1 Introduction: Abdulrazak Gurnah and Shafi Adam Shafi—Two Zanzibari Writers
In this contribution, I will bring together two novels by Zanzibari writers who write in two different languages and whose novels have never been compared. Abdulrazak Gurnah is a widely acclaimed author who has made Zanzibar—the most important East African entrepot in the Indian Ocean network since the nineteenth century—the focus of his literary imagination; Shafi Adam Shafi is one of many other prominent Zanzibari Swahili authors—such as Said Ahmed Mohamed, Mohamed Suleiman Mohamed, and, most recently, Zeinab Alwi Bahroon—who have also narrated Zanzibar’s changing social history.1
Thus, I am deliberately crossing a border that is seldom crossed, one that holds for most East African novels in Swahili and English: though both languages serve as the dominant written literary languages of East Africa, scholarship on East African literature has largely been divided along linguistic lines.2 While one might attribute the dearth of comparative readings featuring Swahili literature to a lack of linguistic competence, even in East Africa, where
The biographies of the two authors have similarities that are also partly mirrored in the novels and already question the notion of a clear dichotomy between the smaller and wider worlds, as I will explore further below. Both Abdulrazak Gurnah and Shafi Adam Shafi were born in Zanzibar Town during the time of late British colonialism and the Omani sultanate in the 1940s. Both experienced the upheavals of the 1960s in their youth, when, driven not only by politics but also by wanderlust, they made their way to Europe, like many other Zanzibari writers. While Abdulrazak Gurnah took a flight to the UK, Shafi Adam Shafi, originally also with the intention of going to the UK, embarked on a long, adventurous journey, crossing the African continent from Kenya to Uganda, the DRC, Sudan, and Egypt to study in the GDR, Czechoslovakia, and later Sweden and the US before coming back to Zanzibar as a journalist in the late 1970s.4 While Abdurazak Gurnah lived through poverty and uncertainty as a displaced migrant, all the while carving out a successful existence both as an academic and in the world of literature, becoming a prominent English-language writer and even a Nobel Prize laureate, Shafi Adam Shafi, who spent two years in prison after the assassination of Zanzibar’s president Abeidi Karume in 1972,5 became renowned as a Swahili journalist, writer, and activist in Tanzania.
Both authors began writing when they were young. Shafi Adam Shafi started publishing his novels in the late 1970s: after Kasri ya mwinyi Fuad (“Overlord Fuad’s Palace,” 1978), depicting the Zanzibar revolution, and Kuli (“Docker,”
2 Worlds Apart? Reading across Worlds
The two novels were not only written in two different languages, but also seem to belong to two different worlds. They attract different readerships, are published by different publishers, distributed according to different market logics, and discussed by different academic disciplines—with different questions in mind.
Gurnah’s English-language novel By the Sea, first published by a British publisher and meant for an international, English-speaking audience, has been widely interpreted in Anglophone studies as speaking to postcolonial paradigms of “writing back” and discussions of diaspora identities as well as Indian Ocean studies with its outlook on narratives of transcontinental trajectories decentering the West. To Hofmeyr, for instance, Gurnah is one of the “three prominent writers on the Indian Ocean” next to Amitav Ghosh and Engseng Hong, since their literary narratives challenge the maps drawn by empires and nation-states.8 Writing “from a position of weakness” against a “dominant narrative, obviously a European and an imperial one,” as Gurnah himself describes his work as a writer, entails sharing his perspective on the displaced diaspora subject “from a poor place.”9 His literature comprises a performative act: his postcolonial novel challenges the constraints of the Western novel, so deeply rooted in the narrow epoch of Europe’s nationalist and imperialist projects.
Adam Shafi’s Vuta n’kuvute is an award-winning Swahili novel that has never been translated into English. It is part of the national school curriculum in Tanzania, widely read in Kenya as well, and discussed by scholars of Swahili studies in both East Africa and the West. In Swahili literary studies, which has developed mostly in parallel to a growing literary production in modern Swahili prose from the 1960s onward, writing literature has been considered primarily a performative act of bringing new sociopolitical worlds into being. Vuta n’kuvute has been read in terms of literature engagée, which became prominent in East African literary criticism after the inception of the socialist state, having been nurtured by a more global Marxist-realist understanding of literature.11 The novel is viewed as kioo cha jamii, a “mirror of society,” a major notion in Swahili literary criticism.12 Its aim is not merely to “mirror” a status quo, but the novel is supposed to have what Barber and Furniss13 call the “purposive dimension” of many African-language literatures, i.e. the intention to bear impact on specific social realities. As Mlacha has put it, the aim is “to create a new society in accordance with how people see the difficulties their societies have to face. Therefore, literature is like a mirror, and the novel like the shadows of our image in that mirror” (“kuiumba jamii mpya, kufuatana na jinsi wanavyoyaona matatizo ambayo yanazikabili jamii zao. Kwa vile fasihi ni kama kioo na riwaya kama vivuli au picha yetu kwenye kioo hicho […]”).14
Accordingly, Vuta n’kuvute, whose main protagonist, Yasmin, belongs to the Indian diaspora, has generally not been discussed with regard to its postcolonial position or in terms of the Indian Ocean, constructing larger, transcontinental maps; rather, ukombozi—“liberation” through class struggle from the shackles of the dark past of oppression by colonial powers, feudalist structures
Generally speaking, Zanzibari novelists from the 1960s to the 1980s, writing in the aftermath of the revolution, were especially preoccupied with “the possibility of a radical reversal of social hierarchies.”17 The revolution, depicted in Shafi Adam Shafi’s Kasri ya mwinyi Fuad, and liberation from a feudal society under British rule, starting with the strike of the workers’ union in 1948—the backdrop of both Said Ahmed Mohamed’s Dunia mti mkavu (“The World Is a Dry Tree,” 1980) and Shafi Adam Shafi’s Kuli—became important topics, as did the lingering forms of exploitation and greed.
