By Irene Escudero |
Cartagena, Colombia (EFE) He does it out of a “need to denounce what is not right”.
“When those in power are falsifying the narrative, you want to say that things are not like that,” says the author of “Paraíso” and “La vida, después” in an interview with EFE in Cartagena de Indias, where he attended as a guest at the Hay Festival.
Question: Did you always want to be a writer?
Answer: No, not always because it seemed like a very big ambition to aspire to it. I grew up in the decolonization generation, and everyone – our teachers, our parents – told us that we had to do something useful for society, they still do, and writing a book was not useful for anyone. We had to do engineering, medicine, law, etc.
So I never thought that this could be a career for two reasons: first, it seemed like a very big ambition and second, because I thought I had to do something useful. And what I later realized is that we need literature just as much as we need the rest.
Q: Also, Swahili culture is purely oral and not so many people write, right?
A: Yes it is written, but it is transmitted orally because not everyone can read or have access to the texts. But people know the stories, the poems and the songs, and they recite them. For example, there is a famous poem in Swahili called “al-inkishafi” (Awakening of the soul) which is probably from the 17th century. We were sent to study it at school and as expected, a 17th century poem in any language given to students three centuries later is difficult to understand because the language has changed.
The homework consisted of analyzing the poem, showing that you had understood what those lines meant. I was working on it and my mom asked me what was wrong. And I told her: “I don’t understand this line that says blablabla” and she recited the following verses to me. And it may seem normal, but she never went to school, she didn’t know how to read, but she knew the poem. This is an example of how literature is transmitted.
Q: What makes you keep writing?
A: I’m hooked! It’s like with everything, when you start, when you have dedicated your existence to something, be it football or writing, they become your life. What keeps me writing is the need to do so, to talk about the things I see and that need to be told. And when you seriously do these things you do them until you can’t do them anymore.
Q: In your books, perhaps because you left your country too soon, you talk a lot about not belonging. What is uprooting for you?
A: It’s something that never leaves you. I left when I was 18 years old, but at that age you have formed your mind and the way you see the world, even if you don’t know much. I am sure that in the people who leave the places where they grew up, either by choice or because they have been forced, that feeling never goes away, you never forget it and you never get over it; you just continue to live with it.
If you’re a writer, you’re going to constantly visit those places and remember them, either because you think about it or because you go back there. And it’s very important to understand yourself, where you come from and what these things mean (…) to understand in a broader context what it means and how it relates to where you live now. So the journey never ends, you are constantly living in both places.
Q: In a world of constant movement, where there are exiles, refugees, migrants, does uprooting become a universal feeling?
A: In the contemporary world I think this is one of the main events. Not because it is new, because migration is part of human history. What is new -or relatively- is the movement that comes from the south, from colonized territories, towards the prosperous societies of the north.
In the 18th century there were millions of Europeans traveling to the rest of the world and taking it for themselves because they needed it and had the power to do it, and nobody could oppose it. Now it is a very different migration with people without power saying “there is prosperity there and we want some” or “our lives are in danger, we want to escape and the safest place is those countries where people live peaceful and prosperous lives”.
There is nothing immoral in that, there is a desire for security, to improve, the same reasons why millions of Europeans migrated at the time. What is behind this panic? Racism. It is because they are not Europeans and he thinks: «these ambitious bastards are going to come to steal our prosperity, to ruin our lives. It doesn’t matter if before we went to ruin their lives or even kill them, it was our right because we had the power.” It is this stupid ignorance of the meaning of the movement of people that has been going on for years.
Q: Can the literature of African writers not talk about colonialism?
A: Sure you can. You can talk about other more intimate topics or love stories and not mention colonialism, but you can’t ignore the consequences of colonialism when you think about African countries because they were founded by colonialism. All these territories and the difficulties they had to become real nations are the result of the arbitrary way in which the world was divided to fit what was good for the colonies.
Q: What do you think about the exoticization of literature on Africa?
A: It works for people who sell books, but I don’t think people who live in these countries see themselves as exotic animals or exotic people. It is a way of commodifying people and their lives for other reasons.
Q: What changed in your life after the Nobel?
A: I have met a lot of people, there are new editions (of my books) coming out, translations, I have visited many new countries. But in the end what I hope when things calm down is to be able to write again.