Map Reading
Map Reading
Contents
Writing
Margate
Learning to Read
Indian Ocean Journeys
Notes
A Note on the Author
Writing
The 2021 Nobel Lecture in Literature
Writing has always been a pleasure. Even as a boy at school, I looked forward to the class set aside for writing a story, or whatever our teachers thought would interest us, more than to any other class on the timetable. Then everyone would fall silent, leaning over their desks to retrieve something worth reporting from memory and imagination. In these youthful efforts, there was no desire to say something in particular, to recall a memorable experience, to express a strongly held opinion or to air a grievance. Nor did these efforts require any other reader than the teacher who prompted them as an exercise in improving our discursive skills. I wrote because I was instructed to write, and because I found such pleasure in the exercise.
Years later, when I was myself a schoolteacher, I was to have this experience in reverse, when I would sit in a silent classroom while the pupils bent over their work. It reminded me of a poem by D. H. Lawrence which I will now quote a few lines from:
From ‘The Best of School’
As I sit on the shores of the class, alone,
Watch the boys in their summer blouses
As they write, their round heads busily bowed:
And one after another rouses
His face to look at me,
To ponder very quietly,
As seeing, he does not see.
And then he turns again, with a little, glad
Thrill of his work he turns again from me,
Having found what he wanted, having got what was to be had.1
The writing class I was speaking of and which this poem recalls, was not writing as it would come to seem later. It was not driven, directed, worked over, reorganised endlessly. In these youthful efforts I wrote in a straight line, so to speak, without much hesitation or correction, with such innocence. I also read with a kind of abandon, similarly without any direction, and I did not know at the time how closely connected these activities were. Sometimes, when it was not necessary to wake up early for school, I read so late into the night that my father, who was something of an insomniac himself, was forced to come to my room and order me to switch off the light. You could not say to him, even if you dared, that he was still awake and why should you not be, because that was not how you spoke to your father. In any case, he did his insomnia in the dark, with the light switched off so as not to disturb my mother, so the instruction to switch off the light would still have stood.
The writing and reading that came later was orderly compared to the haphazard experience of youth, but it never ceased to be a pleasure and was hardly ever a struggle. Gradually, though, it became a different kind of pleasure. I did not realise this fully until I went to live in England. It was there, in my homesickness and amidst the anguish of a stranger’s life, that I began to reflect on so much that I had not considered before. It was out of that period, that prolonged period of poverty and alienation, that I began to do a different kind of writing. It became clearer to me that there was something I needed to say, that there was a task to be done, regrets and grievances to be drawn out and considered.
In the first instance, I reflected on what I had left behind in the reckless flight from my home. A profound chaos descended on our lives in the mid-1960s, whose rights and wrongs were obscured by the brutalities that accompanied the changes brought about by the revolution in Zanzibar in 1964: detentions, executions, expulsions, and endless small and large indignities and oppressions. In the midst of these events, and with the mind of an adolescent, it was impossible to think clearly about the historical and future implications of what was happening.
It was only in the early years that I lived in England that I was able to reflect on such issues, to dwell on the ugliness of what we were capable of inflicting on each other, to revisit the lies and delusions with which we had comforted ourselves. Our histories were partial, silent about many cruelties. Our politics was racialised, and led directly to the persecutions that followed the revolution, when fathers were slaughtered in front of their children and daughters were assaulted in front of their mothers. Living in England, far away from these events yet deeply troubled by them in my mind, it may have been that I was less able to resist the power of such memories than if I had been among people who were still living their consequences. But I was also troubled by other memories that were unrelated to these events: cruelties parents inflicted on their children, the way people were denied full expression because of social or gender dogma, the inequalities that tolerated poverty and dependence. These are matters present in all human life and are not exceptional to us, but they are not always on your mind until circumstances require you to be aware of them. I suspect this is one of the burdens of people who have fled from a trauma and find themselves living safely, away from those left behind. Eventually I began to write about some of these reflections, not in an orderly or organised way, not yet, just for the relief of clarifying a little some of the confusions and uncertainties in my mind.
In time, though, it became clear that something deeply unsettling was taking place. A new, simpler history was being constructed, transforming and even obliterating what had happened, restructuring it to suit the verities of the moment. This new and simpler history was not only the inevitable work of the victors, who are always at liberty to construct a narrative of their choice, but it also suited commentators and scholars, and even writers who had no real interest in us, or were viewing us through a frame that agreed with their view of the world, and who required a familiar narrative of racial emancipation and progress.