Thus, in a nutshell, Swahili- and English-language novels have been interpreted according to different paradigms steeped in different institutional logics. For literary scholars, Abdulrazak Gurnah’s narratives have provided a crucial lens for zooming in on these entangled histories, while the discipline has mostly ignored the significant tradition and ongoing production of Swahili prose—and poetry—on Zanzibar. At the same time, for Swahili literary critics, the construct of the nation rather than the Indian Ocean has been a prominent way of reading Swahili literature, which, however, also bears interesting Indian Ocean references, as I will show. Thus, the Indian Ocean is not only a matter of the corpus we take into consideration, but also depends on the templates of reading.18
In a similar vein, I want to make the differences between the novels as well as their interpretation productive to critically expand our readings of Indian Ocean literature. My essay makes an effort to take Swahili literary perspectives on board, dismissing the notion of a “not-yet” novel. It likewise implies a skeptical look at dominant Indian Ocean readings related mostly to English literature, which have hardly helped to broaden perspectives in recent decades. Although Indian Ocean studies and postcolonialism have celebrated fluid, transnational identities and multicultural and multilingual spaces, comparisons between literary imaginations across languages have rarely been made. Rather, in a paradoxical way, the logic of the monolingual, national philologies of the West, concentrated on former colonial languages, has been emphasized.22
Thus, I would like to attempt a relational approach by exploring the coexistence of the two novels’ narratives of Zanzibar—each of which portrays a multicultural and multilingual island, drawing on different, but also overlapping repertoires—in an effort to multiply perspectives, which might not only add to and confirm, but also contradict, ignore, or question each other. In this essay, by reading Vuta n’kuvute in conversation with Gurnah’s By the Sea, and hence also as an Indian Ocean narrative, I will further show how Shafi’s novel critically interrogates some dominant interpretive patterns in Indian Ocean
My aim is not to find a more ‘authentic’ construction of a Zanzibari world: I am by no means trying to argue for one ‘genuine’ Zanzibari novel, weighing the biographies and languages of the authors against each other to decide who is allowed to speak (as is so often done at the moment). Zanzibar can be equally imagined in English and in Swahili. I do not find the many controversies about Gurnah’s ‘Africanness’ and the question of whether he is an ‘African’ writer, which emerged virulently after his winning the Nobel Prize, productive or even relevant.23 Firstly, pigeonholing (African) identities is misleading as a multicultural place like Zanzibar in particular constantly reminds us. In an interview with Deutsche Welle, Gurnah explains, “I know my identity, which is that I am a man from Zanzibar who lives in the UK and I write. This is my identity. I don’t say, I’m an African writer or I’m a British writer or whatever. I’m from Zanzibar and I live in the UK. I’m from both of these places in any possible way you can think of.”24 This is a statement one can understand with regard to identity, arguing for multiple and layered affiliations, but also as an invitation to read the literary text as drawing on multiple narratives, imaginaries, and semantics.
In the following, I will first give summaries of both novels.
Vuta n’kuvute (“Tug of War”) is set in Zanzibar Town at the time of the political awakening of the 1950s and 1960s, right before Tanganyika’s independence. The protagonist is the young Yasmin, a Zanzibari Indian from an Ithna-Ashari Muslim family of Gujarati descent, who flees her unhappy arranged marriage with the much older Bwana Reza. Expelled from her strict family, she crosses a racial border, taking refuge with her only “African” friend, Mwajuma, in the former slave quarter of Zanzibar Town, Ng’ambu. Mwajuma, who struggles to make ends meet, shows Yasmin what it means to enjoy life: she takes Yasmin to taarab concerts, which Yasmin grows increasingly enthusiastic about. Eventually, she meets Denge, a rebellious Zanzibari who studied in Russia and is now part of the struggle for independence against British rule, translating and smuggling pamphlets of Soviet propaganda to the island. Yasmin falls passionately in love with him and gives birth to their son, but Denge is so dedicated to the political struggle that he cannot marry her: his responsibility toward society is bigger. Denge is the prototypical intellectual activist, who often disappears—for instance, on a meandering journey to Europe—only to reappear after some time. With the help of his friends, he is always one step ahead of the British police inspector Wright, hilariously portrayed through his Anglicized Swahili. When Denge is finally arrested, he struggles under the harsh conditions in prison. But Yasmin and his friends hatch a scheme to allow him to escape on a dhow that takes him to the northern part of the coast. The novel ends with Yasmin getting married to Bukheti, an earlier acquaintance and Swahili merchant, while Denge writes a postcard from China.
2.2 By the Sea
In By the Sea, the main protagonist, Saleh Omar, a Zanzibari man in his mid-sixties, arrives in the UK as a refugee. An air of tragic secrecy surrounds Saleh, the cause of which lies in the past, and is only gradually revealed—mostly in conversations with Latif, a university lecturer who left Zanzibar in the 1960s and is surprised to be called on to interpret for Saleh, who uses his father’s name, Rajab Shabaan. Little by little, the reader learns from suspense-inducing flashbacks about the interlinked fates of their families, dating back to the 1960s and 1970s—approximately the same period as in Vuta n’kuvute. Saleh Omar had owned a furniture shop in Zanzibar Town in the 1960s. When Hussein, a Persian merchant, arrives from across the Indian Ocean, he sets a series of disastrous events in motion: he takes a loan from Saleh and, after seducing Latif’s brother Hassan, disappears with him. The growing shame of Latif’s family is fatally connected with that of Saleh Omar, as Hussein had offered the house of Rajab Shabaan, Hassan and Latif’s father, as security for the loan, which he
On meeting Saleh, Latif not only has to confront his suppressed past, but also learns to see his troubled family from a different perspective. Saleh was not merely the malicious thief of their house, as his family portrayed him: not only did he strive for compromise with Rajab, but his own life was also less fortunate than Latif had imagined. Hardship befell him in the new context of the socialist state: Rajab, climbing the ladder of the new system, moved back into his house, while Saleh was imprisoned, suffering in a series of detention camps. The Zanzibar he finds upon his release in 1979 has changed drastically, his wife and daughter having passed away in the meantime, and he retreats into his store, regarded by others as a “man destroyed by prison and personal tragedy.”25 When the long-lost Hassan returns and threatens to take him to court, Saleh decides to escape to the UK with a false passport issued on Rajab Shaaban’s birth certificate.
