“The trauma experienced by an immigrant family is transmitted to the next generation”

Abdulrazak Gurnah, Nobel Prize for Literature. A author so discreet that when he obtained the very best award for literature, solely a handful of copies have been out there in Spanish bookstores. It didn’t matter that he had obtained the Booker or that his novel “Paradise” maintained the status reserved for excellent books. However now there are not any extra excuses to eliminate studying it. The Salamandra publishing home is publishing his work. Now he’s publishing “On the shores of the ocean”, his sixth work, a type of texts with evocations of various cultures that synthesize very effectively his principal narrative virtues and the important considerations that often seem in his books: cultural roots, colonialism, immigration and the load of the good metropolises. “I’m satisfied that the trauma skilled by an immigrant household is transmitted in a method or one other to the subsequent era. I got here to England at 18 and I feel it will have been totally different if I had been eleven. At 18, an individual has already lived a life and it’s tough to neglect sure issues. However spending adolescence overseas, with that shared household expertise, I suppose it’s harder due to the confusion it might probably generate in youngsters».

Abdulrazak Gurnah is a novelist of beneficiant response and calculated reflection, who prefers well-threaded reasoning to a headline sentence. An uncommon mental delicacy that permits him to look into the present abysses of the world with serenity. “Now I really feel compassion, as does everybody, for what is going on in Ukraine. What can you are feeling once you see a merciless and malevolent assault on the houses of so many individuals. It’s horrible to witness the conflict in Ukraine. The luck they’ve had, inside their misfortune, is that neighboring international locations have responded with huge understanding in direction of them. Not all cities are obtained that method. However the fact is that you may solely really feel disappointment once you see these folks run away and lose their family members.

The novelist, who’s optimistic about the way forward for literature, however who doesn’t pour extraordinary capacities on books to make folks change and evolve, does qualify the evident distinction with which Europe welcomes some immigrants and others. “I’m not stunned by the final sympathy in Europe in direction of the Ukrainians, as a result of they’re household in a method. However yeah it’s unhappy that this sort of human concern doesn’t additionally prolong to Afghans, Syrians or refugees from Iraq. This has served to reveal the biased perspective that exists in direction of folks from different international locations».

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Abdulrazak Gurnah referred to the colonial world, with its excellent injustices, and this world of large migrations, which additionally drag their very own, that are under no circumstances minor. «I’m not certain that readers right this moment are extra conscious or extra understanding of refugees and displaced folks than in different instances, however they should be extra delicate, if solely as a result of these horrible occasions seem within the newspapers: there we see how folks drown within the sea. It’s plain that there was a better consciousness, however it is usually true that in some components of Europe there may be nonetheless some reluctance ». And right here the author underlines one side: «There’s a reticence in direction of strangers and that’s nothing new. However above all it has to do with individuals who come from the south of the world, and this has to do with racism. Not all nations reply the identical. Germany, Spain and Portugal have taken in many individuals, however in different international locations the motion of individuals is spoken of as in the event that they got here right here to steal our prosperity and damage our comfy lives.”

The position that literature performs in an issue of this huge gravity consists, for him, in its capability to arouse empathy in readers and transmit data. “It’s not nearly migration, however literature teaches us issues we don’t know. We learn books for various causes, for the pleasure of coming into a textual content, discovering fantastically written phrases, delving into an episode, or understanding an individual. Literature helps us to acknowledge ourselves. But additionally to know what was not recognized and to do it in a deeper method. Literature permits humanizing educational data and disseminating it. It makes data accessible to us and permits us to enter into experiences».