Review: 'Afterlives,' Abdulrazak Gurnah

One of the most awe-inspiring developments in our contemporary literature is the surpassing brilliance of Anglophone African novelists, from Nigeria's Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie to Zambia's Namwali Serpell to Zimbabwe's Petina Gappah. Last year the Stockholm sages lauded Abdulrazak Gurnah with the Nobel Prize in literature, beaming a bright light onto a career largely built on the margins. Gurnah's bravura, beautifully calibrated novel "Afterlives" encompasses the meld of cultures and languages in eastern Africa and the punishing legacy of European colonialism.

At the age of 18, Gurnah left his native Zanzibar, settling in Canterbury, England, where he has taught at the University of Kent. With its narrative heft and economical skill, "Afterlives" arches over the reader like a cathedral's nave, spanning decades as it charts the strife of empires on a subjugated continent.

He narrates the history of the region, then under German rule, with a journalist's canny ability to zoom into the entwined stories of his lead character: Ilyas, a boy stolen from his parents and then educated; his younger sister Afiya, whom he rescues from indentured servitude; and Hamza, who joins the German schutztruppe as they engage the British during World War I.

There's an air of menace in even the bucolic moments, as Afiya observes: "The small roadside village where she grew up was overlooked by a dark conical hill covered in scrub. ... She was told that she was never to go up there but was not told why, so she populated the hill with all the terrors she was learning to imagine."

As conflict breaks out, Hamza catches the amorous eye of the commanding Oberleutnant, who trains him as a personal aide and teaches him German. Gurnah writes battles and marches and interrogations with panache; cumulatively these scenes form the novel's most stirring set piece. Like Zimbabwe's Gappah, he braids Kiswahili into English; the tension both invigorates his language and heightens the struggles between indigenous African peoples and their foreign overlords.

Away from these horrors, Afiya blooms into an assertive young woman, destined to capture the heart of a weary ex-solider. After the war, Hamza and Afiya circle around each other in a dance of courtship; hope thrives as discord lingers on the global stage. Ever defiant of gender strictures, Afiya plots: "She had heard them talking about how good his German was so she thought she would ask him for a German poem. Not even a dummkopf could misunderstand that she was asking him to translate a love poem for her, which was as good as asking him to write her a love letter."

While "Afterlives" unerringly chronicles the crimes of colonialism, Gurnah seasons his novel with a dry wit; an elderly woman, a gossip, opines, "Who would not want to leave Zanzibar? Every disease you could name was to be found in Zanzibar, including sin and disappointment," a wry, affectionate nod to his homeland.

Until now, Gurnah's career has unfolded beneath our radar, but "Afterlives" is a superb achievement and a welcome, if overdue, introduction to American readers.

A contributing books editor for Oprah Daily, Hamilton Cain reviews fiction and nonfiction for the Star Tribune, the New York Times Book Review, the Washington Post and the Boston Globe. He lives in Brooklyn.

Afterlives

By: Abdulrazak Gurnah.

Publisher: Riverhead, 320 pages, $28.