3 Imagining Zanzibar in Relation
In both Vuta n’kuvute and By the Sea, which are anything but chamber pieces, Zanzibar is portrayed as a gravitational center entangled in a much wider world in flux. Both novels enforce a relational perspective prominent in studying the Indian Ocean: in Reimagining the Indian Ocean, Srinivas, Ng’weno and Jeychandran dismiss the notion of clearly defined areas while highlighting a conceptual and theoretical relationality that sees locations defined by networks and their boundaries as constantly in the making.26 It is its own fluidity that turns the ocean as such into a potent metaphor, which Datta, for instance, views as a “method of relation, and in fact, as the condition of relation.”27 It is
While Gurnah has already been characterized as a pioneering figure in representing “East African locations of Indian Ocean relations,”29 Shafi’s novel, too, as I wish to argue here, constructs Zanzibar primarily as entangled in the “competing relations within the cultural hotch-potch of colonised territories,” as Gurnah describes it in his essay “Imagining the Postcolonial Writer.”30 In both novels, Zanzibar exists under the broader influences of the waning colonial empire, the grumbling sultanate and Indian Ocean networks, but also that of a changing world order increasingly shaped by Cold War dynamics.31 While in By the Sea, Latif studies in the GDR because there is no other viable option, Denge’s studies in Russia and his connections with European socialists have made him a committed activist in the struggle for independence. Zanzibari relations are projected onto the UK and far into the Indian Ocean in By the Sea, whereas notions of Russian communism and Pan-Africanism and Indian diaspora communities situate Zanzibar in a broader world in Vuta n’kuvute. Both novels portray a changing world with a complex layered history from the point of view of a specific place in the Indian Ocean.
The troublesome layered history of Zanzibar, whose cacophonies mark the characters’ present reality, is also echoed in the narrative structure. Suggesting a “liquid reading” of By the Sea, Cooppan speaks of the constant proliferation of narratives, creating a network-like structure in By the Sea, built, according to her, after the model of the Tales from the Arabian Nights:32 “The stories,” as one of the characters in By the Sea says, “are always slipping through our fingers,
The small and the large worlds are strongly intertwined. The characters’ drama is intimately interrelated with the changing political map. The fate of the disintegrating families in By the Sea and that of Saleh, who loses everything, or that of Denge, who sacrifices everything for a larger-than-life political cause, independence, and the abolition of feudalism, are potent metaphors for the profound, earth-shattering changes, recalling Fredric Jameson’s dictum about the necessarily allegorical relationship between the nation and the individual in the postcolonial world.35
In By the Sea, it is first colonialism, with its restrictive maps, and later, the revolution and the intrusion of the nation-state that mark the end of cosmopolitan Zanzibar—and coincide with the beginning of Saleh’s suffering (he takes over Rajab Shabaan’s house the year of the revolution). In an allegorical fashion, Hussein appears in the “blessed musim”36 of 1960, before independence, and disappears with Hassan beyond the horizon, “when Zanzibar cedes its position as terminus of the dhow trade,”37 right before the revolution and, later, the formation of the new socialist state.38 Hussein, “a Persian from Bahrain, as he was quick to remind anyone who mistook him for an Arab or an Indian”39— whose stories of his forefathers sketch out a network spanning the ocean; who comes to Saleh’s shop, itself an archive of the Indian Ocean, to converse with him in English—conjures the cosmopolitan air of Zanzibar in the 1950s and 1960s, where references to Shakespeare, modern cinema, and a repertoire of Islamic oral narratives like the Miʿraj, the Prophet’s night
The Zanzibar of Saleh’s memories is a Zanzibar of the past. The only possible temporal perspective is that of looking back, which corresponds to the vision of the migrant—for whom the present is but an afterlife of the past, not a new beginning. Like Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” to whom he makes repeated reference, he remains passive and silent, “preferring rather not” to act nor to speak on his arrival. However, Zanzibar constantly re-emerges in memories, not as a paradise lost, but as a continuous source of festering wounds caused by the family tragedies of the past that shape the present. Latif comments on it in a passage that reads like a metacomment on the novel: “It’s all history, anyway. None of it matters, really. I am not saying that history does not matter, knowing what happened so we understand what we are all about, and how we came to be as we are, and what stories we tell about it all. I mean, I don’t want recriminations, all this family business, all this muttering that stretches further back. Have you noticed the incredible consequences of family squabbles in the history of Islamic societies?”42 Hence, rather than political forces, it is “family squabbles” that are the drivers of history, as Latif seems to suggest. The larger narrative drama of the revolution, independence, and the politics of nationalization do not cause but rather echo life-shaping forces like love, passion, greed, shame, and honor, which befall the protagonists in a similar way as in Greek tragedy and create bonds over generations. Like in Gurnah’s Paradise (1994), where Yusuf is placed in the possession of Uncle Aziz to pay back an old debt, or in Gravel Heart (2018), where Salim has to return to Zanzibar after years in the UK to unravel the secrets of an ugly family affair, time in By the Sea is not strictly that of an individual’s lifetime, but is defined by relations or networks of kin that the individual cannot liberate him- or herself from—not even when far from Zanzibar. An individual’s fate is linked to that of family, extending into the past, and often also crossing the Indian Ocean to other distant family members.
To quite a large extent, Vuta n’kuvute provides a complementary perspective to By the Sea. While the past weighs the characters down in By the Sea, in Vuta n’kuvute, Zanzibar’s present prevails; the future is full of possibilities.
