Nobel laureate Abdulrazak Gurnah on Germany's Colonial Past

00:00:00: But the point about national narratives is exactly that they provide a protocol for thinking.

00:00:06: They don't just tell a story, but say this what you must not think.

00:00:12: and quite a lot I would have said of writing we value does precisely opposite to it.

00:00:19: It refuses that national protocol which says do not speak like or say things.

00:00:41: Today's episode is a conversation between Heist founding editor Peter Matthews and Nobel laureate Abdul Raza Gurnah.

00:00:48: It's the conversation we recorded when Gurnh was in town for The International Literature Festival in Berlin, or ILB.

00:00:55: You can find that interview also on heistberlinne.com And I'll make sure to link it into show notes.

00:01:01: Remember you can support us from as little as nine euros per month.

00:01:04: That really goes along way toward extending our cash runway and helps continue running as worker owned independent resource.

00:01:11: Now, to set a bit more context about the interview and Grinna.

00:01:15: Abdul Razak Grinne was born in Zanzibar part of Tanzania.

00:01:18: In twenty-one he received the Nobel Prize for Literature.

00:01:22: The Swedish Academy said that He is awarded for his quote uncompromising and compassionate penetration Of the effects of colonialism And the fate of refugee.

00:01:33: You'll hear some talk in this episode about ancestral human remains and museums, which was the topic of a BBC radio documentary that Peter and I made last year.

00:01:41: But also…a lot more!

00:01:43: Like Peter and Gernat talking about the case by Jung Mohamed Hussain who served in the Schutztreppe – The German Colonial Army before he came to Berlin where worked as an actor and appeared at Nazi-era films.

00:01:55: Eventually he was arrested by the Gestapo and died in Sachsenhausen concentration camp in.

00:02:01: His is a story that Gernet uses in the character of Ilias, and his novel Afterlives.

00:02:07: The conversation begins right away with the concept of cosmopolitanism.

00:02:13: It's an important idea for Gernets because it doesn't just mean like worldliness or looking out at some center Or European capital.

00:02:22: Instead he thinks about many centers Like the Indian Ocean Central Asia Middle East and how each of these centres has been a place of exchange, of transmission.

00:02:33: And encounter for just as long as Europe

00:02:35: is.".

00:02:36: He said the difficulty seeing this isn't an intellectual failure but kind historical blindness that we all still live with in the West.

00:02:45: So thats the question.

00:02:46: Peter starts out.

00:02:47: here's Peter and Abdu'ra Zakrana.

00:02:51: You write about finding shards of pottery from Zanzibar China.

00:02:58: I think That one of the ways that you'll work, it sort of re-centres.

00:03:02: It's a way of looking at Europe from a distant place which sort of recenters our relationship and I wonder if you think sometimes cities like Berlin can be sort of blinded by their sense being in the centre?

00:03:15: They don't see themselves as one node or network but they have a sort of myopia of the centre.

00:03:22: Well we could

00:03:23: put it this way though picking a fight with Berlin, which is not necessarily... I guess you know it continues.

00:03:33: Speaking like that continuous the sense of The normative is the big European cities or the normative Is an idea of the world?

00:03:46: Which kind of pulses from Europe to the periphery?

00:03:51: and Of course in terms of power in terms of prosperity.

00:03:56: That is probably largely true, at least until recently.

00:03:59: now we have China as another centre precisely that both political interests and its capacity to finance activities in the world.

00:04:12: But there's a way overlooking this which does not necessarily mean you need to talk in terms periphery or center but understand what I suppose you would call cosmopolitan.

00:04:24: Now, the more familiar Western explanation for what that means is... Shall we say people in the West taking an interest in other parts of the world and therefore they become more worldly?

00:04:40: Cosmopolitan.

00:04:41: The World City as it were.

00:04:44: What that assumes?

00:04:45: is there indeed a center?

00:04:47: There's place where the core human culture civilization can emanates into the wider world.

