Nobel laureate Abdulrazak Gurnah’s new novel is a grand exploration of life in Tanzania, his writing unmistakably of our moment, on immigration and the fate of the formerly colonized long after decolonization.
Theft by Abdulrazak Gurnah
Bloomsbury/Riverhead, 2025
ISBN 9781526678645/ 9780593852606
Philip Grant
Abdulrazak Gurnah is a novelist of plausibility; of looking back; of coming and going. Of plausibility, because in his works we are as far away from any magical realistic sensibility as could be. The authorial voice is always steady and trustworthy — perhaps a little too so: a dash of self-doubt or wry self-undermining would not go amiss. Gurnah almost always writes in the third person, 1987’s Memory of Departure with its extensive first-person passages being a striking exception. We scarcely doubt that we might meet his characters in Zanzibar or southern England and that they would walk, talk, think, feel, and generally have lives rather like the ones he recounts. Even if Raya in his latest novel, Theft, believed her father’s stories of talking animals were true as a child, and struggles to “shake off their reality” as an adult, there is never any sense in Gurnah’s work that speaking beasts or jinns or ghouls might break the bounds of their storytelling enclosures and become themselves characters in the novel.
Of looking back, because here is an oeuvre (eleven novels now and inshallah counting) where readers are inevitably taken back with the author to Zanzibar, the country Gurnah left for the United Kingdom as a refugee in 1968. The violence of Zanzibari independence, revolution, and union with Tanganyika to form the United Republic of Tanzania haunts many of his books, and this upheaval led many Zanzibaris of Arab origin (like Gurnah himself, whose ancestors hailed from Yemen) as well as other groups like Indians to leave for elsewhere.
Gurnah’s main characters are usually Swahili-speaking coastal Muslims of Arab descent, and at the beginning of Theft we find Raya’s father, never named, embittered after the revolution, his stories of magnetic mountains replaced by “tales of grievances.” Raya herself is hastily and miserably married off to a much older man in order to avoid the dishonor that will surely fall on her and her parents if her conversations with Rafik, a young, Cuban-trained revolutionary, continue. Gurnah seems compelled in every novel to return to Zanzibar, and more generally Tanzania and East Africa. Theft is entirely set in a small sliver of Tanzania, from the end of the British colonial regime to the era of the internet and the transformation of Zanzibar by European tourism and Tanzanian state co-operation with NGOs.
Not the least of Gurnah’s skills as a novelist is to keep taking us back to Zanzibar and convincing us we are there, even when the Zanzibar or wider East Africa we are taken to is that of the early colonial period, long before he was born, as in Paradise (1994) or in parts of 2005’s Desertion, or as here, the Tanzania of the decades after he had left.
Of coming and going, because however large Zanzibar-Tanzania looms, the outside world is always present in his novels, most often and notably in the form of Britain, whether as departing colonial power (as here), as colonial power in full ascent (Paradise, Desertion, The Last Gift), or as an often uncaring new home for Zanzibari immigrants and refugees (By the Sea, The Last Gift), populated by, among others, frequently condescending upper middle class families whose interactions with former imperial subjects and their descendants are presented in exquisitely excruciating scenes (Pilgrim’s Way, The Last Gift). Comings and goings are not, however, limited to the (post)colonial relationship with Britain; throughout his works, including in Theft, there are numerous references to rule by the Sultanate of Oman, and to the much longer history of settlement by and links commercial and cultural with the Arab, Persianate, and Indian worlds, including in the Swahili words with which his narratives are peppered, most often unexplained, many of which will seem familiar to Arabic or Persian speakers, even as Swahili is unmistakably a language of East Africa and not some mysterious bearer of outside civilization to an Africa otherwise incapable of it.
In Theft, the British presence is light; the drama emerges from the intimate relationships, or lack of them, between characters firmly grounded in an independent Tanzania. Yet in the form of Geraldine “Jerry” Bruno, a young English software engineer doing a 12-week stint as a volunteer on Unguja, and in the eyes of the young, male characters, strikingly beautiful, Britain makes a late but baleful entrance.