It became necessary, then, to refuse such a history, one that disregarded the material objects that testified to an earlier time: the buildings, the achievements and the tendernesses that had made life possible. Many years later, I walked through the streets of the town I grew up in, and saw the degradation of things and places and people, who live on, grizzled and toothless, and in fear of losing the memory of the past. It became necessary to make an effort to preserve that memory, to write about what was there, to retrieve the moments and the stories people lived by and through which they understood themselves. It was necessary to write of the persecutions and cruelties which the self-congratulations of our rulers sought to wipe from our memory.
There was also another understanding of history necessary to address, one that became clearer to me when I lived closer to its source in England, clearer than it had been while I was going through my colonised education in Zanzibar. We were, those of our generation, children of colonialism in a way that our parents were not and nor were those who came after us, or at least not in the same way. By that I don’t mean that we were alienated from the things our parents valued or that those who came after us were liberated from colonial influence. I mean that we grew up and were educated in that period of high imperial confidence, at least in our parts of the world, when domination disguised its real self in euphemisms and we agreed to the subterfuge. I refer to the period before decolonisation campaigns across the region hit their stride and drew our attention to the depredations of colonial rule. Those who came after us had their post-colonial disappointments and their own self-delusions to comfort them, and perhaps did not see clearly, or in great enough depth, the way in which the colonial encounter had transformed our lives, that our corruptions and misrule were in some measure also part of that colonial legacy.
Some of these matters became clearer to me in England, not because I encountered people who clarified them to me in conversation or in the classroom, but because I gained a better understanding of how someone like me figured in some of their stories of themselves, both in their writing and in casual discourse; in the hilarity that greeted racist jokes on the TV and elsewhere; in the unforced hostility I met in everyday encounters in shops, in offices, on the bus. I could not do anything about that reception, but just as I learned to read with greater understanding, so a desire grew to write – in refusal of the self-assured summaries of people who despised and belittled us.
But writing cannot be just about battling and polemics, however invigorating and comforting that can be. Writing is not about one thing, not about this issue or that, or this concern or another, and since its concern is human life in one way or another, sooner or later cruelty and love and weakness become its subject. I believe that writing also has to show what can be otherwise, what it is that the hard, domineering eye cannot see, what makes people, apparently small in stature, feel assured in themselves, regardless of the disdain of others. So I found it necessary to write about that as well, and to do so truthfully, so that both the ugliness and the virtue come through, and the human being appears out of the simplification and stereotype. When that works, a kind of beauty comes out of it.
And that way of looking makes room for frailty and weakness, for tenderness amid cruelty, and for a capacity for kindness in unlooked-for sources. It is for these reasons that writing has been for me a worthwhile and absorbing part of my life. There are other parts, of course, but they are not our concern on this occasion. A little miraculously, that youthful pleasure in writing that I spoke of at the beginning is still there after all the decades.
Let me end by expressing my deepest gratitude to the Swedish Academy for bestowing this great honour on me and on my work. I am very grateful.
Margate
It wa
s the summer of 1968, my first summer in England. ‘Hey Jude’ was playing out of the PA over the miniature golf course over which my friend John presided. He was keeping an eye on the youngsters and their dads putting golf balls under lights, all the while talking to me in a steady spate. He loved talking. I had been there all afternoon, and the smells had changed as the air cooled, so that now, by early evening, the aromas of seaside-resort food had lost some of their edge. ‘Hey Jude’ had been going all afternoon. It had just been released then, and it played on the radio again and again without respite, and no one grumbled. That is my earliest complete memory of Margate, sitting by the toy golf course in the early evening, listening to that music while John chattered away, and I pretended I was not a lonely and homesick teenager a long way from home.
I had not expected England to get so hot. It was a surprise that the sun blazed, that it made me swelter. The painter Turner lived in Margate and is reported to have described the skies over Margate as the loveliest in Europe. I am not sure what a painter of skies would have meant by such a superlative, but the light that afternoon was bright in a hard-edged way which made the horizon draw near. As the air cooled with the breeze from the sea, I wonder that I did not think to compare where I was to Zanzibar. Because I did not. England seemed so alien then, so unlike anything I had known before.
I had met John in Canterbury, where we were both students at the Technical College. He sought me out as we walked out of a class and fell into step beside me, huge next to me. After a moment he told me that he did not like wogs. The word was new to me, although I had no difficulty guessing its general drift. I asked him why and he said because they smelled.
He would not leave me alone after that. He sat beside me in class even if I tried to find a corner to sit by myself. I liked to sit by myself. The railway station where he caught the train to Margate was on the way to my lodgings, and at the end of the day’s classes he waited for me so we could walk home together. He was my protector against the brawling racist abuse which passed for teasing among the English students. And he invited me to Margate and to his home, where his parents fed me and spoke to me politely. They invited me out of curiosity, they said, because John had reassured them that I was not like other immigrants, that I was civilised. I don’t know how John arrived at this, but I was not civilised enough that his parents neglected to tell me how much better off I would have been had I stayed wherever I came from. It was not unheard of in 1968, in the England I knew, to be spoken to as shamelessly as this to your face, as if you were without feelings. I lost John at some point. He joined the army and disappeared.