00:04:57: Whereas perhaps it's more correct I think in experience to understand that there are several cosmopolitanism, several centers of exchange transmission historical and contemporary relationships.

00:05:16: you might say for example the Middle East is one those where different cultures different religions different ethnicities have been well bickering a little bit, but also living together for a long time.

00:05:29: Or you could think of the Chinese, cosmopolitanism or the Central Asian or indeed The Indian Ocean.

00:05:36: these are places that have their own sense of who they are in a sense and it's one that goes back a long way And still is sustaining itself.

00:05:47: It's going on.

00:05:49: It doesn't mean that it rules out the possibility of engaging with other ways or being, or other centers of knowledge.

00:05:57: But it does not mean completely differential towards a more superior epistemology and culture.

00:06:08: It is very difficult to step out if you are used historically and culturally thinking about yourself in that way.

00:06:19: And I think this is the kind of bind, as opposed to a lot of Europe still in how it regards itself and how we regard the world – not just Europe but North America as well.

00:06:31: North America's more complicated because it already has entangled within its other cultures and ethnicities and histories which are constantly wanting to resist or saying right now Like the United States is a white nation, but it's not.

00:06:51: It's more than fifty percent Not white.

00:06:54: But you know that insistence this part of her over of a desire to return to our most stable idea who we are.

00:07:04: I think That that idea of picking a fight which i'm not trying To do but i think that idea

00:07:08: for wherever no

00:07:10: i'm i Know what?

00:07:11: You mean ii.

00:07:13: i Think that your work it does have A sort of um matter-of-fact sort of relationship with the world.

00:07:19: I wonder if that's something That has changed for you in your life.

00:07:24: Did you always have a sense?

00:07:27: Of being part of a Center, I suppose

00:07:32: No, that would be to put it too strong because there will be kind of self awareness which is not available to let say a teenager or even perhaps young person.

00:07:43: It may be something that comes with With greater understanding of where you are in the world.

00:07:50: See, most of time people don't think about these things in a sense that they're not self-consciously saying Where is my center?

00:07:56: Who am I?

00:07:57: and that kind of thing... People won't do that!

00:07:59: They've got more immediate anxieties like whatever it might be bills or crying children.

00:08:09: but when we begin to reflect on them then ask yourself questions out of I suppose studying or scholarship, thinking just generally being interested in those issues.

00:08:25: And maybe reading brings that about as you read about other places and if you read with enough care and penetration then it might mean how do i relate to this especially if its some ways about me?

00:08:42: Or something?

00:08:46: But for myself, I suppose was like a lot of people... ...I would say from the part of world icon.

00:08:53: From happily unaware that somebody thought that I wasn't on the periphery or anything.. ..I saw it as where I was you know?

00:09:03: And this will happen to most people travelling through their origins.

00:09:09: i think It's maybe something that accelerates and exacerbates self-inquiry about yourself, those questions of how do I relate to this place?

00:09:23: Who am i?

00:09:24: How do I related where come from?

00:09:25: indeed.

00:09:27: But maybe there are not question that arise if you're kind of... Where you are feet on the ground stably getting on and things will be worrying about your career or schooling.

00:09:38: but I expect for people who were estranged, I mean strangers in a sense alienated, but people were strange.

00:09:49: It is a question that you have to kind of come to terms with.

00:09:54: To return to the city there are things in Berlin In music in the museums here for example sort of taken from Tanzania or these places as part of this historical legacy.

00:10:09: one famous One Is The Giant Brachiosaurus dinosaur and Natural History Museum.

00:10:15: Here I wonder whether these transported objects, the physical objects that surround... ...that are taken from former colonies.

00:10:27: Do they give you a complicated or different sense of being in a city?

00:10:33: Not me because it's not your asking if I feel that sense.

00:10:37: no Because where there is which part of Germany say Britain or whatever.

00:10:46: That's important.

