Nobel laureate Abdulrazak Gurnah’s insights and narratives on Kerala and the Malabar coast are largely ignored by the Malayalee readers and critics, says Muzafer Ahamed, a Kerala Sahitya Akademi award winner and senior journalist. He was speaking at the ‘Reading and Discussion’ session organised by the Vakkom Moulavi Memorial and Research Centre (VMMRC) in association with the Institute for Global South Studies and Research (IGSSR). Muzafer said that “Gurnah’s writings and speeches, while mapping a distinctive East African coastal space interlinked with the Indian Ocean littoral through travel, trade and culture, had referred to Kerala and the Malabar coast.” But Malayalees who wrote about Gurnah even after his receipt of Nobel prize, almost disregarded his deep sense of history “connecting people and landscapes” across the Indian Ocean. Muzafer said Gurnah was perhaps the one and only Nobel laureate in literature who understood Kerala in a cosmopolitan framework. His concept of ‘connecting places’ had registered ‘Malabar’ as an important link, alongside his native home Zanzibar. He said “there are similarities in the ‘exodus experiences’ of the people in Zanzibar as well as in Kerala during colonial times. The experiences of agonies, human sufferings along the coast and on the seas were encapsulated in the writings of Gurnah, but the same experiences found no place in the Malayalam literature. Zanzibar was an important point of slave trade on the coast of Indian Ocean, and similar slave narratives we find in Kerala in the contemporary writings. Yet, the agonies seldom reflected in Malayalam literature,” Muzafer pointed out.
Prof Michel Tharakan, Chairman, Kerala Council of Historical Research, Dr. Khadeeja Mumtaz, Vice President, Kerala Sahitya Akademi, Dr. B. Ekbal, Dr Ummar Tharamel, Dr. K.M. Seethi, Dr. V. Mathew Kurian, and others participated in the discussion. Dr MV Bijulal, a faculty and Co-ordinator of the Nelson Mandela Chair in Mahatma Gandhi University chaired the session.