In some parts, Vuta n’kuvute becomes, according to Garnier, a roman à thèse, since the characters are often (not but exclusively) made to embody a Marxist political agenda and ideology of liberation: “Shafi Adam Shafi is without doubt a Swahili novelist who has best managed to directly transplant political discourse into the novel’s discourse. His novel features militants involved in a fight, which leaves no uncertainties.”45 Just as many Zanzibari novels of that time, “influenced by Marxist credo,” it explored “the proletariat as the ‘new man’”46 and female characters like Yasmin also became main protagonists, struggling to find their way between oppressive family structures and the lures of modernity—like Bahati in the acclaimed novel Kiu (“Thirst,” 1972), Rehema in Mohamed Suleiman Mohamed’s Nyota ya Rehema (“Rehema’s Star,” 1976), Maimuna in Said Ahmed Mohammed’s Utengano (“Separation,” 1980), and Bi Khadija and Zahra in Zainab Alwi Baharoon’s Mungu hakopeshwi (“God Does Not Give Loans,” 2017).
Reading the two novels in relation, By the Sea, on the one hand, offers a perspective of the revolution’s aftermath that seems to “ask back” about the atrocities and violence of the revolution, which Vuta n’kuvute does not picture. On the other hand, Shafi’s Vuta N’kuvute seems to question the melancholy and
And what about a perspective that celebrates the revolution? For Denge, the revolution does not imply a catastrophe ending a glorious past; on the contrary, it will do away with a past that only exists in the form of ills like racism, feudalism, and colonialism that must be overcome.48 Vuta N’kuvute seems to ask about perspectives on Indian Ocean connections from the point of view of the less privileged, questioning the strict segregation, whose constraints play out chiefly in the character of Yasmin, who manages to liberate herself as a woman. Interestingly, Shafi Adam Shafi, like a number of Swahili writers of the time, chooses women as important protagonists, yet these have often been neglected in Indian Ocean studies, since they do not seem to fit the prevailing narrative of trade relations.49
An interesting entry point to further exploring the different semantics of the two novels entails a closer examination of the construction of space, as I will turn to below, as space is a potent metaphor in both novels. While By the Sea is significantly set among the houses of Stone Town, next to the sultan’s palace that marks the center of the Indian Ocean trade, Vuta n’kuvute’s setting, the poor neighborhood of Ng’ambu, seems to ask about the Indian Ocean narratives of those who were not merchants involved in trade, but the descendants of former slaves and other migrants from the African hinterland.
In the following, I wish to expand the dialogic reading of Gurnah and Shafi through another form of relationality, examining the relations between characters and concrete space and materiality: connectivity is also material and experienced through the senses. In By the Sea, the characters are haunted by objects. Though many years have passed since his leaving Zanzibar, Latif observes, “I want to look forward, but I always find myself looking back, poking about in times so long ago and so diminished by other events since then, tyrant events which loom large over me and dictate every ordinary action. Yet when I look back, I find some objects still gleam with a bright malevolence and every memory draws blood.”50 It is particularly the infamous “beautiful table”51—which Saleh once sold to the merchant trading in Latif’s “beautiful” brother52—that distills both a family tragedy as well as far-reaching Indian Ocean routes.53 The ebony table, “on three delicately bowed legs”54—an exquisite accessory of intimate leisure hours wiled away, and an index of elegant cosmopolitanism that Saleh cannot part with—comes with “a vital power, and often an ambiguity,” as Meg Samuelson highlights.55
The material and the social world are interconnected in the novel, “a story revolving around property and things:”56 the relationship between Saleh’s and Latif’s families materializes in the houses they gain and lose, as I wish to stress in the current reading. Digging deeper into the intimate connection between social relations and the house, I would propose, as a thought-provoking entry point, the Swahili term nyumba, which refers to the stone houses (in contrast to the mud houses in Ng’ambu as well as their residents, the family, and signal a proud form of urbanity, essentially marked by Indian Ocean trade and Islamic networks, which “made them different from those they despised”57—the former slaves, workers, and dependents living in the villages and the quarters outside of town, so prominently depicted in Vuta n’kuvute. On Zanzibar, as in many other coastal Swahili towns, urban space (as defined by the architecture of the coral-stone houses) and social relations are interlinked: “relations based upon space, are largely expressed and sanctioned in terms of genealogical
His new ‘home’ in the UK is a distorted mirror image of his hometown of Zanzibar—as is the landscape. Saleh frequently draws comparisons with the Old Town of Zanzibar, where he spent most of his life: “I live in a small town by the sea, as I have all my life, though for most of it, it was by a warm green ocean a long way from here.”60 There is a sense of alienation in his comparisons: while the ocean in front of his new door is cold and “murky”61 and obstructs his view of anything else—like the brick wall in front of Bartleby’s office in Melville’s narrative—the “warm green” Indian Ocean of his memories opened up onto the larger, seamless horizon that Zanzibar had been part of for centuries, a passage for “intrepid traders and sailors” who brought “goods and their God and their way of looking at the world, their stories and their songs and prayers.”62 Lost and displaced, living the “half-life of a stranger,”63 he seeks comfort walking through the huge furniture shops in the new “town by the sea,” only to be driven away by the “tiny particles of artificial fibres which fill the air and which corrode the lining of my nostrils and bronchials:”64 the new environment seems toxic. He longs for his shop in Zanzibar Old Town, where he sold mostly antiques that came with the monsoon winds of the ocean, as did “traders from Arabia, the Gulf, India and Sind, and the Horn of Africa.”65 The
In Vuta n’kuvute, it is not the urban context of Zanzibar—that of the sultan, the patricians, merchants, and the educated employees of the administration—that is in focus, but the commoners’ town, Ng’ambu, which literally means “beyond,” “the place on the other side,” the quarters of the former slaves, workers, and servants.66 Historically, Ng’ambu refers to the area outside of Stone Town, both architecturally and spatially differentiated from it—there was a creek separating Stone Town and Ng’ambu—comprised of smaller “mud and thatch houses”: “In these [houses] live non-patricians, ranging from families of ex-slaves, to high status masharifu of recent arrival, and those who have lived in the town for a very long time, but never gained patrician status.”67 As in his earlier novels, Kuli and Kasri ya mwinyi Fuad, which feature the liberation struggles of the hard-working servants, slaves, and dockworkers exploited and despised by “Arab” overlords and British colonialists, Shafi Adam Shafi draws a picture of a part of society in the shadows of Stone Town.
