Abdulrazak
Gurnah, the Tanzanian born novelist settled in Britain, has produced several
novels, of which Paradise was
shortlisted for the Booker and Whitbread Prizes, By The Sea was longlisted for the Booker Prize and awarded the RFI
Temoin de Monde Prize and Desertion was
shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. The Last Gift, published in 2011, follows his earlier work on the
theme of immigration and the life in the place of his origin, Zanzibar, as well as his
present homeland, Britain. It is a story that plays with memory and resistance,
which are related to cultural roots. Zanzibar is a distant memory for the
protagonist Abbas in the novel, who is sixty-three years old like the writer
himself, and he tries his best to hold it to himself through his last days in
Norwich, until the moment he realises that he owes his children at
least a clue to their ancestry. The novel deals with the life of the family
that consists of Abbas, his wife Maryam and their children Hanna/Anna and
Jamal.
The
Last Gift evolves through third person and first person narratives, giving
almost equal importance to the lives of all the four characters. However, the
psychological tension among the characters and their approach to their
immigrant status in Britain provide space for analyses of the clash between
first and second generation expatriate responses to life situations in Britain.
There could be a clear demarcation between the way the parents, Abbas and
Maryam, live and reflect upon their lives and what their children, Hanna and
Jamal, make of their unique, bewildering and sometimes opportune life
experiences. It is clear from the beginning that their race and skin colour
demarcate them all through the changing times and cultural shifts in Britain.
And all of them learn to cope with it, even as they falter at times. Alev Adil,
in a review of the novel, observes:
Gurnah is the
master of the particularity of displacement:
how, despite the fact that this is
an increasingly common
state, migration is always an individual experience. His
novels show how memory evades history. Gurnah is engaged by the guilt of
departure more than he is by the difficulty of belonging. His heroes are
story-tellers, rewriting history, telling tall tales in order to remake and escape
themselves. Their stories of flight map routes between loss and freedom, old
betrayals and new loyalties.
(Adil)
This is an
attempt to sketch the significance of immigration and race in the novel, with
special reference to the gap in psychological responses between the first and
second generation expatriates, signified in the novel as the parents and the
children respectively.
The novel opens with the description of
the sudden illness of Abbas – the result of neglected diabetes. He has a fall,
and then a few strokes follow it. While he is bedridden and is found unable to
speak, something starts to trouble him. Even though he had been an affectionate
father who blessed his children with several vivid storytelling sessions, he
had evaded the most significant story – the one that involved him. He kept on
dissuading his family members in his own ways, whenever they showed some
interest in his past. He never even told them about the place where he came
from – Zanzibar. They knew of him as a sailor who landed up in Britian, found
Maryam in a Boots shop in Exeter, fell in love with her at first sight and
said, “Yallah, let us get out of here” (Gurnah 16) before whisking her away to Birmigham
and then to Norwich where they settled down. Maryam was an abandoned child,
found outside the casualty doors at Exeter Hospital. She had been with several
foster parents before she was finally taken by Ferooz, from Mauritius, and her
husband Vijay, from India, when she was nine years old. They were kind to her
in the beginning, but slowly she was reduced to the role of a skivvy, and more
troubles followed when Dinesh, Vijay’s nephew, came to stay with them and
started harassing her sexually. Dinesh turned Ferooz and Vijay against her and
it was in fact an escape from all this when she decided to elope with Abbas.
Hanna, their first child, likes to call
herself Anna, and is always on the look out to find a place for herself in the
world of opportunities that Britain provides. She has good university education
and becomes a teacher. She has an affair with Nick, whose family turns out to
be white upper middle class racists. He is some sort of a megalomaniac
indulging in the academic work which he takes as an excuse to have a double
life. He is indignant even when his extramarital affair is found out, and tries
to boss Anna further. She gets out of the relationship when she is twenty eight
years old, and decides to face the world on her own. Her liberation from Nick
coincides with the death of Abbas, out of a stroke.
Jamal, the younger child, does his PhD
related to immigration issues. He dangles between his intellectual
preoccupations and religious identity. He attends religious meetings, but is at
a loss when it comes to the traditions and prayers. He resents the fact that
Abbas never cared for them to have a religious or ethnic identity, but is more
open to the final storytelling of his Ba and Ma than the seemingly disturbed
Hanna/Anna. Though shy by nature, he finds his love in Lena/Magdalena, of
Italian descent, in the apartment that he shares with his fellow students. He
is able to connect better with Ma after the death of Ba, because she happens to
work in a Refugee Centre and his research relates to immigrant issues.
