been at odds with pressures from the postcolonial intellectual community he initially helped to found. During Wednesday’s event at Swarthmore, he responded to multiple questions about contemporary issues of refuge and migration by challenging the “sweeping” language with which these issues were described.
While Gurnah made clear that he is glad that his writing has served as a call to intellectual or political revolution for some, this has never been his explicit intention. He is a firm believer in the capacity of literature to enlighten and empower, but he rejects the notion that fiction must serve as an instrument for any particular ends on the part of the author.
“Sometimes you read, and you think, ‘Yes, I know that, but I wouldn’t have thought of putting it like that.’ Sometimes you read something that you didn’t know at all. In either scenario, you come to recognize that you are part of something greater than yourself, which we can call a common humanity. When this happens, it’s not because the writer has sat down and decided what he or she will make the reader feel.”
For Gurnah, the value of literature is its power to create in its readers an empathy that is born not of naivete, but of a sophisticated understanding of human nature and experience. His own works are structured around fluid dichotomies — between the personal and the historical, between complicity and victimhood, between alienation and intimacy — that demonstrate the futility of any binary moral framework. If Gurnah’s fiction offers any singular imperative to its readers, it is that they treat those around them with the sensitivity and respect with which Gurnah treats his characters.
“Many of the people that I write about are burdened. I’m kind to them because what I’m partly arguing is that these burdens can be overcome. I try to investigate how they can be overcome, through resilience, resourcefulness, but ultimately you can’t do it on your own.You need a sympathetic encounter with somebody else. We need kindness; there is no better way in which we can find resilience in ourselves.”
