Gurnah

Relics

“It is difficult to know with precision how things became as they have, to be able to say with some assurance that first it was this and then it led to that and the other, and now here we are. The moments slip through my fingers. Even as I recount them to myself, I can hear echoes of what I am suppressing, of something I’ve forgotten to remember, which then makes the telling so difficult when I don’t wish it to be. But it is possible to say something, and I have an urge to give this account, to give an accounting of the minor dramas I have witnessed and played a part in, and whose endings and beginnings stretch away from me. I don’t think it’s a noble urge. What I mean is, I don’t know a great truth which I ache to impart, nor have I lived an exemplary experience which will illuminate our conditions and our times. Though I have lived, I have lived. It is so different here that it seems as if one life has ended and I am now living another one. So perhaps I should say of myself that once I lived another life elsewhere, but now it is over. Yet I know that the earlier one teems and pulses in rude good health behind me and before me. I have time on my hands. I am in the hands of time, so I might as well account for myself. Sooner or later we have to attend to that.

New maps were made, complete maps, so that every inch was accounted for, and everyone now knew who they were, or at least who they belonged to. Those maps, how they transformed everything. And so it came to pass that in time those scattered little towns by the sea along the African coast found themselves part of huge territories stretching for hundreds of miles into the interior, teeming with people they had thought beneath them, and who when the time came promptly returned the favour.

Perhaps admired is too uncomplicated a way of describing what I think we felt, for it was closer to conceding to their command over our material lives, conceding in the mind as well as in the concrete, succumbing to their blazing self-assurance. In their books I read unflattering accounts of my history, and because they were unflattering they seemed truer than the stories we told ourselves. I read about the diseases that tormented us, about the future that lay before us, about the world we lived in and our place in it. It was as if they had remade us, and in ways that we no longer had any recourse but to accept, so complete and well-fitting was the story they told about us. I don’t suppose the story was told cynically, because I think they believed it too. It was how they understood us and how they understood themselves, and there was little in the overwhelming reality we lived in that allowed us to argue, not while the story had novelty and went unchallenged. The stories we knew about ourselves before they took charge of us seemed medieval and fanciful, sacred and secret myths that were liturgical metaphors and rites of adherence, a different category of knowledge which, despite our assertive observance, could not contest with theirs. So that is how it seems when I think back to the way I was as a child, with no recourse to irony or knowledge of the multitudinous world.

They even went to Bangkok, where Reza had lived for some months as a teenager, living with his father’s agent there in the days before their affair went bad. It was a calm beautiful port town then, with canals and riverside boulevards, not the teeming behemoth it became later. People from all over the world congregated there: Chinese, Indians, Arabs, Europeans. To Hussein it was an incredible journey, an unbelievable journey, and images of that time have stayed with him all his life. And even though he only told them to me as stories, they’ve stayed with me too ever since. To this day I imagine a walk he’d described across the courtyard of a temple on the royal island, I imagine the austere tranquillity he described, and the overwhelming authority of the temple dome. I have seen a photograph of the temple since coming here, but it revealed nothing of the beauty Hussein described.

I speak to maps. And sometimes they say something back to me. This is not as strange as it sounds, nor is it an unheard of thing. Before maps the world was limitless. It was maps that gave it shape and made it seem like territory, like something that could be possessed, not just laid waste and plundered. Maps made places on the edges of the imagination seem graspable and placable. And later when it became necessary, geography became biology in order to construct a hierarchy in which to place the people who lived in their inaccessibility and primitiveness in other places on the map.

Latif

“I looked it up in my Concise Oxford Dictionary as soon as I got in my office, and got very little for it: Negro, black + moor. You can do better than that. So I looked up black, and quailed: blackhearted, blackbrowed, blacklist, blackguard, blackmail, Black Maria, black market, black sheep. Entry after entry like that, so by the time I finished reading through them all I felt despicable and disheartened, smeared by the torrent of vituperation. Of course, I knew about the construction of black as other, as wicked, as beast, as some evil dark place in the innermost being of even the most skinless civilised European, but I had not expected to see so much black black black on a page like that. Stumbling on it so unprepared was a bigger shock than being called you gwinning blackamoor by a man who looked like a disgruntled, dated movie persona. It made me feel hated, suddenly weak with a kind of terror at such associations. This is the house I live in, I thought, a language which barks and scorns at me behind every third corner.