Abbas, in his final days, yearns to speak
out what he held within so far, but words don’t come easily to save him. As he
improves with the constant care that Maryam bestows upon him, he starts
speaking slowly. One day he makes her listen to what he wanted all of them to
know ultimately. He describes his years of hardship in Mfenesini, where he went
to school amidst the protest from his father with whom he had to lead a life of
parsimony. His elder brother Kassim dares to take Abbas to the school against
the will of their father, the stingy and parochial Othman. Kassim gets beaten
up badly, but he persists on Abbas getting an education. Their sister Fawzia is
married to a relatively rich family in the town, and when Abbas passes his
school examinations at sixteen, she takes him away to the town and makes him
stay with her relatives so that he could have his college education. He stays
in a small storeroom with a slit on the wall for a window. He has the view of
the sea from there and he focuses relentlessly on his studies. It is from here
that he starts to peep on a young girl on the terrace of the adjacent building.
She happens to be the foster daughter of a rich merchant. When he is caught
staring at her with her knowledge, the aunt of the girl makes a fuss about her
honour and gets in touch with Fawzia. They hurriedly arrange a marriage between
Abbas and the girl, Sharifa. Abbas likes the life of rich food and habits in
her house in the beginning, but slowly, he starts to feel that he is not being
respected there. The two sons of the merchant are rich themselves, owning
businesses and cars, and are notorious womanisers. They start bullying him,
poking fun at his inexperience and innocence. When Sharifa gets pregnant, he
has the strange doubt that he was trapped into the marriage and that she was
already pregnant by someone else before the marriage was arranged. He slides
away without a word from the life in Zanzibar when Sharifa is six months
pregnant. He becomes a sailor and never comes back to Zanzibar. The news shocks
Maryam, and then the kids. They couldn’t digest the fact that he was a
bigamist.
After the death of Abbas, Maryam gets more
active in the Refugee Centre and invites her children for a play that she acts
in. Later, the children accompany her, as willing decoys, to the place where
Ferooz and Vijay stayed. It is their first meeting after Maryam had left them
with Abbas. She had been trying to connect with them many times, with no
success. The meeting goes well, though what Maryam needed – more information
regarding her origins – turn out to be bare and almost useless. She could just
conclude that perhaps her mother was Polish and her father a ‘darkie’. She
concludes further that she is not Jewish by any chance, because her name could
then have been Miriyam, instead of the Arab Muslim name Maryam.
Gurnah lets the novel shape up through
understatements regarding the place that the characters inhabit – Abbas says
just ‘Boots’ (Gurnah 16) to refer to the place where he met Maryam first in
Exeter. The places where the story takes place – Exeter, Norwich and Chichester
(where Nick’s parents reside) are not described vividly. They are taken for
granted, as places that are filled with people from various origins. Abbas and
family inhabit their places as if they belong to them. What comes as a
surprise, and of more significance, are the places Abbas and Maryam had come
from, or even could have inhabited if they were not destined to be in Britain. Maryam
grows up in Exeter only because she was found there and all her foster parents
were from that area. She is left with no choice, until she meets Abbas.
However, Abbas had seen many places, in his life as a sailor, and it was his
own decision to desert his birth place and to never go back there. The younger
generation, since they were born and brought up in Britain, don’t think beyond
the places that they inhabit. Jamal is concerned about immigrant experiences
from an academic perspective. But for Hanna/Anna, the fact that she is an
immigrant turns out to be a burden. After listening to the story of Ba about
his bigamy and the confession of Ma regarding Dinesh’s attempt to rape her, she
is described as pouring out her frustrated thoughts:
‘I
can’t bear this,’ she said angrily. ‘I can’t bear this shitty, vile immigrant
tragedies of yours. I can’t bear the tyranny of your ugly lives. I’ve had
enough, I’m leaving.’
‘Shut
up, Hanna,’ Jamal said. ‘Let Ma speak.’
‘My
name is Anna, you moron,’ Anna said, but she did not leave.
(Gurnah 194)
Anna also has an
unpleasant conversation with Nick’s uncle Digby, a priest, who tries to
patronise her for not being rooted to her culture and history. During a dinner
with Nick’s family, he asks her where her father was from, and she just says
that he is from East Africa. Uncle Digby proceeds to observe that Anna’s looks
reveal that her father could be from the coast. He asks her where on the coast
was her father from:
She noticed that the tempo and the drift
of the conversation was making everyone smile, anticipating a little
biographical sketch of distant but not unfamiliar origins. ‘I don’t know,’ Anna
said.
