All this family business

“I’m not saying that history does not matter”, insists a character in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s novel By the Sea (2001), clarifying what he means by “history”:

knowing about what happened so we understand what we are about, and how we came to be as we are, and what stories we tell about it all. I mean I don’t want recriminations, all this family business, all this muttering that stretches further back all the time. Have you noticed how the history of Islam is so tied up with family squabbles?

It is a statement, and a question, that takes us to the heart of Gurnah’s imaginative achievement. His novels – the latest, Theft, is his eleventh – are profoundly interested in the effects of colonialism, but prefer to concentrate on the family ties he finds at once necessary and irritating, or even thwarting, rather than on, say, the dramatic sweeps and effects of government policy. This means that they handle their big themes of deracination, exploitation and personal fulfilment, or the lack of it, with an unusual degree of intimacy – and compassion, the virtue singled out by the chair of the Nobel committee when Gurnah became a laureate in 2021.

Theft goes about its business so stealthily, with so little in the way of stylistic flamboyance, so many false trails and so much information withheld, that it is difficult initially for a reader to be sure where the main narrative interest might lie. The first character we meet, Raya (is she to be the heroine?), is admired by the raffish and apparently unreliable Rafik, who is swiftly dispatched in an episode of political unrest, but only after Raya has been led by her parents to marry Bakari Abbas, with whom she has a child – Karim – before bolting from the island of Pemba to the island of Unguja (Zanzibar), where most of the novel’s action takes place. Bakari Abbas, it turns out, has previously been married and already has a son, Ali, a more volatile character than his new half-brother, Karim. After their father dies, Ali sells the family building and contracting business, and marries Jalila. Raya, never the most maternal of mothers, soon marries again, this time to a jovial soul named Haji Othman, who runs a pharmacy business in Dar es Salaam – whereupon Karim, still two years from the end of his time at school, goes to live with Ali, Jalila and their son, Ibrahim.

By this stage, it seems fair to assume that the amount of time Gurnah has spent mapping his complex web of family obligations means we’ve arrived at the centre of his narrative interest. But no. Karim wins a scholarship in geography and environmental studies at the University of Dar es Salaam, where he lives with Raya and Haji during his second year, and a new character enters the fray: Badar, who is employed by Haji and Raya as a servant, and whose father (unbeknown to Badar himself) is related to the Othman family, but was previously “chased … away” for reasons not immediately revealed. Badar is docile, undemonstrative, patient and (though it is not entirely clear Gurnah intends this) a little dull. While remaining ignorant of his circumstances, he seems moulded most conspicuously by the need to survive the scorn of Haji’s Uncle Othman, who forms a part of Raya and Haji’s household. Badar lives in an almost permanent state of low-level anxiety, feeling for some obscure reason that he is “dirty”.

It turns out that Uncle Othman is exploiting Badar to punish Badar’s father, but this only becomes evident as the first section of the novel draws to its close, by which time several more characters have been painted onto Gurnah’s already crowded canvas: Khadija, her daughter Fauzia (a “book rat” who wants to become a teacher) and Fauzia’s friend Hawa (a chatterbox who ends up working in a travel agency). True to form, Gurnah leaves us to speculate as to how these additions might affect his main plot – and who the principal agents of that plot might be.

Fauzia and Karim seem to fit the bill at the start of the second section, when we meet them two years later as a happily courting couple. But Badar also emerges as a contender, as he begins to learn more about his own and his country’s past from Juma, an ancient gardener who works for Raya and Haji. Without exerting himself much, Badar nevertheless becomes a quiet focal point around which various family stories revolve. (The respect that all the many characters have for stories, of both a domestic and folkloric nature, plays a cohesive role.) Eventually, and avoiding catastrophe by a hair’s breadth, Uncle Othman’s hostility to Badar culminates in an accusation of theft. Badar, who for years “had not known if he was a servant or a possession”, only that there was “something degrading about his circumstances”, is whisked away by Karim to Zanzibar, where he is once again compelled to ponder the fact that “the direction of his life had changed without any effort on his part”.

By this stage, we have become acclimatized to the fact that Theft proceeds by various forms of indirection. Badar, the character who appears to have the least agency, emerges as the one of most interest to Gurnah, and the third section, which has a simpler structure, confirms his pre-eminence. Here, we find him working in the Tamarind Hotel under the assistant manager, Issa, and becoming a valued friend to Karim and Fauza, whose marriage is under strain due to Fauza’s postnatal depression and the needs of their fretful baby (whom Badar has a gift for calming). We also see him react to Geraldine Bruno, a guest who has arrived from London to work for a local charity called Relief Exchange International, but seems more interested in the flirtatious exploitation of handsome locals. Badar is then once again accused of theft.

Questions of ownership and possession become dominant in the novel’s final stages. Against the vast background of colonial theft and the political unrest that inevitably follows in its wake, we are asked by Gurnah to consider how individual autonomy might be affected by the kindness, suspicion or prejudice contained in the multitude of strands that comprise the web of family relationships. Badar is blighted by the unknown sins of a father he hardly knew, and resents having to live always at the beck and call of others. But as the action of the novel slows to a close, he has begun to grow into himself: “To himself he said ruefully, once a servant always a servant, but it did not feel like that. He began to feel that in some small way he belonged with them”.

What has he learnt in the process? The question is brought to a crisis by Karim, who, towards the novel’s conclusion, having been angered by Badar, launches a fierce verbal assault on him. Badar is initially silent, then realizes: “I have learned to endure”. Resilience is a theme that Abdulrazak Gurnah has tackled before, and in Theft, as previously, he grounds both this quality and his critique of the colonialism that makes it a necessity in circumstances that border on the mundane. The force of his argument might be somewhat diminished by the complications of his plotting, but it is all the greater for the lack of ostentation with which he otherwise goes about his art.

Andrew Motion’s most recent books are Sleeping on Islands: A life in poetry and New and Selected Poems: 1977–2022, both published in 2023

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