57 pages • 1 hour read
Abdulrazak GurnahParadise
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1994A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Authorial Context: Abdulrazak Gurnah
Abdulrazak Gurnah (1948—) was born in Tanzania in what was then called the Sultanate of Zanzibar. His father was a businessman who had immigrated from Yemen. At the time, the Arab elite ruled Zanzibar, but when that class was overthrown in the 1964 Zanzibar Revolution, Gurnah and his family fled as refugees to England. (The same uprising brought the family of Freddie Mercury, lead singer of Queen, to England, as well.)
In England, Gurnah began to write to express and reflect on his feelings of homesickness and isolation, and to process the experiences of poverty and witnessing violence and chaos that gripped his homeland. Gradually, he realized that he could refuse the narrative of colonizers and victors about the land, people, and cultures they dominated. His writing started to refute the commentators in dominant culture who “were viewing us through a frame that agreed with their view of the world, and who required a familiar narrative of racial emancipation and progress” (Abdulrazak Gurnah Nobel Prize lecture. NobelPrize.org. Nobel Prize Outreach AB 2023). Gurnah seeks to give a voice to the people and experiences overwritten by the forces of colonization and oppression by sharing “the stories people lived by and through which they understood themselves. It was necessary to write of the persecutions and cruelties which the self-congratulations of our rulers sought to wipe from our memory.” Themes of abandonment, displacement, and belonging run throughout Gurnah’s work.
Gurnah teaches English and Postcolonial Literatures at the University of Kent. In 2021, he received the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Sociohistorical Context: Zanzibar
Zanzibar is an archipelago off the coast of Tanzania in East Africa. Its history is long and diverse, with influences of the indigenous Bantu peoples, people from India, as well as traders from Iran and the Arab world, particularly Yemen. The Portuguese invaded and ruled Zanzibar and much of the East African coast from the 15th to 17th centuries until the Omanis took over. The religions practiced in the region were numerous, from Islam, Christianity, and Hinduism to indigenous tribal beliefs. The sultans flourished in the trade of spices and enslaved people.
In the 1880s, the German military moved into East Africa to suppress the locals who were revolting against the German East Africa Company and, ostensibly, to abolish slavery. However, German officials merely prevented the sale of new “recruits,” allowing enslavers to keep the people they enslaved in bondage. In 1890, Great Britain and Germany signed the Zanzibar Treaty, also known as the Helgoland-Zanzibar Treaty, which ceded Zanzibar to the British and the East African mainland to the Germans. As tensions mounted between Germany and Britain leading up to World War I, German officers would recruit soldiers from the local populace, called askari, to fight on their behalf against the British. In many cases, the number of African soldiers in the Imperial German Army was more than three times the number of German soldiers.
With Germany’s defeat in World War I, Britain took over rule of Tanzania and Zanzibar, and ultimately encouraged the organization of political parties along racial and ethnic lines. This move fomented ethnic tensions, which exploded after Zanzibar gained its independence from Britain in 1963. In the 1964 Zanzibar Revolution, thousands of residents and citizens of Arab and Indian descent were killed. Later that year, Zanzibar merged politically with Tanganyika (the mainland) to form the United Republic of Tanzania.