After a puzzled silence, Uncle Digby said,
‘You don’t know where your father comes from! Well, I find this hard to
believe.’
‘I don’t know,’ Anna repeated, unable to
think of anything else to say.
‘I am shocked. Do you mean you don’t know,
or you don’t want to know? It makes me sad to hear you speak with such little
interest about your home, Anna,’ Uncle Digby said, his eyes lowered and his
mouth turned down wretchedly.
‘I am British,’ Anna said, and heard the
strain in her own voice as she spoke.
(Gurnah 117)
But this
reluctance to enhance her origins seems to have come from the fact that their
parents never brought them up in confirmation to any particular ethnicity. When
Anna was in school, some of the Muslim parents had a campaign to exclude their
children from the Christian practices there. Abbas joined with them, though he
did not adhere to the religious fanaticism of most of those campaigners. This
resulted in Anna and Jamal growing up with no religion:
It
was her father who was the Muslim, although there was nothing Muslim about what
he did or the way they lived. Sometimes he told them what it meant to be a
Muslim, the Pillars of Islam, as he called them, praying, fasting, giving alms,
going on the pilgrimage to Mecca, although he never did any of those things
himself. He told them the story of Muhammad, and the Muslim conquests of most
of the unknown world, from China to the gates of Vienna, and of its scholarship
and learning. The stories were like great adventures, that was how he told them,
tales of when men were giants and it was still possible to stumble on a treasure
chest of emeralds and diamonds when searching for firewood in the forest. What
their mother Maryam knew about religion was what she had picked up along the
way, and it was the lightest of burdens.
(Gurnah 113-14)
Anna tries to
adapt herself to the British society as much as she could, despite the fact
people like the ones in Nick’s family see her as different from them. Though
they try to hide it, they are curious about the ethnic origins and immigrant
status of Anna. She couldn’t help but being blunt and at times rude, because
she never had a real knowledge about her true origins, as long as Abbas kept
them in the dark about his life prior to his meeting with Maryam. Anna grows up
in England and doesn’t go to a church once, till her visit to a church with
Nick’s family. But she also grows up with Abbas and Maryam and never gets to
know much about her own religion:
If
their Dad was a proper Muslim, he would have committed a great sin by keeping
them in ignorance about their religion, instead of which he kept them in
ignorance about everything, or tried to anyway. There was so much more he
should have told them, a great deal more about a great many things.
(Gurnah 114)
Jamal is not as
much disturbed about his immigrant status, perhaps because he engages with the
issue academically as well. This perhaps gives him the required distance to it
in order to approach it in a less sensitive manner. Anna had been very close to
her Ba until she started her university education, while Jamal was not so
expressive and affectionate from a young age. No matter how different Anna and
Jamal happen to be, they have to deal with the same kind of issues related to
their race and immigrant status.
Jamal turns out to be a lot more concerned
about Harun Sharif, a black man who is constantly disturbed by the white
children of the neighbourhood. Once Lena and Jamal find Harun falling down on
the way and they help him out. Later they visit him in his house which was next
door to them. Jamal could see a lot of Ba in Harun. Jamal asks him about the
youngsters who trouble him by rattling his gate all the time and shouting abuse
at him, and Harun’s response makes him think about his Ba, and he was genuinely
concerned about the harm the children could do to Harun:
‘... They are probably more frightened
about what they are doing than I am. I have seen enough in my life not to be
frightened by children shouting abuse.’
Jamal could imagine his Ba saying the same
thing. Me, I’m not afraid of these children. I’m more afraid of the police. But
Jamal had no faith in children and did not think they could be disarmed by
being ignored. They were as evil as everyone else. Just think for a moment of
the tortures child soldiers were committing in African wars.
(Gurnah 211)
Anna, on the
other hand, when faced with similar situations, is repulsed. She narrates an
incident to Nick about spotting two female asylum seekers standing helplessly
in the train station, and she does not extend any help to them:
‘... I saw these two women in Liverpool
Street, a mother and a daughter, I think. They were so hopelessly fat, and so
much at a loss, so confused in that huge station. It was depressing to see
them. Black women. They spoke to each other in a language I did not understand,
and were looking around in a terrified way. I don’t think they could read
English.”
‘Then?’ Nick asked when she said no more
for a while.
