“We did not ask you to come, and we have no welcome for you. Your intentions are not generous, and by coming among us you only bring us evil and calamity. You have come here to do us harm. We have suffered from others like you who have preceded you, and have no intention of suffering again. They came among our neighbours and captured them and took them away. […] After their first visit to our land only calamities have befallen us. And you have come to add to them. Our crops do not grow, children are born lame and diseased, our animals die from unheard-of diseases.”
Paradise by Abdulrazak Gurnah offers a story shaped around the Biblical and Quranic references, and set in East Africa during the German colonization. The story is centered around a young boy Yusuf, whose Dad sells him to a merchant called Aziz in exchange for paying off his debts. Yusuf is a young child thrown into an adult world, trying to preserve his innocence. The readers are immersed into the East African society made of various Bantu tribes (one of them being Swahili), Indians, Arabs, and Europeans.
On one side, we have the Swahili, who see themselves as inferior to the Indians, who work under the Germans, the occupying force. Both the Swahili and the Indians are colonized, yet they deal with their situations quite differently (_“The Indian knows how to deal with the European. We have no choice but to work with him.”_) Europeans, however, are the mythical creatures of enormous strength and severe brutality. Germans exploit, punish, kill. Belgians, who were winning territories to the west, are the most brutal ones, according to the natives. Dutch in South Africa have also been known to be murderous monsters and beasts.
On the other hand, the native Bantu tribes inhabiting central and west Tanzania and Democratic Republic of Congo are enslaved, killed, and seen as “savage or demonic beasts” by other groups. I personally preferred reading about the native experience of the bloody and brutal Western European colonization, as I feel like that experience is largely overlooked, drowned in numbers, and underrepresented in today’s mainstream literature. Gurnah’s writing, resembling that of Márquez, painted a perfect pictures of these native tribes interacting with the colonizers and other ethnic groups who do not wish them well. Gurnah presented how the beauty of their settlements and the wisdom of their chiefs (most notably, Chatu), was used and overrun by the white colonizers.
However, what made this a 4 star read instead of 5 for me was the ending. The writing and the plot started going south in the last 50 or so pages, and it put me off. That is one of the main reasons this one took so long to review.
“In their eyes we’re animals, and we can’t make them stop thinking this stupid thing for a long time. Do you know why they’re so strong? Because they have been feeding off the world for centuries.”