The urban map is characterized by segregation based on race and social class, and Yasmin, from an Indian Ithna-Ashari background and thus belonging to Stone Town, is described as crossing this line, taking refuge in and becoming part of Ng’ambu, also repeatedly referred to as “Uswahilini” (“Swahili world”) in the novel and constructed in opposition to the rich but restrictive city of Stone Town: “Yasmin is not a city person anymore. She is a Ng’ambu person. She is not of that place with wooden balconies and the mansions of dignitaries. Now she lives in the huts of the Swahili world; she has immersed herself in the very foundations of this life here” (“[…] Yasmin si wa mjini tena. Ni wa Ng’ambu. Siye wa kule kwenye maroshani na majumba ya watukufu. Yeye sasa yumo ndani ya vibanda vya Uswahili, amezama katika mizizi katika maisha ya huko).”68 Ng’ambu entails a “Swahili lifestyle” (“Maisha ya Uswahilini),”69 full of improvisation, sometimes poverty, but also music and joy, free from the many conventions that trouble Stone Town; here, in Ng’ambu, women like Yasmin and Mwajuma can live alone, enjoying themselves at taarab concerts, dance halls, the cinema, and nights of passionate love, joking with (male) friends who come over with bottles of spirits under their arms.70 Survival is
Most captivating are the vivid depictions of the taarab concerts in Ng’ambu.76 If By the Sea is a story of “powerful” objects “thick with meaning,” as Cooppan writes,77 Vuta n’kuvute is a story of taarab music, which creates a powerful aesthetic experience in its literal sense of sensuous perception. Cooppan underlines the importance of an approach to the Indian Ocean that highlights the senses as a form of knowledge that cannot easily be paraphrased, as I also wish to emphasize here. Taarab changes Yasmin’s life and fosters her experiences of freedom. It epitomizes the spirit of ‘Uswahilini’ in Ng’ambu and indexes another history of Indian Ocean entanglements. Music thus becomes a way of defining space, speaking to Srinivas, Ng’weno, and Jeychandran’s notion of place-making in the Indian Ocean, which is not only a translocal network, but also manifests in specific places.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, taarab, originally an orchestral music genre confined to the sultan’s court and incorporating various musical influences (most prominently from Egypt, the Middle East, and sometimes
The musical instruments that distinguish the taarab of Ng’ambu and produce its typical soundscape are described in great detail in Vuta n’kuvute: the fiddle lies on the shoulder of the musician, “who stroke the cords so well, producing a music that would bring a snake out of the cave” (“kuzikwaruzakwaruza nyuzi zikitoa muziki wa kumtoa nyoka pangoni),”81 while the player of the dumbak, a newly introduced goblet drum, “gave the music its rhythm and choruses” (“akuupa ule muziki mizani na vibwagizo).”82 83 The swaying women follow along by clapping, while the “rattle” (“kayamba”),”84 adapted from the dance genres of the mainland, adds an exhilarating effect to the music—“the music rejoiced” (“muziki ukachangamka”)85—which stirs yet more women to join in, “taken hostage by the joy and delights of that night” (“waliotekwa na raha na starehe ya usiku ule”).”86 In the novel, the sophistication of the singer, the renowned Bakari Shirizi, an important taarab singer of the early twentieth century, is depicted with an elegant appearance, wearing a suit,
The taarab of Ng’ambu is that of a female world in motion. Historically, Siti Binti Saad played an important role, firstly in encouraging the foundation of woman’s taarab clubs, giving women the possibility to determine the kind of entertainment they wanted: an aspect that the novel sketches out in a palpable way.88 As depicted in the novel, concerts take place in quickly improvised spaces, demarcated by the “textile of sails” (“kitambaa cha tanga”, p. 62) and “canvas” (“maturubali,” p. 62) used to shield the concert from the curious gaze of male “fans” (“mashabiki,” p. 62) squatting outside, eager to catch at least a glimpse of the high-spirited women inside, “one more beautifully adorned than the other” (“kila mmoja kajipamba kuliko mwenzake,” p. 63). The female world of Ng’ambu, as Shafi sketches out in the novel, draws on memories of flourishing women’s taarab clubs, host to musical groups with female singers playing for female audiences outside the palace and Stone Town.
In the novel, the taarab scenes become a potent allegory of the women’s search for liberation. Music accompanies Yasmin’s own coming-of-age: she becomes a singer of a taarab group. It is the music, more than anything else, that makes her feel at home in Ng’ambu, and, taking hold of her body, makes her conscious of her own femininity and autonomy. In times of intense social change, music, providing a meaningful sensuous experience, gives people an opportunity to “define who they are, who they are not and who they wish to be.”89 The novel portrays what Fair considers the revolutionary potential of the music,90 since it not only overrides racial boundaries, drawing musically on both mainland African as well as a variety of Indian Ocean influences, but also becomes a means by which women are able to protest against personal and sexual subordination. In its powerful quality of speaking to the senses, music
The political map is hence an audible or sensuous map. There is a bodily knowledge of a local and a wider world and a bright future full of possibilities that the women acquire through the music. The novel seems to underline a reading of the Indian Ocean as manifesting itself in localized practices and specific sensuous experiences. It thus invites us to include local narratives, sound worlds of music, practices of dancing, narrating, and singing, and all kinds of repertoires of popular culture—not least, as the novel seems to suggest, because they provide key ways of bringing women, former slaves, and others typically in the shadow of Indian Ocean narratives to the fore.
