Theft is Abdulrazak Gurnah’s first novel since winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2021. Described as ‘one of the world’s most prominent postcolonial writers’ by the chairman of the Nobel committee, he continues to explore that theme through three young people in 1990s Zanzibar, his native country, whose lives become closely intertwined.
He would do things differently when he became a father, that was certain. He would make sure his child knew it was desired, that it was loved.
Raya’s father quickly marries her off to a much older man when she attracts the attention of an activist in Zanzibar’s violent revolution. She returns several years later, fleeing her husband’s vicious attentions, bringing her son with her. Karim is largely raised by his grandparents when his mother moves to Dar es Salaam to marry the generous and open-hearted Haji. He’s a bright child, engaging the affection of his older half-brother who fosters his ambitions and is delighted when he falls in love with Fauzia, beautiful and clever with her eyes set on becoming a teacher. When Haji and Raya take Badar into their home, ostensibly as a servant, Karim takes a slightly patronising interest in him, a little puzzled by the status of this teenager in the household, coming to his rescue when Badar is wrongfully accused of theft, offering him a home and facilitating a job in a hotel for him. Within a few years, Karim has established himself as a golden boy with a political career ahead of him, but new parenthood puts his marriage under strain. What once had seemed a loving friendship between Karim and Badar is exposed as a relationship based on obligation and patronage.
With tourism came, suddenly, thousands of strangers, mostly Europeans who did not speak Kiswahili and who went about their pleasure with frowning intensity, stretched out on sunbeds in the blazing sun, bargaining for trinkets in the gift shops or stumbling in the lanes after a tour guide as he reeled off his half-fabricated stories ahead of them.
Gurnah’s novel is written with the same delicate understatement I remember from By the Sea. Themes of family and obligation underpin the narrative with postcolonial Zanzibar providing the backdrop, now a tourist destination with its beautiful archipelago. The price of this influx is smartly portrayed, visitors’ assumed superiority open or hidden beneath a well-meaning yet superficial courtesy with little or no understanding of the effect they might have on the people they meet or how they are perceived. The web of obligation woven through extended families, often grudgingly observed, is illustrated by Badar, a decent and honourable character in counterpoint to Karim’s arrogance and inability to resist seduction. From its title onwards, Theft is a subtle, many-layered piece of fiction which offers a great deal to think about. Not easy to do it justice, and I don’t think I have, but highly recommended as a thoughtful exploration of postcolonialism made vivid by its characters.
Bloomsbury London 9781526678645 240 pages Hardback
