This one for Africa: The Nobel Prize ennobles itself

By awarding this year’s Nobel Prize for literature to Abdulrazak Gurnah, the Swedish Academy ennobled the prize itself.

Abdulrazak Gurnah is not exactly a household name in much of the English-speaking world. Those happy few who have known his literary output and critical writings of the last three decades, however, were not surprised that he received the 2021 Nobel Prize for literature. He richly deserves it.

As the world rushes to learn more about him and read his novels, and justly so, it would also be good to consider some of his non-fiction critical writings, such as the volumes he edited on Essays on African Writing (1993) or The Cambridge Companion to Salman Rushdie (2007). His works of fiction are the product of the same critical mind.

In its announcement, the Swedish Academy, which is responsible for the selection of the Nobel Prize laureates in literature, has said Gurnah was honoured with the award for his “uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism”. That “compassionate penetration” (the academy needs to show a better command of idiomatic English) is the result of a lifetime of dispossession, exile, homesickness, and being subject to the horrors of racism and white supremacy. Such thematic traits may define the texture of his works of fiction but they do not on their own define his literary significance. We are in the presence of a powerful writer of fiction, not a political activist opting for a literary disguise.