John was not my only link with Margate in those days. Most of the students I knew came from elsewhere – several from the oil countries: Iran, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait. For some reason, they liked to live in Margate. Perhaps they had first arrived there when they came to England. Crowds of students from Europe and from the Middle East came to seaside resorts to learn English, using up the otherwise empty accommodation outside the holiday season. Something about the brash gaiety of the town must have appealed, and several of the students stayed on while they continued studying in Canterbury.
Margate seemed alien when I first knew it, because I had not known about this England. When I arrived in Canterbury, on the other hand, the town was recognisable, familiar from what I had read: the cathedral, the river, the beamed houses; the butcher, the baker and the policeman. Margate was noisy and crowded with people finding pleasure in trinkety games and loud pop music, a place where bands of youths fought incomprehensible battles on the promenade. Margate was Dreamland, from where, every Monday morning at college, came stories of frenzies and seductions, of escapades with the one-armed bandits and the excesses of pop concerts. Sometimes there were stories of mini-orgies, of young women who agreed to have sex with several of my wealthy fellow students.
They blazed with arrogance, the moneybags students, especially the Iranians, who carried themselves with the same assurance that the Shah adopted in the royal photos. For this was still in the days of the Shah, who was known for his global ambitions, so he would perhaps have been pleased that some of his subjects had taken charge of a small corner of Margate and were seducing young women at will. Their bragging tales made their lives in Margate sound lively and full compared to my poverty-stricken struggles in a stuffy lodging house. They made Margate sound dangerous, and gave it a kind of tatty and unattractive glamour.
It was nearly thirty years after that 1968 memory that I visited Margate again. I left the area for several years, and when I returned, it was to live a different life of work and family, and Margate, though only thirty miles away, did not figure in it. In 1997 I went to Margate to record interviews with Czech Roma asylum seekers. They had appeared in Dover in their scores after a TV programme aired in the Czech Republic had depicted the port as a paradise of tolerance and relaxed immigration procedures. Ferry-loads of asylum seekers were turned back, but they came again, bringing others with them. And since they had a case for requesting asylum, suffering persecution in the Czech Republic, in the end several of them were allowed to stay. Margate, just down the road from Dover, got to take several of the refugees.
The Roma asylum seekers spoke about harassment in the Czech Republic, about violence from local youth, how their children were attacked and how the authorities did nothing to protect them. One young woman showed me a mouthful of shattered teeth, the result of an assault with a baseball bat. They spoke about revenge attacks their men undertook, which got them into even further trouble. Then they saw a TV programme which said that Dover was a Roma heaven, where families were given housing, children sent to school, and abusers put in jail, and so they came.
I think I expected more canniness, more cynicism, more worldliness. I think I expected them to be more distraught and angry about their reception. Instead they spoke about the kindness with which they had been treated, about how happy they were to be here, about how good it was to be in a country that was a monarchy (because republics are dictatorships – such ironies!), about how good it felt to be free. It was mostly the women who did the talking. Some of the men were detained in prison in Chatham and Dover, some had already disappeared, and the ones who were there during my conversations sat back watchfully, listening but not saying much. The women talked, describing their anguishes, showing their bruises, while their children clung to them or watched with wide-open eyes. Fighting for their new lives.
By 1997 Margate had collapsed as a seaside holiday resort. The credit boom brought in by Mrs Thatcher’s government made any fantasy destination possible. Who would choose Margate, given that option? And the students of English had also gone. The Islamic Republic of Iran preferred to use its money differently, and it was cheaper to purchase half a dozen English teachers and take them to Riyadh than to send a crowd of youths to Margate, where they would pick up strange ways. So the asylum seekers and refugees, and the government money they brought, were welcome when they turned up.
The issue released the vilest xenophobia in the local press (‘This Human Sewage’ ran one headline). The frenzy reminded me of the time I arrived in England, when something similar was happening about the arrival of Kenyan Asians. So in 1997 I drove along the Margate Promenade, past the harbour, and realised that although it had been an age since I was last here, the memory of its old self was still alive. The Promenade was almost empty, the PA silent and the funfair closed down, and even Dreamland shut after fire damage. That part of town had turned into an abandoned site, not derelict but empty, underused, dangerous, an open detention centre and a hostel for displaced people. The asylum seekers’ lives are tense with insecurity, local resentment finds expression somehow, in fights, in vandalism and abuse. It is not quite an asylum-seekers’ gulag, but it looks a wreck, living up to its reputation as a decaying town.
Learning to Read
Then I felt like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;