4 Conclusion
In this contribution, I have brought two novels into conversation, allowing them to interrogate each other with the aim of broadening perspectives in Indian Ocean literary studies. Though the novels belong to two different literary worlds (and dominant discourses) and differ in the maps they sketch out, we cannot easily construct the novels along the lines of sheer dichotomy. Vuta n’kuvute is a polyphonous narrative, as I have tried to show, and can hardly be unequivocally defined as simply mapping out a narrower—or more narrow-minded—map of its world in dichotomous opposition to the ‘wordly’ By the Sea. In both novels, the intimate world of the characters is steeped in
I do think that these observations can have implications for the project of Indian Ocean literary studies at large, which has often favored a one-sided
We must question the narrow frame of interpretation that excludes many literary works by contemporary authors in and around the Indian Ocean writing in ‘minor’ languages, like Arabic, Hindi, Malay, or Swahili, that are affiliated with many worlds. What about the narratives in local languages and popular music emerging from the shadows of the unassuming entrepots Shafi explores in Vuta n’kuvute? Given the emphasis on historical perspectives in Indian Ocean studies, don’t we need to extend these perspectives into the present and also allow for a more multivocal account of Indian Ocean narratives, highlighting the paradoxes and the simultaneity of narratives beyond dichotomies like that of ‘local’ and ‘cosmopolitan,’ ‘national’ and ‘oceanic’? What about narratives in which the nation is a genuine concern among others:98 are they not part of Indian Ocean history as well? Do we not also need to acknowledge the difficulty of sometimes even incongruous narratives, like the rigid plot of class struggle in Vuta n’kuvute and its praises of a new nation, that do not easily ‘fit,’ and hence question dominant, well-established frames, typologies, and expectations?
Thus, instead of reading a limited set of narratives insofar as they speak to established discourses on the Indian Ocean, I suggest heeding the variety of narratives and genres in the Indian Ocean and reading them for how they imagine larger worlds, but sometimes also carve out smaller worlds, in intertextual relation to the specific repertoires at hand, rooted in local semantics. It is an exploration of the multilayeredness of narratives, drawing on various repertoires, stories, and imageries coming from multiple directions, including (but not favoring) the West, as well as their complicated relations, that seems to me the most promising project for a study of Indian Ocean literatures and their worlds. Needless to add that the translation of more Swahili novels into
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Werberger, A. “Theory from the East.” Paper presented at the workshop Location of Theory, European University Viadrina Frankfurt/Oder, February 2020.
Whiteley, W. Swahili: The Rise of a National Language. London: Methuen, 1969.
For an overview, see E. Bertoncini Zúbková et al., eds., Outline of Swahili Literature: Prose Fiction and Drama (Leiden: Brill, 2009). There have been a few attempts to bring English- and Swahili-language East African literature together, such as, for instance, Mwangi’s critical interrogation of postcolonial discourses in East Africa in Africa Writes Back to Self: Metafiction, Gender, Sexuality (Albany: State University Press of New York, 2009), and the volume edited by L. Diegner and F. Schulze-Engler, Habari ya Kiswahili? What about English? East Africa as a Literary and Linguistic Contact Zone (Leiden: Brill, 2015), which sets out to address this rift in scholarship.
For a pioneering critical discussion, see L. Diegner and F. Schulze-Engler, “Habari ya Contact Zone? East African Literature Revisited,” in Habari ya Kiswahili? What about English? East Africa as a Literary and Linguistic Contact Zone, ed. L. Diegner and F. Schulze-Engler (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 1–22. This largely holds both for East African academia as well as beyond it; in the former case, this might be even more surprising, given that not only are many authors minimally bilingual, but so are the scholars.
See also K. Kresse and C. Vierke, “Swahili Language and Literature as Resources for Indian Ocean Studies,” History Compass 20 (2022): 1–14.
In his memoirs, Mbali na nyumbani (“Far Away from Home”), Shafi Adam Shafi gives a vivid account of his journey. As for his intellectual career, see the informative interview in A. Shafi and L. Diegner, “Mazungumzo na Adam Shafi juu ya Uandishi wake wa Riwaya,” Swahili Forum 18 (2011): 37–68, as well as the YouTube clip “Adam Shafi juu ya Maisha yake na kazi zake” (“Adam Shafi on His Life and Works”): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xKTJCBertXQ. For an interview with Abdulrazak Gurnah on his life and works, see T. Steiner, “A Conversation with Abdulrazak Gurnah,” English Studies in Africa 56, no. 1 (2013): 157–167.
Many intellectuals were imprisoned without trial at that time—an experience that informed his novel Haini (“The Traitor,” 2013).
See also E. Bertoncini Zúbková et al., Outline of Swahili literature, 151 and X. Garnier, Le roman Swahili. La notion de ‘Littérature mineure’ à l’épreuve (Paris: Karthala, 2006), 122ff. Later literary works, besides the already mentioned Haini (“Traitor,” 2003), include Mbali na nyumbani (“Far Away from Home,” 2013) and Mtoto wa mama (“Mother’s Child,” 2018). Kasri ya mwinyi Fuad has been translated into French, German, and Russian; Kuli has also been translated into Russian. The film adaptation of Vuta n’kuvute by the Tanzanian filmmaker Amil Shivji debuted at the Toronto film festival in 2021 and has been internationally acclaimed.
It is the only novel of his that has been translated into Swahili in a recent translation by Ida Hadjivayanis.
I. Hofmeyr, “Universalizing the Indian Ocean,” PMLA 125, no. 3 (2010): 723.
Steiner, “A Conversation with Abdulrazak Gurnah,” 160–161.
C. Moser and L. Simonis, “Einleitung: Das globale Imaginäre,” in Figuren des Globalen. Weltbezug und Welterzeugung in Literatur, Kunst und Medien, ed. C. Moser and L. Simonis (Göttingen: V&R Unipress, 2014), 14.
