Is Zanzibar the blind spot in East African literature?

How does one explain the sheer absence of Zanzibar in our imagination of East African literatures?

Most of us know this island of old histories, now part of Tanzania, for the sense of the exotic and romance promised in popular Tanzanian music of the 1970s, where marashi ya karafuu, or wafting cloves, was the iconic association with the island.

To be fair, Zanzibar has been sung about by musicians far beyond the region, including legendary South African Sipho ‘Hotstix’ Mabuse, whose Soweto and Afrodizzia made my generation’s youthful years what they were.

So how can many of us in Kenya know Zanzibar in these terms and not in its novels? Is it because we tend to see things in their wholeness — Tanzania — rather than their constituent parts — Tanganyika and Zanzibar?

True, Julius Nyerere’s 1967 Arusha Declaration yoked the two parts together to form what remains Tanzania today, but shouldn’t we still pay a glance at the island and what literature it yields? Or is it a question of inheriting a reading tradition from generations that looked at "the bigger picture"?

For me, Zanzibar and its literature in the wider Kenyan literary curriculum remains an area of darkness largely because of the pan-Africanist logic that informed virtually all aspects of life immediately after independence, if we recall that Nyerere’s Ujamaa, Jomo Kenyatta’s Kenyanisation and Milton Obote’s Common Man’s Charter had embedded within them mild forms of racial segregation against non-black East Africans.

FORMS OF EXCLUSION

Of course, all these initiatives fronted class as the operational index. But if we consider that most of the "poor" and the "rich" who were targeted were blacks and non-blacks respectively, then we see the vulnerabilities that Arabs and Asians were exposed to.

The 1960s was an era touted as that of nation-formation, where certain forms of violence and exclusion were "acceptable" to right the wrongs of colonialism and other forms of African oppression.

As if taking the cue from their political counterparts to assume the Africanist position, intellectual leaders of the time set in motion a certain trend in scholarship where literatures other than those of black Africans were given a wide berth, or only studied to double-check ‘the image of Africans’, and dismiss such for the colonial hang-ups such works supposedly contained.

In Kenyan literary scholarship at least, I have found little evidence that there was concern with the racial violence in Zanzibar, and the narratives that the violence generated by way of literature.

Yet, Zanzibari literature continues to thrive, documenting various aspects of the island’s histories and cultures that tend to be subsumed under the wider Tanzanian strands.

To say nothing of the oral poetry and drama for which scholars elsewhere know Zanzibar, there is Abdulrazak Gurnah, easily the leading novelist from Zanzibar, who grapples with issues of belonging, loss, domination and the meaning of human dignity within the traditional story-telling mode that makes his novels sheer joy to read.

FORMS OF DOMINATION

Widely known for Paradise, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in Literature in 1994, Gurnah employs narration to confront the uncomfortable pasts of slavery, colonial and post-colonial forms of domination, while showing compassion for the human spirit in all these.

Importantly, he employs self-reflexive irony to show the unreliability of narratives generally, or their incompleteness.

Perhaps this is due to the fact that Gurnah is also a seasoned critic, whose many years of teaching literature at the University of Kent have surely made him always aware of the perils of single narratives.

He also knows the unpredictability of human behaviour, or the unknowability of the human being, which allows for sometimes paradoxical, and other contradictory action.

This is what we see at the end of Paradise, where the protagonist, Yusuf, deserts one slave master only to join another.

If by creating Yusuf and making him behave this way Gurnah is suggesting possibilities of different affiliations made possible in a multicultural and multilingual world, he also signals towards the theme of hybridity that has dominated social interactions across what is currently understood as the Indian Ocean World, extensively theorised by post-colonial critics worldwide.

CULTURAL BOUNDARIES

In this sense, any claims to purity are rendered nonsensical by going back to histories of sometimes willing but mainly coerced racial, cultural and linguistic interactions through place and history, which brought forth different peoples with different values. Subtly thus, Gurnah disabuses us of the notion that some people are different from others.

It is an idea that Gurnah brings out in Desertion, which revisits colonial histories in East Africa and how they allowed for transgression of racial and cultural boundaries involving Europeans and Africans, Europeans and Arabs, all of which demonstrated above all else the fact of our shared humanity.

In all these, there is the ever present concern with different forms and scales of violence that Arabs have suffered in post-independence times, and which remains somewhat elided out of dominant readings of the region and its literatures.

This violence, and what it does to the victims, is the concern in two of Gurnah’s earlier and most read novels, By the Sea and Admiring Silence, which respectively hint at the vulnerability of people who inhabit marginal spaces and those on whom circumstances have imposed silence as their only way of avoiding further persecution.

PRIDE AND HONOUR
Asking profound questions about the meaning of human life in threatening circumstances, Gurnah invites readers to wrestle with such issues as what one does to restore their dignity when it is violated by systemic designs, and what can notions of pride or honour really mean to a people who are degraded every day by systems and cultures that exile them from the dominant moral spaces.

Ultimately, Gurnah in his corpus, suggests an empathetic approach that places the aggrieved groups somewhere between victimhood and aggression, between moral degeneracy and moral Puritanism, where individuals may be judged but not condemned.

Possibly, this is a way through which Gurnah pushes us to acknowledge our own role in the past whose consequences we are now called upon to bear.

These are issues that he progressively deals with in other works, including Memory of Departure – which also foregrounds the highly charged idea of same-sex desire – Pilgrim’s Way and The Last Gift.

While all these have not been taught and read in Kenya as much, they are the subject of a 2013 special issue of English Studies in Africa that was guest edited by Tina Steiner and Maria Olaussen.

Dr Siundu is a Senior Lecturer of Literature at the University of Nairobi, and a Research Associate in the Department of English, Stellenbosch University. [email protected]