I abhor poems. I read them and teach them and abhor them. I even write some. I teach them to students (of course not my own buts of offal, for God’s sake) and squeeze what I can out of them, make them laconic where they are verbose and posturing, wise and prophetic where they are clumsily speculative. They say nothing so elaborately, they reveal nothing, they lead to nothing. Worse than wall-paper or a notice outside the departmental secretary’s office. Give me a lucid bit of prose any day.

Silences

“Though even after all the fading and furring, so many lines still remain, now seeming like even sparser fragments of the whole: a warm look in the eye when the face is lost, a smell that recalls a music whose melody is out of range, the memory of a room when the house or its location is forgotten, a field of pasture by the side of the road in the middle of a void. So time dismembers the images of our time. Or to put it in an archaeological way, it is as if the details of our lives have accumulated in layers, and now some layers have been displaced by the friction of other events, and bits of contingent pieces still remain, accidentally tumbled about.

Then we went to Bukoba, to stay with Jamal Hussein’s family. We took a lake ferry from Entebbe for the crossing, and I remember it rained all the way, forcing down the endless papyrus on the shores and turning the lake surface into dark quicksilver. Lightning sheeted across the low-hanging sky and the wind howled like a creature terrified. That was the only time I made the crossing, and it saddens me that all I saw was this gothic extravaganza, not to mention the rising panic of all the passengers as the ship staggered about in that downfall.

We spent the night in Mombasa with one of Sefu’s relatives and then took a bus to Malindi the following morning. Being back on the coast was like being at home, or more than that, like recognising that here I had a place in the scheme of things. So much of what I had learned in Kampala was crushing, glimpses of the extent of my ignorance, and the self-assured puniness we lived with. Back on the coast, I felt part of something generous and noble after all, a way of living that had a part for me and which I had been too hasty in seeing as futile raggedness.

On the moonless nights of those few days, the commanding officer was barely visible on his side of the veranda, just a slight thickening of the night where he sat, and a glowing eye of rage when he smoked.

The Walled Garden

“The darkness outside was a measureless void, and he feared that the train was too deep in it to be able to return safely. He tried to concentrate on the noise of the wheels, but their rhythm was eccentric and only served to distract him and keep him awake.

Whenever Yusuf rolled too close, Kahlil kicked him away savagely. Mosquitoes wheeled around them, shrieking for blood with high-pitched wails. If the sheets slipped from their bodies the mosquitoes instantly gathered to their sinful feast. Yusuf dreamt he could see their jagged-edged sabres sawing through his flesh.

Kahlil told him, ‘You’re here because your Ba owes the seyyid money. I’m here because my Ba owes him money - only he’s dead now, God’s mercy on his soul.

She seemed very old to Yusuf, cumbersome, bulky, and with a look of suffering when her face was unguarded. Her body shivered and straightened with an involuntary charge when she caught sight of him, and a small cry escaped her. If Yusuf had not seen her, she stalked him until he was near enough to squeeze him into her arms. Then, while he struggled and kicked she ululated with triumph and joy. On occasions when she could not sneak up on him, she approached him with ecstatic cries, calling him my husband, my master.

Several months after Yusuf’s arrival - he had taught himself to lose count, and his perverse success made him understand that days could be as long as weeks if there was no desire for them - preparations were being made for a journey to the interior. Uncle Aziz spoke to Kahlil for long periods in the evening, sitting on the bench in front of the shop which the old men occupied during the day. A lamp burned brightly between them, flattening their faces into masks of frankness.

His hard-bitten air was a grotesque parody, making everyone laugh, for he was shrunken and unwell, dressed in rags, and was often beaten in the streets by other boys. No one knew where he slept for he had no home. Kahlil called him kifa urongo too. ‘Another one. The original,’ he said.

Every morning, the old gardener Hamdani came to attend to the secret trees and bushes, and clean the pool and water channels. He never spoke to anyone and went unsmiling about his work, humming verses and qasidas.

The Mountain Town

“Every morning he began work without greeting anyone, filled his buckets and scooped the water out with his hand as he walked along the paths, as if nothing else existed apart from this garden and this work.

In the daylight he looked out of the window, searching the countryside and noting its changes. On their right distant hills were rising again, looking lush and dark. The air above the hills was thick and opaque, secreting a promise. On the parched plain through which the train was labouring, the light was clear. As the sun rose the air became gritty with dust. The scorched and dry plain was still covered with patches of dead grass which the rains would transform into lush savannahs. Clumps of gnarled thorn trees dotted the plain, which was darkened by scattered outcrops of black rock. Waves of heat and vapour rose from the burning earth, filling Yusuf’s mouth and making him heave fire breath. At one station, where they stopped for a long time, a solitary jacaranda tree was in bloom. Mauve and purple petals lay on the ground like an iridescent rug. Beside the tree was a two-roomed railway store. On its doors hung enormous rusty padlocks and its whitewashed walls were spattered with laterite mud.

