Tanzanian novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah has said he was « surprised and humbled » to be awarded the 2021 Nobel Prize for Literature.

BREAKING NEWS:
The 2021 #NobelPrize in Literature is awarded to the novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah “for his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents.” pic.twitter.com/zw2LBQSJ4j

— The Nobel Prize (@NobelPrize) October 7, 2021

The Swedish Academy praised Gurnah for his « uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism ».

The prize is awarded by the Swedish Academy and is worth 10 million Swedish crowns ($1.14m / £840,000).

Gurnah, 73, is the author of 10 novels, including Paradise and Desertion.

He said how grateful he was to the academy, adding: « It’s just great – its just a big prize, and such a huge list of wonderful writers – I am still taking it in.

« It was such a complete surprise that I really had to wait until I heard it announced before I could believe it. »

"The 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature is awarded to … "

See the very moment the world discovered who had been awarded this year's literature prize.

Watch the full announcement: https://t.co/m84ucblWAR pic.twitter.com/tUcT8nNQGg

— The Nobel Prize (@NobelPrize) October 7, 2021

‘Dedication to truth’

Paradise, published in 1994, told the story of a boy growing up in Tanzania in the early 20th Century and was nominated for the Booker Prize, marking his breakthrough as a novelist.

“The story is about growing up with a sense that there are things hidden from you.”

2021 literature laureate Abdulrazak Gurnah speaks about his novel 'Gravel Heart', and reads us an extract.

Take a look:https://t.co/B3Un7Gb6SG#NobelPrize

— The Nobel Prize (@NobelPrize) October 7, 2021

« Abdulrazak Gurnah’s dedication to truth and his aversion to simplification are striking, » the Nobel Committee for Literature said in a statement.

« His novels recoil from stereotypical descriptions and open our gaze to a culturally diversified East Africa unfamiliar to many in other parts of the world. »

« [His] characters find themselves in a hiatus between cultures and continents, between a life that was and a life emerging; it is an insecure state that can never be resolved. »

Born in Zanzibar in 1948, Gurnah arrived in England as a refugee in the late 1960s.

He was Professor of English and Postcolonial Literatures at the University of Kent, Canterbury, until his recent retirement.

Gurnah is the first black African author to have won the award since Wole Soyinka in 1986.

He said his award would mean issues such as the refugee crisis and colonialism, which he has experienced, will be « discussed ».

« These are things that are with us every day. People are dying, people are being hurt around the world – we must deal with these issues in the most kind way, » he said.

‘Much more violent’

« I came to England when these words, such as asylum-seeker, were not quite the same – more people are struggling and running from terror states.

« The world is much more violent than it was in the 1960s, so there is now greater pressure on the countries that are safe, they inevitably draw more people. »

In an interview in 2016, when asked if he would call himself an « author of postcolonial and/or world literature », Gurnah replied: « I would not use any of those words. I wouldn’t call myself a something writer of any kind.

« In fact, I am not sure that I would call myself anything apart from my name. I guess, if somebody challenges me, that would be another way of saying, ‘Are you a… one of these…?’ I would probably say ‘no’. Precisely, I don’t want that part of me having a reductive name. »

The Nobel Prizes, which have been awarded since 1901, recognise achievement in literature, science, peace and latterly economics.

Past winners have included novelists such as Ernest Hemingway, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Toni Morrison, poets such as Pablo Neruda, Joseph Brodsky and Rabindranath Tagore, and playwrights including Harold Pinter and Eugene O’Neill.

Last year’s award was won by American poet Louise Gluck.

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« I am speaking the truth. And the truth is savage and dangerous. »

So wrote Nawal El Saadawi, who has died at the age of 89, according to Egyptian media reports.

The pioneering Egyptian doctor, feminist and writer spent decades sharing her own story and perspectives – in her novels, essays, autobiographies and eagerly attended talks.

Her brutal honesty and unwavering dedication to improving the political and sexual rights of women inspired generations.

But in daring to speak dangerously, she was also subjected to outrage, death threats and imprisonment.

« She was born with fighting spirit, » Omnia Amin, her friend and translator, told the BBC in 2020.

« People like her are rare. »

Born in a village outside Cairo in 1931, the second of nine children, El Saadawi wrote her first novel at the age of 13. Her father was a government official, with little money, while her mother came from a wealthy background.

Her family tried to make her marry at the age of 10, but when she resisted her mother stood by her.

Her parents encouraged her education, El Saadawi wrote, but she realised at an early age that daughters were less valued than sons. Later she would describe how she stamped her foot in fury when her grandmother told her, « a boy is worth 15 girls at least… Girls are a blight ».

