Nobel laureate for literature: Britain's behavior towards refugees is "disgusting" and it should be kind and compassionate
Tanzanian novelist Abdul Razak Gurna, who won the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature, said on Thursday that Europe should welcome migrants with compassion rather than barbed wire and that the British government's behavior was "a bit disgusting" towards asylum seekers.
Jorna, who chronicles in his books the legacy of colonialism and its effects on people forced to leave their homes, said he was completely surprised when the Swedish Academy called him to inform him of his award.
Jorna was born in Zanzibar, now Tanzania, and moved as a student to Britain in 1968. His novels, the first of which was published in 1987, frequently depict displaced persons and strangers coming to terms with an identity in flux.
He spoke poetically of the experience of immigration, of leaving one's family and a part of one's life to live in a new society in which one always feels like a stranger.
Jorna, 73, added that he feels the British government looks bad towards those seeking political asylum.
"Right now, the government's behavior seems to be a bit disgusting with people who are seeking asylum or seeking to enter this country," he told Reuters in his garden in Canterbury, England. Who wouldn't want to come to a more prosperous country? There is a kind of meanness in this response."
Journa presents his work as an attempt to bridge the gap between academic work on colonialism and popular knowledge of it.
"This is an area in which literature can play a role. Not in an educational way but through narration and communication, through talking about things, and by making people live (the event)," he said.
A day after British Prime Minister Boris Johnson vowed to "defend our history and cultural heritage" against those who attack Britain's past, Gurna said he rejects attempts to celebrate a selective history.
"You must know. If there are terrible things to know, they must be known. You cannot just say that it is nonsense that bothers us."
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