Power, Progress and the Past: Gurnah's 'Theft' Explores Post-Colonial Identity

Listen here:

Excerpts from the interview:
Q: What was the genesis of this particular novel?
A: It began with thinking about something that had happened when I was myself growing up. When I was a teenager, there's a young man about the same age as me who was employed as a servant in a neighbour's place. And we got friendly. I was going to school, he was a servant, not going to school. And then he was accused of theft. And as it turned out, probably unjustly, it was something stupid like a packet of biscuits or something like that. And then I did see this young man afterwards around town now and then. And he seemed to have done okay. He was dressed very smartly, and I don't know what he did with his life. But now and then the story of this person came back to me and so I thought I would write about that. My main interest being, obviously, he's a powerless young man, a boy. His life is probably circumscribed. He's a servant. He's not like us going to school. How would he find a way out of this situation? How would he deal with what life has given to him? That's how I began to think about this novel.

Q: What are the kind of literary techniques that you prefer to employ in your storytelling?
A: I wasn't thinking that it will be something that will be read aloud necessarily, but if it works, being read aloud, that too is good. These stories kind of interlock in a way that these people's lives intersect and indeed become intermeshed. And moving from one to the other is quite an interesting technical problem for me, as the writer, to try and make these lives not only intersect, but also overlap and also intermingle and so on. So maybe that sort of fluidity as well works also as sort of an oral event, as a reading event, as much as an individual reading a book.

Q: How did you develop this? Because it was very nicely done.
A: I guess it's just trying to do it so that it works. And I'm glad it sounds as if it has. You organize the material in a way that allows to go from one sort of episode to another as smoothly as I could possibly make it.

Q: How important do you think it is to use fiction to tell the history of a land?
A: Writers do whatever it is that engages them. And that's the whole wonderful thing about literature and about writing. Those writers whose work we enjoy and admire have an originality, not because they're telling us things we don't know always, but because of the way they do so, because of the voice that speaks to us, because of the kind of the perspective that is offered to us. So the illumination is as much to do with new information as with a kind of realignment of what we already know. So when you say that the history of a country, it's not always that there's something new to say, some kind of episode to reveal. But really is that it allows us to understand the context in a way that perhaps we hadn't understood before. So I think that's one of the values of literature when it comes to when it engages with the historical or with even a contemporary historical. When I say historical, I don't mean it has to be 100 years old. Yesterday is also historical. But the way it requires us to engage with this context and understand it better, that is also an important function of what literature does, or indeed important pleasure for us as readers.

Q: You also talk about the changes in modern society, in modern Tanzania , and about how the tourism industry has come in. Exploring this whole post-colonial narrative and talking about how messy the legacy is. How do you recreate your identities in this space?
A: I think we are still living through the consequences of the colonial period. Of course, in India's case, you had many hundreds of years of it. In our case, we did not have as long. But the consequences are transforming nonetheless for the world. Both the world of the colonised and indeed the world of the colonisers, too. And we're still living through those consequences one way or another. Some of them obvious, like I suppose the inequality. I mean inequality in economic terms, particularly for small places. Some of the larger countries and states like India, for example, have made great progress in that respect and have become independent and indeed dynamically. Small countries are still struggling with that inequality of the economies as well. And tourism is a complicated example of that. A tourist going to somewhere like the United Kingdom , say, experiences tourism in a completely different way from a United Kingdom person going to a small place like Zanzibar , where the difference in the purchasing power of the tourists in relation to the local person is just huge. And, therefore, there is a dimension of it which is corrupting, corrupting in the sense that it has the capacity to make a huge impact on this society. There are positives to this. It isn't all to do with domination or whatever. Tourism brings work, it brings investment. The govt has to be a little less authoritarian, otherwise the tourists won't come, the pavements get fixed, the water's running. But there is an element of it that is disturbing and that is disruptive.

Q: A novel like ‘Theft’ makes you read and understand a past and the present that's kind of you.
A: I also have a feeling that I know that a lot of us anxious about how the social media and the Internet and so on overwhelm particularly young people, it seems. But I'm not quite so anxious as many colleagues are because I see it as I've just been describing. I also see it as enabling in, in a way it doesn't stop people from reading. The book is still alive and well, and people are reading happily and buying lots of books, I gather, from what publisher friends tell me. I'm wondering whether people who, that we now worry about that they're spending more time on social media, whether they would have been reading anyway even if they weren't spending time on social media, perhaps might have been doing something else. Would it have been reading though? I'm not so sure. So I'm optimistic. I'm thinking let everybody have all of it. Let's have the books and let's have the Internet and let's have the lot.