what is Tanzanian literature?
The answer to this question gained an unexpected importance in 2021, when Abdulrazak Gurnah was distinguished with a Nobel prize in literature. Till that moment the topic was largely neglected; Tanzanian literature did not seem to gain the same visibility as, just to give an example, the Kenyan one. Apparently, it was just a typical postcolonial literature, a fine varnish covering centuries of African orality. Nonetheless, the oral literature in Swahili is not to be neglected, and Swahili is not just a tribal language. On the contrary, it is one of those languages with a larger horizon, spoken along trade routes, gathering human experience and wisdom that is more than local. No wonder that already on the brink of colonial/decolonial/postcolonial expression we find books written in Swahili, namely those of Shaaban Robert (1909-1962), such as Maisha yangu (My life). There have even been detective stories in Swahili, namely those of Muhammed Said Abdulla (1918-1991). On the other hand, Swahili served as a "qabila language" (I tried to create such a concept in one of my Polish essays), i.e. served as an intermediary form of expression, a step between strictly local expression in a tribal tongue and the global English. An example of this function was the Swahili translation of an early novel written by Aniceti Kitereza in his native tongue Kikerewe and published as Bwana Myombekere na Bibi Bugonoka, Ntulanalwo na Bulihwali (Mr. Myombekere and His Wife Bugonoka, Their Son Ntulanalwo and Daughter Bulihwali) in 1981. Nonetheless, the fact that a major part of Tanzanian literature is written in Swahili played against its global visibility, while local readership was still deficient. This is why an important factor in this literary development are Taarab songs; important developments of poetic diction has been made in the lyrics adopted by this popular musical genre.
No wonder that it was rather the line of Tanzanian writing in English that finally obtained international attention, i.e. the Nobel for Abdurazak Gurnah. It is a tradition that develops since the 1960s, when Peter Palangyo published his pioneering novel Dying in the Sun (1968).
No wonder that it was rather the line of Tanzanian writing in English that finally obtained international attention, i.e. the Nobel for Abdurazak Gurnah. It is a tradition that develops since the 1960s, when Peter Palangyo published his pioneering novel Dying in the Sun (1968).
I have readAbdurazak Gurnah, Desertion (2005), Afterlives (2020)
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I have written... nothing ...
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"at dawn, like a figure out of myth"
Many years ago, my husband talked to me of that hour before dawn, about the way to his local mosque in the darkness. When God seems to be close, and the terror of God, and of things immaterial, is also close. Precisely the hour when Gurnah's narration starts. It is on his way to the mosque that Hassanali finds the stranger, and the story of encounter begins.
Gurnah tells it personage by personage, encapsulated in the biography of each of them, with a separate origin and separate reason behind each thing. The colonized and their colonizers, but the colonial affair is only a curtain in the background, with a painted world on it. The real thing are those biographies of each of them, which may seem modest and typical, but they are nonetheless separate, out of the pattern, without repetition, alienating. Everyone carries his or her own desertion.
Abdulrazak Gurnah, Desertion, London: Bloomsbury, 2005.
Lisbon, March 15th, 2022.
Gurnah tells it personage by personage, encapsulated in the biography of each of them, with a separate origin and separate reason behind each thing. The colonized and their colonizers, but the colonial affair is only a curtain in the background, with a painted world on it. The real thing are those biographies of each of them, which may seem modest and typical, but they are nonetheless separate, out of the pattern, without repetition, alienating. Everyone carries his or her own desertion.
Abdulrazak Gurnah, Desertion, London: Bloomsbury, 2005.
Lisbon, March 15th, 2022.
following a Malay intellectual Farish Noor
into his Tanzanian adventure
[...] Leaving behind his “artsy post-modern university”, he enters the world of Ustaz Mwalongo, a product of traditional religious education, who receives him with a smile “so sweet that his chubby cheeks make [him] think of hot chocolate laced with cinnamon” (Noor 2009: 25) before passing to a session of Qur'anic exegesis. But the worse is to come on the morrow, as nothing could possibly have prepared the itinerant scholar for the discussion with young Tanzanian imam who complains that the Christian missionaries surreptitiously produce and sell mats for the mosques, covering them with tiny crosses: “I look at the prayer mats closely, and you know what I see? I see crosses everywhere. Here, there, crosses and crosses everywhere. This is what they want, so that when we pray our heads will touch their crosses!”, claims with bitterness the angry imam (Noor 2009: 26).