« She saw something wrong and she spoke out, » says Dr Amin. « Nawal can’t turn her back. »

One of the childhood experiences El Saadawi documented with uncomfortable clarity was being subjected to female genital mutilation (FGM) at the age of six.

In her book, The Hidden Face of Eve, she described undergoing the agonising procedure on the bathroom floor, as her mother stood alongside.

1980: Anna Walentynowicz #womenoftheyear https://t.co/RfwDUvdVBv pic.twitter.com/LomXzImMrB

— TIME (@TIME) March 5, 2020

She campaigned against FGM throughout her lifetime, arguing that it was a tool used to oppress women. FGM was banned in Egypt in 2008, but El Saadawi condemned its continued prevalence.

El Saadawi graduated with a degree in medicine from Cairo University in 1955 and worked as a doctor, eventually specialising in psychiatry.

She went on to become director of public health for the Egyptian government, but was dismissed in 1972 after publishing her non-fiction book, Women and Sex, which railed against FGM and the sexual oppression of women.

The magazine Health, which had she founded a few years earlier, was closed down in 1973.

Still, she continued to speak out and write. In 1975, she published Woman at Point Zero, a novel based on a real life account of a woman on death row she had met.

It was followed in 1977 by the Hidden Face of Eve, in which she documented her experiences as a village doctor witnessing sexual abuse, « honour killings » and prostitution. It caused outrage, with critics accusing her of reinforcing stereotypes of Arab women.

Then, in September 1981, El Saadawi was arrested as part of a round-up of dissidents under President Anwar Sadat and held in prison for three months. There she wrote her memoirs on toilet paper, using an eyebrow pencil smuggled to her by a jailed sex worker.

« She did things that people just didn’t venture to do, but for her it was normal, » Dr Amin says.

« She wasn’t thinking about breaking rules or regulations, but telling her truth. »

After President Sadat was assassinated, El Saadawi was released. But her work was censored and her books banned.

In the years that followed, she received death threats from religious fundamentalists, was taken to court, and eventually went into exile in the US.

There she continued to level attacks against religion, colonialism and Western hypocrisy. She railed against the Muslim veil but also make-up and revealing clothes – upsetting even fellow feminists.

When BBC presenter Zeinab Badawi suggested during an interview in 2018 that she tone down her criticism, El Saadawi replied: « No. I should be more outspoken, I should be more aggressive, because the world is becoming more aggressive, and we need people to speak loudly against injustices.

« I speak loudly because I am angry. »

As well as sparking outrage, El Saadawi gained much international recognition, with her books translated into more than 40 languages.

« I know people do not always agree with her politics, but what inspires me most is her writing, what she has achieved and what that can do for women, » says British author and publisher Kadija Sesay, who acted as her agent in London.

« Especially if you are an African woman, or a woman of colour, you will be affected by her work. »

She received numerous honorary degrees from universities around the world. In 2020, Time magazine named her one of its 100 Women of the Year, dedicating a front cover to her.

But one thing would remain out of reach.

« Her only dream or hope was for some acknowledgement from Egypt, » Dr Amin says. « She said she had received honours worldwide, but never got anything from her own country. »

El Saadawi returned to her beloved Egypt in 1996 and soon caused a stir.

She stood as a presidential candidate in the 2004 election and was in Cairo’s Tahrir Square for the 2011 uprising against President Hosni Mubarak.

She spent her final years in Cairo, close to her son and daughter. As Egyptian newspapers reported her death, the simple message (in Arabic) « Nawal Al-Saadawi…….. goodbye » appeared on her Facebook page.

« She has been through a lot, » said Dr Amin. « She has affected generations.

« The young try to look for role models. She stands up. »

Kadija Sesay remembers the writer for her willingness to listen to other women’s stories and speaking to them about their harsh experiences.

« I don’t know many people, especially when they are that well known, who are that giving, » she says.

« But she didn’t want to be anybody’s hero – she’d say, ‘Be your own hero’.

World Opinions Culture – BBC Culture

L’article Nawal El Saadawi: Feminist firebrand who dared to write dangerously est apparu en premier sur World Opinion | Alternative Média.

In our times of uncertainty, the latest fiction about climate disaster is unsettling – but also strangely comforting. Hephzibah Anderson speaks to the authors.

Imagine you’re enjoying much-needed time away with your family, staying in a luxurious Long Island holiday rental, miles from anywhere. Then comes a late-night knock at the door and strangers bearing news of a sinister power outage in New York City. The internet has gone down, phone service has been severed, and when you switch on the TV, every channel shows the same blank screen. Your children are asleep down the hallway, and you’ve no way of knowing what’s going on, or even whether these people are telling the truth.