Frederic Jameson notoriously argued that what were then called “Third World” novels were always allegories of postcolonial nationhood, and even if the Marxist philosopher and literary theorist Aijaz Ahmad was right to object that this was too vast a generalization, there continue to be plenty of postcolonial novels that might well be reasonably read as allegories of the nation: José Eduardo Agualusa’s 2012 A General Theory of Oblivion (in Angolan Portuguese) springs to mind. Gurnah’s novels, written in and so often from England, in a recognizably British English (the Swahili notwithstanding), and despite — or rather because of their looking back and their coming and going — do not, however, easily fit into any notion of “Third World” fiction, a category still, if barely, operational when he began his career as a novelist in the late 1980s.
Still less are they allegories, of nationhood or anything else — except for Paradise, which draws on centuries-old Persianate and Islamicate images of paradises as walled gardens of privileged tranquility; and yet, when it comes to Gurnah’s character Jerry, Jameson’s insight may not be entirely irrelevant.
Jerry enters a Zanzibar whose contact with the outside world in the 21st century is mainly by way of European tourists, some of whom like to take a break from beach-side resorts and game lodges by staying in old buildings purchased by foreign investors and turned “into gilded fantasies of oriental luxury.” We see her first from the perspective of Badar, by this point a junior hotel worker in precisely one such urban hotel, to him shockingly expensive, whose part-owner Bwana Sharif Makame also has interests in “posher” waterfront properties. Badar, forced to leave school at thirteen to become a household servant, bemused that Europeans want to come to this crowded, heated urban environment at all rather than lounge all day half-naked with cocktails beside crystal blue waters, as in the pictures he has seen in his previous employer’s magazines, finds the hotel guests frequently condescending. It is Badar who first notices Jerry, on account of her beauty, her playing sad music on an instrument that sounds like a kind of flute (it turns out to be a clarinet), and her being the first European to actually take an interest in him.
It is Jerry who will, casually, and almost without motive (other than wanting to sleep with a good looking young local man), cruelly, even, bring a swift end to the marriage of two of the novel’s younger characters, before disappearing just as casually back to London, her spell as a volunteer and their marriage over. This whole episode could stand, almost too neatly, for the continuing disruption of the postcolonial nation, by now several decades into its existence, by the descendants of the colonizer, there to have fun, and worse, to do good.
The novelist’s art, however, is to place the articulation of this allegory, having first established the grounds of its possibility, into the mouth of the woman’s mother:
He did not deserve you. He has gone away to do dirty things with a tourist woman, in front of everyone, without shame… This woman must have put a madness in him, whoever she is, some tourist vagabond with money but no honor. What do these people want with us? Why do they come here? They come here with their filth and their money and interfere with us and ruin our lives for their pleasure, and it seems that we cannot resist their wealth and their filthy ways… Everywhere you go you see them, in the narrowest alley and street… looking into people’s houses…and alongside them will be one of our shameless young men, grinning like a monkey while he does his blather. Don’t they have seas and beaches in their own countries? They come here with their heedless ways to add to the troubles we’ve seen. There was something we knew about living that we no longer know now.
Not the least magnificent aspect of Theft is the impression we have of passing through a series of antechambers where the action and above all the characters fascinate us, even as there is a modest but unsettling underlying tension, a foreboding that something terrible will happen, though we are not quite sure to whom, and less sure still what and how.
An advert I recently received for a novel-writing course makes much of how students will learn to develop the world of their central character, filtering events and emotions through the lens of that character’s perspective. Gurnah, this far into his career at least, has no need of such doctrines. Here the dramatis personae are not the same in each room. We begin with the drama of Raya, her increasingly bitter father, and Raya’s subjection to her much older husband, who sees and acts upon her mainly as a body existing for his satisfaction, including soon after the birth of their son, Karim; but once Raya has decided to cut all ties with him, refusing the advice of “aunties and other people she hardly knew,” the novel almost does too. Almost, because who his father is remains a question for Karim, especially when Ali, an older brother by his father’s first marriage, takes him under his wing.