‘Then nothing. I went to catch my train,’
she said. ‘Asylum seekers, I suppose. May be I should have offered to help, but
the sight of them depressed me. They were so helpless and so ugly. Is it really
so bad where they come from?’
‘Probably,’ he said quietly.
She smiled. ‘You sound like my saintly
brother.’
(Gurnah 201-2)
Anna’s life and
attitudes change when her relationship with Nick breaks, and he pours out a
tirade of abuse against her and her family. In an argument after it was found
out that he was having an extramarital relationship, he tries to cover up his
infirmity by abusing Anna. He says that he feels sorry for “people like you”
(Gurnah 235), and when Anna insists on an explanation of what he meant by that
because she thinks that he meant something about race, he bursts out:
‘I
mean I feel sorry for people like you because you don’t know how to look after
yourselves. Your father was a whingeing tyrant, bullying everyone with one
misery or another, in the grip of a psychic crisis, so it seemed. But he only
had diabetes, a thoroughly treatable disease, that’s all. Your mother was an
abandoned baby and doesn’t know she is. Well, it doesn’t take a genius to find
out that kind of information. Why couldn’t she just pay an agency to check it
out for her? Or why couldn’t you, or your brother, do it for her? She, and all
of you, would have known within days. But no, it had to be another festering
drama. And then it turns out that your father is an absconder and a bigamist
but he couldn’t just talk about this, the whole crowd of you in the grip of a
hopeless melodrama, acting like immigrants.’
Anna was almost drawn into offering a
defence but she managed to suppress her words. She had thought all this
herself. What he added to what she had thought herself about her family was
scorn. It jolted her the way he said that word, immigrants, exactly as she
would have said it, with the same degree of disdain.
(Gurnah 235)
According to Zenga
Longmore , “[T]here are minutely observed descriptions of the English attitude
towards immigrants which, although caustic at times, reveal the warmth of the
author’s heart” (Longmore). Giles Foden observes that “the book is in no way reducible
to one or other position; indeed, it makes a virtue of its provisonality” (Foden).
The generation of Anna and Jamal learn it better to claim a homeland where they
are destined to struggle for an existence. For Abbas and Maryam, England is a
place of final destination. They are
concerned about the challenges their children face in life, but are also
content with the fact that they are much better off when compared to their own
struggle for existence in the initial days.
It seems apt in this context to reflect on
what Bill Ashcroft observes in his lecture titled “Home and Horizon” on how the
concept of ‘home’ is taken beyond the boundaries, the horizon, by the diaspora
writers:
When
will the traveller reach home? When will the exile reach the Promised Land?
Unanswerable questions that reach into the heart of our sense of self, because
the self must, above all, be located. But like that sense of self, ‘home’
brings with it the inescapable tyranny of limits, of borders. Whether home is a
place, a location, a feeling, a tradition, an ethnicity, it carries with it the
sometimes imperceptible, but ever present reality of boundaries ... it is into
the horizon beyond the boundaries of home that the diasporic writer takes
us.
(Ashcroft)
Gurnah’s novel
takes us beyond the horizons of lived experiences. It makes us worried about
the existence of young and old people in a world charged with invented
categories. In some cases, one’s racial identity turns out to be advantageous
while in some others it brings in possibilities of endless conflict. Gurnah reflects a lot on how the new generation of 'immigrants' have to 'learn to live with it'. That makes us wonder
whether there could be a phase where it should not be the highest
priority presenting a combat zone, so that one could focus on other
things that matter more in life.The best a
novel like The Last Gift does may be to disturb us a bit, and force us
to look for an easy or tough way out.
Bibliography
Adil, Alev. “The
Last Gift, By Abdulrazak Gurnah”, The Independent, 27 May 2011. http://www.independent.co.uk/arts- entertainment/books/reviews/the-last-gift-by-abdulrazak-gurnah-2289421.html.
Ashcroft, Bill. “Home and Horizon” International Conference of the
Association for the Study of Australasia in
India(ASAA), Mar Ivanios College, Trivandrum, July 9, 2004.
Foden, Giles. “The Last Gift, By Abdulrazak Gurnah – Review”, The Guardian, 21 May 2011. http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/may/22/last-gift-abdulrazak-gurnah-review.
Gurnah, Abdulrazak. The Last Gift.
London: Bloomsbury, 2012.
Longmore, Zenga. “The Last Gift, By Abdulrazak Gurnah:
Review”, The Telegraph, 19 May 2011. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/8498339/The-Last-Gift-by-Abdulrazak-Gurnah- review.html.
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