Tuesday, December 20

A little bit of literature

“He saw two Europeans on the railway platform at that time, the first he had ever seen. He was not frightened, not at first. He went to the station often, to watch the trains come noisily and gracefully in, and then to wait for them to haul themselves out again, marshalled by the scowling Indian signalman with his pennants and whistle. Often Yusuf waited hours for a train to arrive.”

“The teacher was in no hurry to see the children complete their studies. Once a child had successfully read the Koran from beginning to end, that was one fee less a month for the teacher. It was expected that a child would attend classes for five years before the studies were complete. This was fair to both teacher and pupils. The children did many chores for the teacher, cleaning the house, fetching firewood, running errands. The boys played truant when they could and were often thrashed. Girls were only ever hit on the palm of the hand and were taught to behave decorously. Respect yourself and others will come to respect you. That is true about all of us, but especially true about women. That is the meaning of honour, their teacher told them. This was all as it had always been, as far as anyone knew or could remember, and the little boys and girls crowded on the mat in the teacher’s backyard chanted their lessons with predictable reluctance and forbearance. In due course Yusuf would have graduated and counted himself honourable among his peers and elders. But he was sent away.”

Vocabulary build-up

The adjective scowl means “having a gloomy or threatening expression; sullen or unfriendly in appearance; not disposed to friendship or friendliness.” Close synonyms are “unfriendly”, “frowning”, and “displeased”.

In this context, the transitive verb attend means “to be present, as at a scheduled event.”

The term pupils means simply "students". It is a term more commonly used in British English.

We highlighted the noun honour because it is written in British English. In the American form, it would be honor. You must be careful with spelling in the exam and be coherent with the style you chose. You cannot begin a sentence using American English and finish it with British.

The noun forbearance means “tolerance and restraint in the face of provocation; patience; a refraining from the enforcement of something (as a debt, right, or obligation) that is due.” 

Comments

Abdulrazak Gurnah, a Tanzanian-born British writer who fled to the United Kingdom as a refugee in the 1960s during the Zanzibar Revolution, won the 2021 Nobel Prize due to his affecting description of the effects of colonialism in Africa and the fates of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents. As an English and postcolonial literature professor, he not only wrote a number of academic essays about the subject, but also short stories and novels. His commercial success, however, only flourished after he was awarded with the Nobel Prize. Gurnah is the sixth African writer to be awarded with the prize, joining the Argelian Albert Camus and others. Although his first language is Swahili, he has always used English as his literary language. He also introduced elements of Arabic and German in his novels, which enriches the cultural experience of his stories and shows us that English literature is much more than American and British English. 

“Paradise” is a historical novel shortlisted for the Booker Prize of 1994. The book that tells the story of Yusuf in pre-colonial Tanzania, a boy who has a few qualms about the journey he is to make. In essence, the story is about a world that was eradicated by the Europeans, but also a world in which the slave trade flourished between West Africa and the Middle East. The author, thus, does not idealize the African past and shows that everything in Africa was not all peace and harmony before the Europeans laid waste to the continent. “Paradise” is a rich plot of myth, dreams, and Biblical and Koranic tradition. It is the story of a young boy's coming of age against the backdrop of an Africa increasingly corrupted by colonialism and violence.