First Amendment:
The current Nobel Prize in Literature had to look for it. Also in his native Zanzibar, he reads more in Swahili and has not escaped the strange spin of the Swedish Academy. Hence, there is the African writer’s fascination, fifth out of 117 winners, with simple prose that travels through the racism and horrors of German and Asian colonialism, as well as the uprooting he experienced first-hand. But at the same time he repeats a masculine and in English profile, far from the diversity that the institution is proud of.
Profile Abdul Razzaq Jarna, a teacher and author of novels and short stories – among them “Heaven”, “By the Sea” and “After Life” – were captured in this program. Before he became the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature, which surprised him more or more than other human beings, his journey was that of a writer born out of the need to remember Tanzania and the continent that was robbed of him.
As a Zanzibar refugee in the UK and of Muslim origin, he studied at the University of Kent and became a member of the Royal Society of Literature. Always investigate and reflect on all the horrors unleashed by colonialism and postcolonialism, yes, with a special look inside the grand staircase that African literature assumes.
Examples include his description of the Asian communities in East Africa, the racism emanating from them, as well as the imposition of the Germans, less descriptive than the English or the French, who, in turn, reached a contradictory and unequal continent.
However, without detracting from the work of Gourna, as the days go by, this Nobel is celebrated not so much as an African, but as an award that seems out of the West, celebrating other themes, but not escaping from the West. In this case, from the British and normative, about an author who lived or still lives in Europe. And there, as every year, the question is: Did the Swedish Academy that awards this award manage to understand diversity or does it fall into the same dynamic as always?
On this date we are also talking about the first film shot in space that Russia applied to the United States; The rise of French cinema and the economic support it receives from the state; And the cool premiere of a billboard that was explained only with “007” or “license to kill”.
“Thinker. Professional twitter fanatic. Certified introvert. Troublemaker. Unapologetic zombie maven.”