According to the Saidian definition of the intellectual's function, the crucial duty consists in bringing the marginalized voices into the sphere of the dominating discourse, making them audible in the name of higher ethical values. The intellectual is “an individual endowed with a faculty for representing, embodying, articulating a message, a view, an attitude, philosophy or opinion to, as well as for, a public” (Said 1994: 9). This is a clear, apparently handy definition. But what to do if the voice of the other sounds to the intellectual's ear as nothing more than mumbling? Where is the message, the philosophy, the opinion in the gibberish of the angry imam?
Nonetheless, the Tanzanian imam and his problems undoubtedly belong to the Saidian category of “people and issues that are routinely forgotten or swept under the rug” (Said 1994: 9). His anger, expressed by a mere torrent of nonsense, probably has its own logic and reasons. His fear concerning the crosses on the prayer mat reflects in a distorted and paranoiac way quite well founded anxieties of neo-colonial exploitation of a country transformed into a tourist paradise, offering no resistance to external influence and affluence. But Noor hardly tries to explain all this to the external public, concentrated rather on reporting quite crudely the drivel of his interlocutors.
Paradoxically, this experience of listening to the angry mumbling becomes perhaps one of the crucial steps in the spiritual quest of the itinerant scholar. One of the organic intellectual's illusions might be rooted in the ancient mistake of Averroes, who believed in the existence of a universal intellect that forms a common platform, enabling humans to discuss with arguments beyond the difference of cultural or religious backgrounds. Universality of reason should make it possible to argue, to mediate and to convince. But the Tanzanian adventure makes the itinerant scholar rather sceptical about the possibility of appealing to such a sphere of rationality. As he supposes that the Christians must think as well “that there are crescents surreptitiously smuggled into their Bibles” (Noor 2009: 27), a universalism of irrationality seems to be closer at hand. [...]
Fragments of my essay on Noor's travelogues Qur'an and cricket. Travels through the madrasahs of Asia and other stories, Kuala Lumpur: Silverfish Books, 2009.
“Travelling away from the 'artsy post-modern lefty-pinko university'. Noor's transcultural experience and the duties of the intellectual”, Colloquia Humanistica, no 3/2014, p. 91-102.
According to the Saidian definition of the intellectual's function, the crucial duty consists in bringing the marginalized voices into the sphere of the dominating discourse, making them audible in the name of higher ethical values. The intellectual is “an individual endowed with a faculty for representing, embodying, articulating a message, a view, an attitude, philosophy or opinion to, as well as for, a public” (Said 1994: 9). This is a clear, apparently handy definition. But what to do if the voice of the other sounds to the intellectual's ear as nothing more than mumbling? Where is the message, the philosophy, the opinion in the gibberish of the angry imam?
Nonetheless, the Tanzanian imam and his problems undoubtedly belong to the Saidian category of “people and issues that are routinely forgotten or swept under the rug” (Said 1994: 9). His anger, expressed by a mere torrent of nonsense, probably has its own logic and reasons. His fear concerning the crosses on the prayer mat reflects in a distorted and paranoiac way quite well founded anxieties of neo-colonial exploitation of a country transformed into a tourist paradise, offering no resistance to external influence and affluence. But Noor hardly tries to explain all this to the external public, concentrated rather on reporting quite crudely the drivel of his interlocutors.
Paradoxically, this experience of listening to the angry mumbling becomes perhaps one of the crucial steps in the spiritual quest of the itinerant scholar. One of the organic intellectual's illusions might be rooted in the ancient mistake of Averroes, who believed in the existence of a universal intellect that forms a common platform, enabling humans to discuss with arguments beyond the difference of cultural or religious backgrounds. Universality of reason should make it possible to argue, to mediate and to convince. But the Tanzanian adventure makes the itinerant scholar rather sceptical about the possibility of appealing to such a sphere of rationality. As he supposes that the Christians must think as well “that there are crescents surreptitiously smuggled into their Bibles” (Noor 2009: 27), a universalism of irrationality seems to be closer at hand. [...]
Fragments of my essay on Noor's travelogues Qur'an and cricket. Travels through the madrasahs of Asia and other stories, Kuala Lumpur: Silverfish Books, 2009.
“Travelling away from the 'artsy post-modern lefty-pinko university'. Noor's transcultural experience and the duties of the intellectual”, Colloquia Humanistica, no 3/2014, p. 91-102.