00:10:48: The fact that they are in the Humboldt here, or the fact there is a British Museum isn't the most crucial thing... ...the most crucial things first were the impulse which made this transaction happen and you're talking about the dinosaur.

00:11:02: I would have thought it was the more sensationally outrageous items brought back where human remains And not always for ostensibly scientific reasons either.

00:11:16: I mean, that was the ostensible reason to study these whatever.

00:11:19: But quite often there were trophies of war for example... ...the leader or the Hehe people in Germany and Africa.

00:11:29: You write about Macau

00:11:32: indeed who gave the shoot-through a great deal of trouble but when they finally defeated them and captured him They cut his head off.

00:11:44: I mean, this is not to do with science.

00:11:48: This has a kind of vengeance and there are many other trophies like that Not only in East Africa.

00:11:57: you mentioned the others but they're not so many So it's worth knowing them.

00:12:01: And what is now Namibia Cameroon and Togo In relation to Africa?

00:12:07: These were places where other atrocities of equally outrageous nature happened and the remains were brought back here.

00:12:19: So I'm saying it's the impulse really that is one that engages, concerns me or makes an impact on me rather than where have they put them?

00:12:30: Those human remains are still held to this day in museum basements or whatever.

00:12:38: I think Freud uses burial artefacts as a metaphor for repression in some way.

00:12:46: I think he writes about how things which are buried underground and not exposed, they're then preserved unchanged.

00:12:53: And i wonder whether the you think that

00:12:57: Europe

00:12:58: does have somewhat of a repressed attitude to its colonial history?

00:13:02: Well definitely but uh...I don't think it's those remains that are indicative of it But there would I suppose we'd quite like to bury them now.

00:13:11: But they're there, in display.

00:13:13: If you go to the homeboat their stacks and you can observe them it's not that they are hidden anywhere.

00:13:21: I think human remains are often no longer on display.

00:13:25: There is plenty of trophies but from all different expeditions They have made a decision to put the remains in the basement, which has its own complications I think.

00:13:40: It's

00:13:41: a practice that perhaps is kind of being modified and it's not only colonial practice towards Africa.

00:13:51: but i remember visiting The Natural History Museum library...it's a library really!

00:13:58: But also museum at the University of Oklahoma.

00:14:02: And there are stacks with human remains of Native American people who were displaced from there.

00:14:09: And they are, you know dated.

00:14:11: and these boxes.

00:14:12: I suspect that too in a basement now because what that indicates it seems to me is not just recognition but shame at this knowledge That This Is What We've Done... ...and It Isn't Something That Can Be Explained Away.

00:14:27: But what's interesting?

00:14:29: Is the reluctance To Release Them?

00:14:32: Yeah Absolutely.

00:14:34: There's something else ask you about which is in Afterlives, do you rework some real historical personages?

00:14:42: I'm thinking particularly of Bayoumeh Mohammed Hussain.

00:14:46: Tanzanian who fought on behalf of Germany worked in Berlin not too far from here actually and taught English.

00:14:55: he acted in Nazi propaganda films And finally became a victim of the regime.

00:15:03: i wonder if you could tell me what What drew you to this story in particular?

00:15:10: The particular story was a chance.

00:15:16: The idea of people who became mercenaries for the colonial armies, not just in this war but also for the British and Portuguese or Belgians.

00:15:31: It was that interest to me.

00:15:33: One of the questions I was interested in answering, or at least investigating after life is how did people who did that explain it themselves?

00:15:42: What do they think were doing?

00:15:43: what would make somebody become a mercenary force?

00:15:48: that will be oppressing your own people if you like.

00:15:53: and one thing i came to understand there are not their own.

00:15:57: They did not think of them as their own people.

00:15:59: The idea that an African was one who wasn't there at the time, they thought about themselves differently in more precise or in a local sense even if it were big and local.

00:16:14: but nonetheless.

00:16:17: so I was interested then when i read my book this person who became an actor.

00:16:27: This was the first thing that I saw, he was a shoot stupor and then become an

00:16:31: actor.".