Hooked? You wouldn’t be alone. It’s the premise of Leave the World Behind by Rumaan Alam, a propulsive, penetrating new novel about race, class, and climate change. Because while the true nature of what’s going on remains obscure – could it be a terrorist attack, the actions of a rogue state? – clues scattered throughout hint heavily at a climate event. Not only did this profoundly unsettling novel make the shortlist of the US National Book Award, it’s also become a bestseller.

Comfort has been at a premium during the current pandemic, and it hasn’t always come from expected sources. Never mind cosy home-baking and box sets: readers have turned not just to beloved classics but also to the often-dystopian genre known as cli-fi – novels in which environmental devastation is a driving force, catapulting protagonists into an apocalyptic « after » or else pinning them in the fast-vanishing « before », with disaster bearing down, inaction endemic and anxiety soaring.

In Rumaan Alam’s best-selling novel, the characters all react differently to calamity (Credit: Bloomsbury)

Short for climate fiction, cli-fi is a relatively new term for a trend whose long roots extend back to sci-fi. Think JG Ballard’s The Drowned World or Ursula K Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven, both written at a point in history when frequent wildfires and regular flash floods belonged to the realm of the speculative. In the past couple of decades, contributions from titans of literary fiction, including Margaret Atwood and Cormac McCarthy, have brought cli-fi into mainstream storytelling. Worsening scientific projections are keeping it there.

By Hephzibah Anderson – bbc.com

L’article Books. The rise of apocalyptic novels est apparu en premier sur World Opinion | Alternative Média.

“The only ones for me are the mad ones,” begins Jack Kerouac’s famous sentence. “The ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time” — you know the rest.

For some, though, the only ones are the shy ones. The rumpled, the abstracted, the easily crushed, the not quite made for this world — the word people, and not the glamorous sort: lexicographers, copy editors, fact checkers, librarians, the better sort of Wikipedia updaters: the rank and file of the intellectual proletariat.

These unacknowledged legislators of the world of reading matter, this band of shaggy-sweatered warriors, share expertise and a nomenclature and a tendency to blink in strong sunlight.

Now that scorn for knowledge has been spread in America, like a squirt from a pump dispenser of liquid margarine, Evelyn Waugh’s instruction has never sounded more necessary: “Pray always for all the learned, the oblique, the delicate. Let them not be quite forgotten at the throne of God when the simple come into their kingdom.”

The English writer Eley Williams’s spirited first novel, “The Liar’s Dictionary,” is about lexicography. It’s a celebration of the people who compile dictionaries, even if they’re driven out of their minds in the process.

Dictionaries are plump and (mostly) written in earnest. This novel more resembles a bonsai tree — compact, wizened and funny. It’s about fricatives and vowels and Latin and love; it’s about updating the meanings of words like “dyke,” “teabag” and “marriage.” Its idea of a joke is to remark that someone looks like they’ve been hit by an omnibus.

Williams is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the author of a previous book, “Attrib.,” a collection of word-besotted short stories. In that book a woman worries about giving her cat fleas, instead of the other way around.

“The Liar’s Dictionary” tells braided stories. It’s about two sets of characters, living in London more than a century apart. Each set toils on Swansby’s New Encyclopaedic Dictionary, most notable for having never been completed, though an edition was published in the 1930s.

This endearingly hapless (and wholly fictional) dictionary has long dwelled in the shadow of what Williams calls “those sleek dark blue hearses” — the Oxford English Dictionary and the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

The book rewinds to the 19th century, where a shy, bow tie-wearing man with a weird secret (he speaks with a fake lisp) works on the letter “S” of Swansby’s dictionary. His name is Peter Winceworth. He chafes at the pinning down of language. For fun he begins to insert mountweazels — bogus entries — into the dictionary.

By Dwight Garner – nytimes.com

L’article In ‘The Liar’s Dictionary,’ People Work on the Definition of Love and Many Other Words est apparu en premier sur World Opinion | Alternative Média.

Along time ago, in 1883, a future president (Woodrow Wilson, a subject of this year’s reckonings) studied political science at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, in a classroom in which was inscribed the slogan “History is Past Politics, Politics is Present History”, attributed to Sir John Seeley, a Cambridge professor.

That was before the era of the made-for-campaign book.

