Latest Nobel for Literature Lecture

Abdulrazak Gurnah won this year's Nobel Prize for Literature. He is the first African to win in decades. Each winner is expected to give a lecture. I have posted excerpts from other winners that I find illuminate this madness I have undertaken of putting words on paper. The following are the points I found of interest from Mr. Gurnah's lecture; you can read full lecture here. Now to my excerpts:

Writing has always been a pleasure. Even as a boy at school I looked forward to the class set aside for writing a story, or whatever our teachers thought would interest us, more than to any other class on the timetable. Then everyone would fall silent, leaning over their desks to retrieve something worth reporting from memory and imagination. In these youthful efforts, there was no desire to say something in particular, to recall a memorable experience, to express a strongly-held opinion or to air a grievance. Nor did these efforts require any other reader than the teacher who prompted them as an exercise in improving our discursive skills. I wrote because I was instructed to write, and because I found such pleasure in the exercise.

I can recognize this person. Can you?

 It was only in the early years that I lived in England that I was able to reflect on such issues, to dwell on the ugliness of what we were capable of inflicting on each other, to revisit the lies and delusions with which we had comforted ourselves. Our histories were partial, silent about many cruelties. Our politics was racialised, and led directly to the persecutions that followed the revolution, when fathers were slaughtered in front of their children and daughters were assaulted in front of their mothers. Living in England, far away from these events yet deeply troubled by them in my mind, it may have been that I was less able to resist the power of such memories than if I had been among people who were still living their consequences. But I was also troubled by other memories that were unrelated to these events: cruelties parents inflicted on their children, the way people were denied full expression because of social or gender dogma, the inequalities that tolerated poverty and dependence. These are matters present in all human life and are not exceptional to us, but they are not always on your mind until circumstances require you to be aware of them. I suspect this is one of the burdens of people who have fled from a trauma and find themselves living safely, away from those left behind. Eventually I began to write about some of these reflections, not in an orderly or organised way, not yet, just for the relief of clarifying a little some of the confusions and uncertainties in my mind.

I had to have friends encourage me to take up again writing fiction after I destroyed my life. I had to go to a prison in New Jersey to find a subject to write about and a way to tell those stores. I fo not suggest emulating in any way whatsoever other than leaving where you are for somewhere that will give you perspective on the world. 

But writing cannot be just about battling and polemics, however invigorating and comforting that can be. Writing is not about one thing, not about this issue or that, or this concern or another, and since its concern is human life in one way or another, sooner or later cruelty and love and weakness become its subject. I believe that writing also has to show what can be otherwise, what it is that the hard domineering eye cannot see, what makes people, apparently small in stature, feel assured in themselves regardless of the disdain of others. So I found it necessary to write about that as well, and to do so truthfully, so that both the ugliness and the virtue come through, and the human being appears out of the simplification and stereotype. When that works, a kind of beauty comes out of it.

Let me confess it is humanity I strive to write about. Having run from confronting the inhumanity of our times, I find myself with no choice but to make a stand. As more than one friend told me years ago, no one will tell the stories unless I do so. I think the same ad ice applies to you. Start putting pen to paper.

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