See X. Garnier, Le roman Swahili. La notion de la ‘Littérature mineure’ à l’epreuve (Paris: Karthala, 2006).
See also X. Garnier, Le roman Swahili and C. Vierke, “‘What Is There in My Speaking’: Re-explorations of Language in Abdilatif Abdalla’s Anthology of Prison Poetry, Sauti Ya Dhiki,” African Literatures 48, no. 1 (2017): 135–157.
K. Barber and G. Furniss, “African-language Writing,” RAL 37, no. 3 (2006): 6.
S. A. K. Mlacha, “Riwaya za Visiwani (1970–1980) na Ujenzi wa Jamii Mpya,” Mulika 16 (1984): 4.
See O. A. Adam, “Kuchunguza Dhamira za Kijamii na Kiutamaduni katika Riwaya ya Kiswahili: Mifano kutoka Kuli na Vuta N’Kuvute” (PhD diss., Free University Tanzania, 2014) and S. A. K. Mlacha and J. S. Madumulla, Riwaya ya Kiswahili (Dar es Salaam University Press, 1991).
See Diegner and Schulze-Engler, “Habari ya Contact Zone?” and W. Whiteley, Swahili: The Rise of a National Language (London: Methuen, 1969).
Garnier, Le roman Swahili, 17 (translation mine); see also Mlacha, “Riwaya za Visiwani,” 4ff. and F. Aiello, “Investigating Topics and Style in Vuta N’kuvute by Shafi Adam Shafi,” AAP 72/Swahili Forum 9 (2002), 35.
See also J. Verne and M. Verne, “Introduction: The Indian Ocean as Aesthetic Space,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 37, no. 2 (2017): 315.
Diegner and Schulze-Engler, “Habari ya Contact Zone?,” 7.
For instance, A. Werberger traced similar patterns in discourse on Yiddish and Eastern European languages in “Theory from the East” (paper presented at the workshop Location of Theory, European University Viadrina Frankfurt/Oder, February 2020).
See, for instance, M. Arenberg, “Studying African Literature in the Age of the Global,” Africa Today 63, no. 2 (2016): 117–120 and S. Marzagora, “African-language Literatures and the ‘Transnational Turn’ in Euro-American Humanities,” Journal of Cultural Studies 27, no. 1 (2015): 40–55.
See also C. Vierke, “Other Worlds: The ‘Prophet’s Ascension’ as World Literature and Its Adaptation in Swahili-speaking East Africa,” in Vergleichende Weltliteraturen/Comparative World Literatures, ed. D. Lamping, G. Tihanov, and M. Bortmuth (Berlin: Metzler, 2019), 215–229.
Also the Nobel Prize Committee fell into clichés of othering the African continent, viewing it primarily in isolation, as Meg Arenberg has intelligently pointed out in “Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Nobel: The Right Award for the Wrong Reason,” New Lines Magazine, November 10, 2021, https://newlinesmag.com/argument/abdulrazak-gurnahs-nobel-the-right-award-for-the-wrong-reason/9.
A. Steffes-Halmer, “Abdulrazak Gurnah on Exile and Literature,” Deutsche Welle, March 18, 2022, https://www.dw.com/en/nobel-laureate-abdulrazak-gurnah-on-exile-and-literature/a-61154081. In the context of the BARAZA Swahili studies conference in London (October 29, 2022), he said, “I come from Indian Zanzibar.” Gurnah, himself of Yemeni descent, described his childhood in the neighborhood of Malindi, each season overflowing with the many merchants who came from across the ocean. As he explained, “You do not leave a place.” There are numerous interviews in which he was asked to comment on how representative he is as an African writer; see, for instance, A. Marshall, “Abdulrazak Gurnah Refuses to Be Boxed In: ‘I Represent Me,’” The New York Times, August, 21, 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/21/books/abdulrazak-gurnah-nobel-book.html.
A. Gurnah, By the Sea (London: Bloomsbury 2001), 235.
S. Srinivas, B. Ng’weno, and N. Jeychandran, “Many Worlds, Many Oceans,” in Reimagining Indian Ocean Worlds, ed. S. Srinivas, B. Ng’weno, and N. Jeychandran (London: Routledge, 2020), 13.
S. M. Datta, “Swahili Transmodernity and the Indian Ocean: Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Ethic of Community in By the Sea, Desertion, and Gravel Heart,” Postcolonial Text 14, nos. 3/4 (2019): 4. Not only have Indian Ocean literary studies—see V. Cooppan, “Object Orientation and Circulatory Form in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s By the Sea,” Comparative Literature 74, no. 2 (2022): 171–185 and M. Samuelson, “Coastal Form: Amphibian Positions, Wider Worlds, and Planetary Horizons on the African Indian Ocean Littoral,” Comparative Literature 69, no. 1 (2017): 16–24—widely explored aquatic metaphors, but so too have diasporic studies focusing on the Atlantic (see the contributions by Fendler and Ndi Shang in this volume, making reference to tidalectics).
Datta, “Swahili Transmodernity,” 4.
Ibid., 8.
A. Gurnah, “Imagining the Postcolonial Writer,” in Reading the “New” Literatures in a Postcolonial Era, ed. Susheila Nasta (Cambridge: Brewer, 2000), 85.
On Indian Ocean cartographies and the importance of maps in By the Sea, see M. Samuelson, “Narrative Cartographies, ‘Beautiful Things’ and Littoral States in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s By the Sea,” English Studies in Africa 56, no. 1 (2013): 78–90 and F. Schulze-Engler, “Africa’s Asian Options—Indian Ocean Imaginaries in East African Literature,” in Beyond the Line: Cultural Narratives of the Southern Oceans, ed. M. Mann and I. Phaf-Rheinberger (Berlin: Neofelis, 2014), 159–178.
Cooppan, “Object Orientation,” 175.
Ibid., 130.