Without ever being difficult to follow, Theft is punctuated by frequent shifts of emphasis. Certain characters depart the scene, and others move to the fore or recede out of the main action. When Raya, already less involved in Karim’s upbringing than expected, departs for Dar es Salaam with her new husband, Haji, Karim, who after his grandmother’s death moves in with Ali and his wife Jalila, becomes the focus of our attention — but not for long, as Badar and Fauzia both make their own, unconnected entrances. Fauzia swiftly emerges — Gurnah’s prose is never hurried, but in his books, especially here, young people are forever and inexorably growing up — from an early childhood overshadowed by her “falling sickness” and her mother’s anxieties about it. These are as much marked by the fears it might blight her daughter’s marriage prospects or be passed on to Fauzia’s own children as for the young Fauzia’s health, but when Fauzia does have a daughter of her own, these worries loom over the infant Nasra, threatened however less by illness than by paternal indifference. Many passages from one antechamber to another will need to happen before we reach that point; at first we just see Fauzia succeeding at school, developing a love for reading world literature, from the Shahnameh to Shakespeare, and resolving to become a teacher even though her parents and her best friend Hawa think someone of her talents should have ambitions made of sterner stuff.
Meanwhile we first meet Badar, aged thirteen, being unceremoniously deposited at the house of a morose and wealthy relative, Uncle Othman, who clearly wants nothing to do with him, by a man described as his father who is nonetheless not his father, and who likewise cares little for his adopted son. While in a way Badar is a classic character, a boy who has lost his parents and who is raised by people who do not care much for him or are even actively hostile (David Copperfield is just one among many exemplars of this novelistic phenomenon), and therefore, as the cliché goes, forced to grow up fast, he paradoxically seems to grow up more slowly than Karim or Fauzia, or Raya before them. This impression is certainly a function of how little he knows — both about the world beyond his village, then the world beyond the confines of his new neighborhood in Dar, then the world beyond coastal Tanzania and Zanzibar; and about his own antecedents, how he is related to his “uncle” and why this relative shows nothing but disdain for him. Yet it is also a consequence of Gurnah’s especial concern for him: not particularly wanted as a boy, forced to become a house servant in adolescence, shipped off to work in a hotel on Zanzibar once Uncle Othman manages to eject him from his house after falsely accusing him of theft. There is a coming-of-age novel-within-a-novel as Badar discovers, in fits and starts, both more about the adult world, the deception and inequalities that mark it, but also its possibilities; and about his own origins and his entanglements with the other characters.
Badar will eventually become the agent that binds together those around him, even as for much of his short life he has been entirely at the beck and call of others.
Subject to a succession of forces and people beyond his control, Badar nonetheless emerges triumphant by the time we reach the novel’s final chamber, both happier than most of those he has served, and less heedless of the realities around him than the book’s other male characters, not to mention the European visitors.
Theft is, in fact, not mainly about Europeans. They must be there, in a postcolonial novel, but why should they be center stage? In this profoundly domestic tale, it is the Tanzanians who get on with things, sometimes making a mess of them, on both sides of and crossing the water that once separated the Sultanate of Zanzibar from Tanganyika. If one European wrecks one tiny corner of a Zanzibari world, it is because one Tanzanian invites her in to it, having already made a mess of it; another repairs the damage, showing us both that the chain of paternal and maternal neglect and abandonment might be broken, and that it might after all be possible to get on in this world, with a little cunning, certainly, but without being disloyal or corrupt; by enduring, as Badar puts it to himself.
Badar becomes the protagonist, then, but it is not the least of the joys of this novel that the female characters are more central to the action than is often the case in Gurnah’s earlier work. Fauzia’s struggles with postpartum depression are depicted not merely with sensitivity, but in full recognition of the fact that they matter deeply and are worthy, indeed necessary, material for literature of this quality. Her origins, while not grand, are certainly more privileged than Badar’s; yet she too emerges from a desperate situation, her unhappy marriage, blighted by the way he reproduces the parental neglect he too suffered from, through her own decisive initiative, and without, unlike so many of the other characters, involving herself in deep moral compromise.
