I don't know anything about the scientists who were awarded the Nobel in medicine, nor in chemistry, nor in physics. On occasions, I can at least pretend to have heard about them well before the Nobel, like in the case of CRISPR. But, otherwise, almost always the laureates names are new to me.
What's good for the sciences is good for literature too. I had never ever before heard of Abdulrazak Gurnah, who is the most recent honoree.
Who is Gurnah? He was born in Zanzibar, and in 1964," a violent uprising forced Gurnah, when he was 18, to flee to England."
Hmmm ... Zanzibar to England. Remind you of another brown-skinned person?
Gurnah, 72, is the first Black writer to receive the prize since Toni Morrison in 1993, and some observers saw his selection as a long overdue corrective after years of European and American Nobel laureates.
European and American writers dominate the higher education curriculum too. A few years ago, I was a member of the campus curriculum committee when we reviewed a proposal from the English Department. I asked them what "world literature" in the proposal meant. I was shocked that there was but only one course that addressed ALL the literature from the vast part of the world that was outside Europe and North America. It is understandable that we are restricted by language, and we can only read those that have been translated into English. But, still ...
Amid the heated speculation in the run-up to this year’s award, the literature prize was called out for lacking diversity among its winners. The journalist Greta Thurfjell, writing in Dagens Nyheter, a Swedish newspaper, noted that 95 of the 117 past Nobel laureates were from Europe or North America, and that only 16 winners had been women. “Can it really continue like that?” she asked.
An alien might conclude from the data that it is overwhelmingly only males from Europe and North America who author outstanding works in literature!
Consider, for instance, the Sahitya Akademi Awards in India, which are conferred on "writers of the most outstanding books of literary merit published in any of the 24 major Indian languages." Any of the 24 major languages! Now, from that list, take a look at the honorees whose works were in the English language.
So, yes, Abdulrazak Gurnah's selection is a much needed corrective.
Gurnah’s first language is Swahili, but he adopted English as his literary language, with his prose often inflected with traces of Swahili, Arabic and German. He drew on the imagery and stories from the Quran, as well as from Arabic and Persian poetry, particularly “The Arabian Nights.” Occasionally, he had to push back against publishers who wanted to italicize or Anglicize Swahili and Arabic references and phrases in his books, he said.
“There’s a way in which British publishing, and perhaps American publishing as well, always wants to make the alien seem alien,” he said. “They want you to italicize it or even put a glossary. And I think no, no, no, no.”
Gurnah is the third Muslim to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. An immigrant in the post-Brexit UK; I bet he has plenty of opinions on this matter.
In both his scholarly work and his fiction, Gurnah has tried to uncover “the way in which colonialism transformed everything in the world, and people who are living through it are still processing that experience and some of its wounds,” he said.
The same themes that occupied him early in his career, when he was processing the effects of his own displacement, feel equally urgent today, he said, as both Europe and America have been gripped with a backlash against immigrants and refugees, and political instability and war have driven more people from their home countries. “It’s a kind of meanness and miserliness on the part of these prosperous countries that say, we don’t want these people,” he said. “They’re getting these literally handfuls of people compared to European migrations.
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