For Vuta n’kuvute, see Aiello, “Investigating Topics and Style“; for By the Sea, see Samuelson, “Narrative Cartographies.”
F. Jameson, “Third-world Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism,” Social Text 15 (1986): 65–88.
Gurnah, By the Sea, 19.
Samuelson, “Narrative Cartographies,” 10.
Samuelson (“Narrative Cartographies,” 86) notes the temporal simultaneity as well, pointing out that 1960 is “the year in which Hussein catalyses the personal and familial tragedies of Saleh,” while it is also “presented as a watershed one in the history […] where it coincides with the steps towards self-rule that will culminate in independence in 1963.”
Gurnah, By the Sea, 19.
Gurnah, By the Sea, 42.
A. Gurnah, “Learning to Read,” in Habari ya Kiswahili? What about English? East Africa as a Literary and Linguistic Contact Zone, ed. L. Diegner and F. Schulze-Engler (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 29.
Gurnah, By the Sea, 195.
See also Garnier, Le roman Swahili, 125.
A. S. Shafi, Vuta n’kuvute (Dar Es Salaam: Mkuki na Nyota 1999), 145.
Garnier, Le roman Swahili, 122; translation mine.
S. A. M. Khamis, “Signs of New Features in the Swahili Novel,” RAL 36, no. 1 (2005): 95.
Srinivas, Ng’weno, and Jeychandran, “Many Worlds.”
This figures most strongly in Shafi’s other novels, with their prevailing hope that the plantation economy and systems of exploitation and racial segregation will come to an end.
See also N. Mahayan, “Seasons of Sail: The Monsoon, Kinship, and Labor in the Dhow Trade,” in Reimagining Indian Ocean Worlds, ed. S. Srinivas, B. Ng’weno, and N. Jeychandran (London: Routledge, 2020), 74; F. Fay, “Women Storying the Swahili Seas: Indian Ocean Feminist Aesthetics and Affective Imaginaries in Lubaina Himid’s Political Painting,” in Intermedial Indian Ocean, ed. U. Fendler and C. Vierke (forthcoming).
Gurnah, By the Sea, 86.
Gurnah, By the Sea, 19.
Gurnah, By the Sea, 20, 30.
See also Cooppan, “Object Orientation.”
Gurnah, By the Sea, 22.
Samuelson, “Narrative Cartographies,” 83.
Ibid., 82.
Gurnah, By the Sea, 15.
M. Horton and J. Middleton, The Swahili: The Social Landscape of a Mercantile Society (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 140. See ibid. on the flexible construction of genealogical categories.
K. Barber, The Anthropology of Texts, Persons and Publics: Oral Written Culture in Africa and Beyond (Cambridge University Press, 2007), 112.
Gurnah, By the Sea, 2.
Gurnah, By the Sea, 2.
Gurnah, By the Sea, 15.
Gurnah, By the Sea, 2.
Gurnah, By the Sea, 3.
Gurnah, By the Sea, 14.
In the novel, the standard word “Ng’ambo” is written as “Ng’ambu.”
Horton and Middleton, The Swahili, 125.
Shafi, Vuta n’kuvute , 94.
Shafi, Vuta n’kuvute, 42.
Mwajuma, for instance, is described as a “girl who did not like to torment herself, and she made use of her freedom to live as she wished. She was ready to do anything that she thought could bring her joy without caring what the others would say” (“… ni msichana asiyependa kujikera nafsi yake na aliutumilia uhuru wake wa maisha kama alivyopenda. Alikuwa tayari kufanya lolote lile ambalo alihisi litamletea furaha bila ya kujali wengine watasema nini,” p. 22).
See, for instance, the following passage from By the Sea: “To drink alcohol in that place, after God’s edict against its consumption, was simply to have no fear of indignity, to be foolish beyond recklessness because of the mockery and persecution it invited” (p. 163).
Garnier, Le roman Swahili, 95; translation mine.
See also ibid., 89–90.
Ibid., 92; translation mine.
Shafi, Vuta n’kuvute, 199.
Moreover, the joking dialogues (utani), so much a part of everyday conversation, bring in an element of quotidian orality, turning the novel almost into a play. (On the importance of dialogue, see also Aiello, “Investigating Topics and Style,” 39.)
Cooppan, “Object Orientation,” 174.
L. Fair, Pastimes and Politics: Culture, Community, and Identity in Post-abolition Urban Zanzibar, 1890–1945 (Ohio University Press, 2001), 169ff.
Ibid., 173.
J. Topp Fargion, “The Role of Women in Taarab in Zanzibar: An Historical Examination of a Process of ‘Africanisation,’” World of Music 35, no. 2: 109–125.
Shafi, Vuta n’kuvute, 63.
Shafi, Vuta n’kuvute, 63.
The taarab of Ng’ambu is far more rhythmically pronounced than the more melodic older forms (see also Fair, Pastimes and Politics, 169ff. on nightlife in the “African quarter”).
Shafi, Vuta n’kuvute, 63.
Shafi, Vuta n’kuvute, 63.
Shafi, Vuta n’kuvute, 63.
Shafi, Vuta n’kuvute, 63.
Laura Fair (Pastimes and Politics, 170) also describes the women’s search for “new definitions of femininity, definitions that enhance their autonomy,” already echoed in the taarab music of the 1910s and 1920s, in which both the lyrics and music played an important role.
D. Coplan, In Township Tonight! South Africa’s Black City Music and Theatre (London: Longman, 1985), 232.
Fair, Pastimes and Politics, 170ff.
Shafi, Vuta n’kuvute, 62.
Shafi, Vuta n’kuvute, 63.
Shafi, Vuta n’kuvute, 30.
Aiello, “Investigating Topics and Style,” 40.
Gurnah, “Learning to Read,” 39.
See also Datta, “Swahili Transmodernity.”
Cooppan, “Object Orientation,” 182.
See Marzagora, “African-language Literatures and the ‘Transnational Turn.’”