Politics books in this election year fell into three broad categories. The ordinary, ranging from “meeting-and-tells” to campaign biographies that outlived their relevance. The interesting, those which made tentative starts at history or contained some important revelations. And the significant, those few whose value should live past this year because they actually changed the narrative – or are simply good or important reads.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the books also fell in descending categories numerically. Carlos Lozada of the Washington Post read 150 books on Donald Trump and the Trump era for his own book, What Were We Thinking. Virtually all readers, however, will be content with simply a “non-zero” number, to quote a Trump campaign lawyer.

First, the ephemera and the expected offerings of any election year. Scandals in and out of government; tales of the extended Trump family; attempts at self-justification; books, some entertaining, by correspondents; how-to guides to politics meant to be read and applied before November.

The permutations and penumbras of the 2016 campaign continued to produce new books: Peter Strozk’s Compromised is the story of the origin of the investigation into the Trump campaign from one FBI agent’s perspective, strong stuff and persuasive though omitting facts inconvenient to him. Rick Gates’ Wicked Game contains some new inside scoop, but the real stuff presumably went to the Mueller investigation of which Strzok was briefly a part. Donald Trump Jr’s Liberal Privilege had a double mission: to encourage votes for the father in 2020 and perhaps for the son in 2024. American Crisis, New York governor Andrew Cuomo’s early book on the coronavirus outbreak, highlighted his programmatic vision rather than soaring prose, a choice appropriate for the year but quickly forgotten as the pandemic rages on.

Second come those books that made one sit up a bit to pay attention: a new insight, important facts revealed; “worth a detour”, in the language of the Michelin guides. Psychologist and presidential niece Mary Trump’s Too Much and Never Enough explained the pain of the Trump family over two generations and how that pain has influenced our national life for ill. David Frum was among the first to predict Trump’s authoritarian dangers. This year, Trumpocalpyse, well-written and insightful as always, focused on the attacks on the rule of law and “white ethnic chauvinism” as hallmarks of Trumpism, whether its supporters are poor or elite. Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker, Pulitzer-winning Post reporters, chronicled Trump more deeply and successfully than most in A Very Stable Genius. Trump’s anger at the book showed they hit their target.

Stuart Stevens’ It Was All a Lie takes Republican history back a few decades in a punchy mea culpa whose themes will be important in the debate over the future of the GOP. Among the Democrats, a rare good work by a politician, Stacey Abrams’ Our Time Is Now, as well as her triumph in political organizing in Georgia, marks her as an important force.

For quality in financial journalism and the importance of its topic, not least to current and future investigations of Trump and the Trump Organization, Dark Towers by David Enrich on Deutsche Bank offers as full an analysis of the bank and its relation to Trump as is likely to be public absent a further court case in New York.

Andrew Weissmann, a senior prosecutor with the Mueller investigation, wrote Where Law Ends, a strongly-written account in which he regrets his boss not having pursued further, notably in not issuing a subpoena to Trump and then in not making a formal determination as to whether the president would be charged with obstruction of justice. Weissmann’s frustration is understandable, but readers may judge for themselves how fair or not he is to the pressures and formal restrictions on Mueller himself.

By John S Gardner – theguardian.com

L’article From A Very Stable Genius to After Trump: 2020 in US politics books est apparu en premier sur World Opinion | Alternative Média.

I have long found memoirs of American politicians to be heavy on humbug and light on new insight, especially those meant to pave the way to the White House, like Hillary Clinton’s Hard Choices, Kamala Harris’s The Truths We Hold, Cory Booker’s United, and yes, the best of them, Barack Obama’s The Audacity of Hope.

Since his political career is now behind him, I hoped the former president was going to be a bit more forthcoming, blunt and daring in his new memoir, The Promised Land.

Seven hundred pages into the book, I had mixed feelings or perhaps I was a bit too generous with my hope. Obama may no longer be as hampered by politics, but he is certainly haunted by legacy.

My first impression when reading The Promised Land is that unlike the sitting president, Donald Trump, who is unable to articulate a thought or finish a sentence, Obama is a gifted writer, as he is a brilliant orator.

In fact, the first few chapters show how his personal narrative, story-telling and exceptional oratory, highlighted in his speeches against the Iraq war and his address to the 2004 Democratic National Convention, propelled him to the national political scene. They played a major part in his rise from an Illinois state senator to US senator and then two-term president.

Obama comes across as thoughtful, conciliatory, as well as funny and sarcastic, as if to draw a contrast with his divisive, deceptive, and miserable successor. It is as if the former president remains haunted by the effect of Trump’s victory on his legacy and his attempt to undo everything Obama.PUBLICITÉ

It is indeed telling that he chose to end the book with the killing of Osama bin Laden and his humiliation of Trump at a White House Correspondents’ Association dinner.