Later, when the night was deep into the small hours, their conversation became softer and more gloomy, punctuated by longer and more frequent yawns.

‘I fear for the times ahead of us,’ Hussein said quietly, making Hamid sigh wearily. ‘Everything is in turmoil. There Europeans are very determined, and as they fight over the prosperity of the earth they will crush all of us. You’d be a fool to think they’re here to do anything that is good. It isn’t trade they’re after, but the land itself. And everything in it… us.

One day they’ll make them spit on all that we know, and will make them recite their laws and their story of the world as if it were the holy word. When they come to write about us, what will they say? That we made slaves.

The Journey to the Interior

“Kalasinga explained to him the mysteries of the engine, and Yusuf grasped something of this but was happier watching him magically coax the tangle of pipes and bolts into life. He heard about India, where Kalasinga had not been for many years, and South Africa, where he had lived as a child. It’s a madhouse in South. All kinds of cruel fantasies have come true there. Let me tell you something about those Afrikander bastards, though. They’re crazy. I don’t just mean wild and cruel, I mean round the loop. Hot sun has turned their Dutch brain to soup.

The scattered scrub took formidably gnarled and twisted forms, as if existence was a torture.

The Gates of Flame

“After a few days they knew they were close to the lake. The light ahead of them looked thicker, softer with the burden of water below. The thought of the lake made everyone happier.

They kept the canoes in close formation, close enough to throw snatches of song as each other and laugh at the replies. The travellers sat silently for the most part, troubled by the immensity of the water and the strong men in whose hands their lives lay. Most of them were not swimmers, even though their homes were by the sea. Their feet would cross a lifetime of mountains and plains but still retreat hurriedly from the hissing times which washed their shores.

A Clot of Blood

“Their intrigues and hatreds and vengeful acquisitiveness had forced even simple virtues into tokens of exchange and barter. He would go away, there was nothing simpler. Somewhere where he could escape the oppressive claims everything made on him. But he knew that a hard lump of loneliness had long ago formed in his displaced heart, that wherever he went it would be with him, to diminish and disperse any plot he could hatch for small fulfilment.

Relics minutaea

“It is difficult to know with precision how things became as they have, to be able to say with some assurance that first it was this and then it led to that and the other, and now here we are. The moments slip through my fingers. Even as I recount them to myself, I can hear echoes of what I am suppressing, of something I’ve forgotten to remember, which then makes the telling so difficult when I don’t wish it to be. But it is possible to say something, and I have an urge to give this account, to give an accounting of the minor dramas I have witnessed and played a part in, and whose endings and beginnings stretch away from me. I don’t think it’s a noble urge. What I mean is, I don’t know a great truth which I ache to impart, nor have I lived an exemplary experience which will illuminate our conditions and our times. Though I have lived, I have lived. It is so different here that it seems as if one life has ended and I am now living another one. So perhaps I should say of myself that once I lived another life elsewhere, but now it is over. Yet I know that the earlier one teems and pulses in rude good health behind me and before me. I have time on my hands. I am in the hands of time, so I might as well account for myself. Sooner or later we have to attend to that.

New maps were made, complete maps, so that every inch was accounted for, and everyone now knew who they were, or at least who they belonged to. Those maps, how they transformed everything. And so it came to pass that in time those scattered little towns by the sea along the African coast found themselves part of huge territories stretching for hundreds of miles into the interior, teeming with people they had thought beneath them, and who when the time came promptly returned the favour.

Perhaps admired is too uncomplicated a way of describing what I think we felt, for it was closer to conceding to their command over our material lives, conceding in the mind as well as in the concrete, succumbing to their blazing self-assurance. In their books I read unflattering accounts of my history, and because they were unflattering they seemed truer than the stories we told ourselves. I read about the diseases that tormented us, about the future that lay before us, about the world we lived in and our place in it. It was as if they had remade us, and in ways that we no longer had any recourse but to accept, so complete and well-fitting was the story they told about us. I don’t suppose the story was told cynically, because I think they believed it too. It was how they understood us and how they understood themselves, and there was little in the overwhelming reality we lived in that allowed us to argue, not while the story had novelty and went unchallenged. The stories we knew about ourselves before they took charge of us seemed medieval and fanciful, sacred and secret myths that were liturgical metaphors and rites of adherence, a different category of knowledge which, despite our assertive observance, could not contest with theirs. So that is how it seems when I think back to the way I was as a child, with no recourse to irony or knowledge of the multitudinous world.