00:16:32: And so i started looking into that and read it bit more... ...and found out in fact there's very interesting history.

00:16:41: The other interesting things to say about that figure is not Tanzania or Tanganyika.

00:16:46: those words didn't exist at the time.

00:16:49: He actually was Sudanese.. ..this connection between the shoot stupa, the Sudanese the British, et cetera.

00:16:58: So they first become mercenaries... These are Nubian people who became mercenaires of the British against the Mahdi in the late-nineteenth century.

00:17:05: They're demobbed in Alexandria.

00:17:08: Colonel Visman is looking for mercenary.

00:17:11: He goes to Alexandria recruits them and takes some to Georgia or South Africa.

00:17:16: so there's a foreign army In essence And he was one those Or he's a descendant on all others.

00:17:25: That complicates it.

00:17:26: It's not just simply a Tanzanian, which as I said didn't exist anyway.

00:17:31: But he was not even part of the place... He is part something completely different and you might think that he kind of revivified by his connection with Germany The Germans would give him life picking out some misery in Alexandria making a sergeant or something like That.

00:17:50: i think it was some kind of NCO And he´s German In his heart.

00:17:56: They are his saviours.

00:17:58: That's right.

00:17:59: and did you

00:18:00: feel... And then they kill him?

00:18:02: Yeah, yeah I mean the story of him here in Germany is quite remarkable when you deal with it very condensely.

00:18:12: i like that little coda In your book at the end where someone comes and finds out The Story.

00:18:19: You follow them actually not in Berlin but But his story was, I think he was a waiter not too far from here at this big sort of amusement nightclub thing and starred in these folka shower shows they would do to show off people from different parts of the world.

00:18:48: So yeah how much did you then follow up on that?

00:18:53: Obviously you adapted it for your was different, you were taking a... A different.

00:18:58: Well I want to write story that is sort of like historical.

00:19:02: i wanted figure and so I made him musician.

00:19:07: but the picture that describe which it's a picture with young Elias as budding journalist he does his project for course in doing uh.. That is a picture of Hussein there.

00:19:22: actually The description is a picture of Hussain standing on stage with, you know the big swastika flag behind him and A man in a leather horse and young man.

00:19:34: In a leather house and standing one side And another Man With an arm band and brown uniform.

00:19:40: You Know the Brown shirt Uniform On the other Side obviously doing some kind Of song.

00:19:46: Some kind was that I thought.

00:19:47: okay i will make Him a singer rather than An actor But I did see in my various researches, as well.

00:19:54: I didn't see Eva Knopf's film where... In it?

00:20:00: If you know it…

00:20:01: –I haven't seen it

00:20:03: but what she does is shows various clips of the films that he took part in and even most of them or almost all of them his either a waiter or wearing a shootstroop uniform.

00:20:17: He was there when we saw him parts as it were, he's an actor.

00:20:23: But then doesn't completely work out like that?

00:20:26: Yeah He was in.

00:20:27: I think the big film one of his big films was final films.

00:20:31: Was this film about Carl Peters who came and he plays The Assistant In Germany...in the north of germ or in vetting in the North District there was a formerly Peter Zalley street which commemorated Carl Peters Which is now had the name changed to Magi Magi Ale.

00:20:55: There's also a Stolperstein, are you familiar with these?

00:21:00: The

00:21:00: pavement things exactly commemorating Hussain as well elsewhere in this city.

00:21:05: I wonder if Germany has an interesting relationship of its own memory.

00:21:12: how does it commemorate?

00:21:14: I wonder whether you think, if you reflect on that... In that colonialism has been often considered a bit of blind spot in how Germany reflects its own past because it gets eclipsed by the story of The Holocaust.

00:21:35: Do see those things in relationship to each other?

00:21:38: Or do you think is there something we can learn from or complicate about memory culture

00:21:48: In relation to how colonialism is remembered in Germany, it seems to me understandable that it would recede a little bit in memory because there are these events from the nineteen thirties onwards or at least next ten years.

