Paper short abstract:

Abdulrazak Gurnah's novels on the interdependence of the Indian Ocean World and Europe celebrate Swahili history and culture. Does it matter for the recognition of African literature that they have been written not in Swahili but in English and that only 'Paradise' has been translated into Swahili?

Paper long abstract:

Throughout his novels on the interdependence between Europe and the Indian Ocean world, Abdulrazak Gurnah has addressed questions of identity, exile and diaspora. He balances his portrayal of the Swahili world as a region at the receiving end of European colonialism and a site of emigration to Europe and mobility across the Indian Ocean with the portrayal of Great Britain and Europe as regions of immigration and aggressive colonization.

The recognition of global interconnection has not led to Gurnah writing in his mother tongue, Swahili, nor to his novels other than 'Paradise' being translated into Swahili. The author is not going to replace English with Swahili. Swahili speakers who don’t know English have been excluded from a literary celebration of their world that has won global recognition.

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I will broaden the question of ’what it means to be an Indian Ocean African’, and a ’diasporic intellectual’ to the question of African writers in the diaspora and the problematic of language. Is Gurnah’s language choice important for the recognition of African literature? I’ll touch on the practices of Ngugi wa Thiong’o and J. M. Coetzee and their ways in and out of Babel. They have published their latest tales not in English, but in Kikuyu and in Spanish. Both have explained that they have done so to destabilize the global hegemony of English. Like Gurnah, who has lived in Great Britain since his youth, they live far from their countries of birth – Coetzee in Australia, Ngugi in the US.