They even went to Bangkok, where Reza had lived for some months as a teenager, living with his father’s agent there in the days before their affair went bad. It was a calm beautiful port town then, with canals and riverside boulevards, not the teeming behemoth it became later. People from all over the world congregated there: Chinese, Indians, Arabs, Europeans. To Hussein it was an incredible journey, an unbelievable journey, and images of that time have stayed with him all his life. And even though he only told them to me as stories, they’ve stayed with me too ever since. To this day I imagine a walk he’d described across the courtyard of a temple on the royal island, I imagine the austere tranquillity he described, and the overwhelming authority of the temple dome. I have seen a photograph of the temple since coming here, but it revealed nothing of the beauty Hussein described.

I speak to maps. And sometimes they say something back to me. This is not as strange as it sounds, nor is it an unheard of thing. Before maps the world was limitless. It was maps that gave it shape and made it seem like territory, like something that could be possessed, not just laid waste and plundered. Maps made places on the edges of the imagination seem graspable and placable. And later when it became necessary, geography became biology in order to construct a hierarchy in which to place the people who lived in their inaccessibility and primitiveness in other places on the map.

Latif

“I looked it up in my Concise Oxford Dictionary as soon as I got in my office, and got very little for it: Negro, black + moor. You can do better than that. So I looked up black, and quailed: blackhearted, blackbrowed, blacklist, blackguard, blackmail, Black Maria, black market, black sheep. Entry after entry like that, so by the time I finished reading through them all I felt despicable and disheartened, smeared by the torrent of vituperation. Of course, I knew about the construction of black as other, as wicked, as beast, as some evil dark place in the innermost being of even the most skinless civilised European, but I had not expected to see so much black black black on a page like that. Stumbling on it so unprepared was a bigger shock than being called you gwinning blackamoor by a man who looked like a disgruntled, dated movie persona. It made me feel hated, suddenly weak with a kind of terror at such associations. This is the house I live in, I thought, a language which barks and scorns at me behind every third corner.

I abhor poems. I read them and teach them and abhor them. I even write some. I teach them to students (of course not my own buts of offal, for God’s sake) and squeeze what I can out of them, make them laconic where they are verbose and posturing, wise and prophetic where they are clumsily speculative. They say nothing so elaborately, they reveal nothing, they lead to nothing. Worse than wall-paper or a notice outside the departmental secretary’s office. Give me a lucid bit of prose any day.

Silences

“Though even after all the fading and furring, so many lines still remain, now seeming like even sparser fragments of the whole: a warm look in the eye when the face is lost, a smell that recalls a music whose melody is out of range, the memory of a room when the house or its location is forgotten, a field of pasture by the side of the road in the middle of a void. So time dismembers the images of our time. Or to put it in an archaeological way, it is as if the details of our lives have accumulated in layers, and now some layers have been displaced by the friction of other events, and bits of contingent pieces still remain, accidentally tumbled about.

Then we went to Bukoba, to stay with Jamal Hussein’s family. We took a lake ferry from Entebbe for the crossing, and I remember it rained all the way, forcing down the endless papyrus on the shores and turning the lake surface into dark quicksilver. Lightning sheeted across the low-hanging sky and the wind howled like a creature terrified. That was the only time I made the crossing, and it saddens me that all I saw was this gothic extravaganza, not to mention the rising panic of all the passengers as the ship staggered about in that downfall.

We spent the night in Mombasa with one of Sefu’s relatives and then took a bus to Malindi the following morning. Being back on the coast was like being at home, or more than that, like recognising that here I had a place in the scheme of things. So much of what I had learned in Kampala was crushing, glimpses of the extent of my ignorance, and the self-assured puniness we lived with. Back on the coast, I felt part of something generous and noble after all, a way of living that had a part for me and which I had been too hasty in seeing as futile raggedness.

On the moonless nights of those few days, the commanding officer was barely visible on his side of the veranda, just a slight thickening of the night where he sat, and a glowing eye of rage when he smoked.

The Walled Garden

“The darkness outside was a measureless void, and he feared that the train was too deep in it to be able to return safely. He tried to concentrate on the noise of the wheels, but their rhythm was eccentric and only served to distract him and keep him awake.

Whenever Yusuf rolled too close, Kahlil kicked him away savagely. Mosquitoes wheeled around them, shrieking for blood with high-pitched wails. If the sheets slipped from their bodies the mosquitoes instantly gathered to their sinful feast. Yusuf dreamt he could see their jagged-edged sabres sawing through his flesh.