00:22:08: That quite rightly occupy the minds and anxieties indeed of of people in Germany and related nearby.

00:22:25: And also, Germany's ceased to be an imperial nation in nineteen eighteen.

00:22:30: what it didn't see is that the reclaiming of the colonies was part of a Nazi platform.

00:22:39: so there would have been something kept alive and bubbling by this desire.

00:22:45: now connection particularly by Hannah Arendt, but others is that the earliest lessons for the Nazis and indeed for the Soviet Union as well arise out of experience of colonising and subjecting others.

00:23:06: In a sense in case with the Soviet union it was mostly adjacent cultures, Central Asia say that kind of thing.

00:23:17: Whereas for Germany very late in the day with a British and French Portuguese and Hispanics have been doing it for centuries before Germany joined overseas business going to Africa or Australia so on.

00:23:32: That seems like long way away compared to events from the nineteen thirties in the nineteen forties for Germany.

00:23:39: So what I say is understandable, i'm not saying it's okay to remember colonialism but you can see why.

00:23:45: uh...the foreground of memory and indeed inquiry becomes that And other thing.

00:23:53: oh cool we cant deal with THAT as well when dealing this.

00:23:58: But sure time has come now where people are coming around understanding this.

00:24:03: You cannot make same excuse for the French or British though They don't have this big guilt to sort out as a result of the Second World War, but they're just happy To suppress memory or father or at least two to retell The experience of colonialism in ways that suits them.

00:24:26: I mean no more about the British experience and the French experience.

00:24:30: But but i think there are probably similarities In the way say Algerians in France is seen as an intrusion, even worse than that perhaps something like a danger.

00:24:47: And there's famous remark and it's contested who made it first but which is we're here because you are there so the Algerian they're there.

00:25:04: And the same also is true of, uh...the consequences of colonialism for European societies.

00:25:09: Is that you were there?

00:25:11: and That's only one.

00:25:13: Of course The other reason it was more to do with Prosperity or perhaps For safety or refugees but thats One of their reasons.

00:25:22: But theres a longer way of coming around the issue You are raising Which why they not remember?

00:25:29: They don't remember first because they have other things to worry about in some cases and the other more obvious thing is a way that national memories work Is to suppress shameful events?

00:25:41: And always, you know foreground The aggrandizing self-aggrandising event.

00:25:50: I mean i think your work comes from such particular stories.

00:25:59: It seems to work against that idea of national memory in some way, the stories are complicated and particular.

00:26:06: And we follow a single story through Alive... ...and it seems in someway to work against That idea of I don't know grand narrative would be too much?

00:26:19: No there wouldn't be too Much.

00:26:20: Of course if you use Grand Narrative immediately start thinking about Modernism.

00:26:24: but i dont operate refusal of core values or something like that.

00:26:34: But the point about national narratives is exactly they provide a protocol for thinking, They don't just tell a story but say this what you must not think.

00:26:47: and quite a lot I would have said in writing.

00:26:50: we value does precisely opposite to it refuses national protocol.

00:26:59: Don't speak like that or don't say things like

00:27:01: that.".

00:27:02: And sometimes we confuse this with the idea of narrative perspective, sometime people go away in order to be able write about whatever... Well it's not just distance and does this but going away means its a way also refusing kind everyday sense being oppressed by what can and cannot be said.

00:27:26: That was your last question.

00:27:27: I think that's the last question.

00:27:28: Yeah, so I like

00:27:29: this funny to introduce one more questions and then you can see them taking a breath.

00:27:35: Ask another

00:27:37: way Well will spare you there?

00:27:39: So thank you very much.

00:27:43: Thanks for listening to another episode of The Heist podcast.

00:27:46: if you enjoyed This conversation check out the other episodes on the podcast feed And please leave us a review or comment.

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00:27:59: We'll be back in two weeks with a next episode!

00:28:02: Till Then Bye.