Obama may be Trump’s opposite, but not because he embraces Black nationalism the way Trump embraces white nationalism or supremacy. Rather, because he deliberately or instinctively veers towards the middle, always looking for two sides to any issue.

He is the guy directing the traffic, always situating himself at the centre of every argument, between hope and fear, idealism and realism, principles and interests, homeowners and bankers, grieving mothers and army commanders, protesters and police, young advisers and political veterans.

Likewise, internationally, Obama positions himself between the Europeans and the Chinese, say on climate change, between the Palestinians and Israelis, the Arab protesters and allied Arab dictators, almost always rooting for the first while explaining, justifying or even defending the latter.

He carefully juxtaposes writing letters to the grieving families of dead soldiers with his support for a military surge in Afghanistan, accepting the Nobel Peace Prize with escalating war efforts.

He readily reconciles the promise and peril of his own first two years in office, commending his administration’s impressive record while blaming himself for the Democratic losses in the 2010 mid-term elections, writing: “… it proved that – whether for lack of talent, cunning, charm or good fortune – I’d failed to rally the nation, as F.D.R. had once done, behind what I knew to be right.

His critics may see his memoir as the recollections of an opportunist, but it actually is one long expose in defence of pragmatism.

Obama claims to draw inspiration from Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King Jr, and the most revered American presidents, like Abraham Lincoln and Franklyn Roosevelt, who presided over two of the toughest periods of US history.

Whether he will go down in history as one of these transformative leaders is too early to judge. But Obama seems to suggest that his success to get elected, not once but twice, as the first Black president is in and by itself a transformative event for America.

To his credit, Obama comes across, again unlike his successor, as someone humbled by experience and bruised by the democratic reality.

He recognises that the president can change a few US policies while in office, but cannot transform its political culture. He also acknowledges that he lacked the political experience and the political allies, considering he went from a freshman senator to leading presidential candidate within just two years.

Likewise, his knowledge of the world was limited to his childhood in Indonesia and university friendships with international students. Obama hoped that what he lacked in experience he could make up for in hard work and fresh new ideas.

But within two years, the mood in the country had shifted towards the right, deepening the social, political and racial divisions in America.

Likewise, the foreign policy establishment or the Blob, proved powerful, tenacious and set in its ways. He says he came to end the war mindset but found himself constantly undermined by both the military and the civilian establishment, including members of his cabinet.

Obama blames himself for not being forceful enough, dare I say, like Trump. He specifically regrets not having the foresight to push the Democrats to do away with the filibuster – a tactic used to prevent a bill from being voted on – that allowed Republican senators to undermine or even block his agenda with a mere 40 percent of the seats.

But it was not only the Republicans. Obama acknowledges that America suffers from a deeper cultural and racial malady under a dominant (white) political culture that feels threatened by multiculturalism and is hostile to immigrants and foreigners.

Paradoxically, some of the most insightful passages about America’s political culture in the book are the ones he says he thought of but never uttered during his time at the White House.

For example, he writes how the drop in his popularity in the polls after calling a policeman’s attack on a Black man in Boston “stupid”, reminded him “that the basis of our nation’s social order had never been simply about consent; that it was also about centuries of state-sponsored violence by whites against Black and brown people.

Or, how the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill showed, “We Americans love cheap gas and our big cars more than we care about the environment.”

Obama also had more than a few insightful things to say about his predecessor’s blunders in the Middle East, Saudi, Emirati and Israeli warnings and hostility towards the Arab Spring, the domestic repercussion of disagreement with Israel, the reasons for the stalled Middle East “peace process”, and much more.

But that would have to wait for another day.

Marwan BisharaSenior political analyst at Al Jazeera.Bishara was previously a professor of International Relations at the American University of Paris. An author who writes extensively on global politics, he is widely regarded as a leading authority on the Middle East and international affairs.

L’article Obama’s (not so) promising land est apparu en premier sur World Opinion | Alternative Média.

Living in an overpopulated, polluted metropolis, Bea realises she and her daughter cannot stay in the city, and so join a group of volunteers to take part in an extreme experiment.

The group must settle in the Wilderness State, a huge, untamed expanse of land that has never been inhabited by humankind, until now. Dystopian novel The New Wilderness has been shortlisted for the Booker. The Booker Prize describes it as: “At once a blazing lament of our contempt for nature… and what it means to be human, The New Wildernessis an extraordinary, compelling novel for our times.”

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L’article Books. The New Wilderness by Diane Cook est apparu en premier sur World Opinion | Alternative Média.