Kahlil told him, ‘You’re here because your Ba owes the seyyid money. I’m here because my Ba owes him money - only he’s dead now, God’s mercy on his soul.

She seemed very old to Yusuf, cumbersome, bulky, and with a look of suffering when her face was unguarded. Her body shivered and straightened with an involuntary charge when she caught sight of him, and a small cry escaped her. If Yusuf had not seen her, she stalked him until he was near enough to squeeze him into her arms. Then, while he struggled and kicked she ululated with triumph and joy. On occasions when she could not sneak up on him, she approached him with ecstatic cries, calling him my husband, my master.

Several months after Yusuf’s arrival - he had taught himself to lose count, and his perverse success made him understand that days could be as long as weeks if there was no desire for them - preparations were being made for a journey to the interior. Uncle Aziz spoke to Kahlil for long periods in the evening, sitting on the bench in front of the shop which the old men occupied during the day. A lamp burned brightly between them, flattening their faces into masks of frankness.

His hard-bitten air was a grotesque parody, making everyone laugh, for he was shrunken and unwell, dressed in rags, and was often beaten in the streets by other boys. No one knew where he slept for he had no home. Kahlil called him kifa urongo too. ‘Another one. The original,’ he said.

Every morning, the old gardener Hamdani came to attend to the secret trees and bushes, and clean the pool and water channels. He never spoke to anyone and went unsmiling about his work, humming verses and qasidas.

The Mountain Town

“Every morning he began work without greeting anyone, filled his buckets and scooped the water out with his hand as he walked along the paths, as if nothing else existed apart from this garden and this work.

In the daylight he looked out of the window, searching the countryside and noting its changes. On their right distant hills were rising again, looking lush and dark. The air above the hills was thick and opaque, secreting a promise. On the parched plain through which the train was labouring, the light was clear. As the sun rose the air became gritty with dust. The scorched and dry plain was still covered with patches of dead grass which the rains would transform into lush savannahs. Clumps of gnarled thorn trees dotted the plain, which was darkened by scattered outcrops of black rock. Waves of heat and vapour rose from the burning earth, filling Yusuf’s mouth and making him heave fire breath. At one station, where they stopped for a long time, a solitary jacaranda tree was in bloom. Mauve and purple petals lay on the ground like an iridescent rug. Beside the tree was a two-roomed railway store. On its doors hung enormous rusty padlocks and its whitewashed walls were spattered with laterite mud.

Later, when the night was deep into the small hours, their conversation became softer and more gloomy, punctuated by longer and more frequent yawns.

‘I fear for the times ahead of us,’ Hussein said quietly, making Hamid sigh wearily. ‘Everything is in turmoil. There Europeans are very determined, and as they fight over the prosperity of the earth they will crush all of us. You’d be a fool to think they’re here to do anything that is good. It isn’t trade they’re after, but the land itself. And everything in it… us.

One day they’ll make them spit on all that we know, and will make them recite their laws and their story of the world as if it were the holy word. When they come to write about us, what will they say? That we made slaves.

The Journey to the Interior

“Kalasinga explained to him the mysteries of the engine, and Yusuf grasped something of this but was happier watching him magically coax the tangle of pipes and bolts into life. He heard about India, where Kalasinga had not been for many years, and South Africa, where he had lived as a child. It’s a madhouse in South. All kinds of cruel fantasies have come true there. Let me tell you something about those Afrikander bastards, though. They’re crazy. I don’t just mean wild and cruel, I mean round the loop. Hot sun has turned their Dutch brain to soup.

The scattered scrub took formidably gnarled and twisted forms, as if existence was a torture.

The Gates of Flame

“After a few days they knew they were close to the lake. The light ahead of them looked thicker, softer with the burden of water below. The thought of the lake made everyone happier.

They kept the canoes in close formation, close enough to throw snatches of song as each other and laugh at the replies. The travellers sat silently for the most part, troubled by the immensity of the water and the strong men in whose hands their lives lay. Most of them were not swimmers, even though their homes were by the sea. Their feet would cross a lifetime of mountains and plains but still retreat hurriedly from the hissing times which washed their shores.

A Clot of Blood

“Their intrigues and hatreds and vengeful acquisitiveness had forced even simple virtues into tokens of exchange and barter. He would go away, there was nothing simpler. Somewhere where he could escape the oppressive claims everything made on him. But he knew that a hard lump of loneliness had long ago formed in his displaced heart, that wherever he went it would be with him, to diminish and disperse any plot he could hatch for small fulfilment.