Paradise by Abdulrazak Gurnah

He would go away, there was nothing simpler. Somewhere where he could escape the oppressive claims everything made on him. But he knew that a hard lump of loneliness had long ago formed in his displaced heart, that wherever he went it would be with him, to diminish and disperse any plot he could hatch for small fulfilment. He could go to the mountain town, where Hamid could torture him with self-righteous questions and Kalasinga could divert him with fantasies. Or join Hussein in his mountain retreat. He could find small enough fulfilment there. Or go to Chatu, to become the court clown of his ramshackle fiefdom. Or to Witu, to find Mohamed the hashish smoker's mother and the sweet land he had lost by his transgressions. And everywhere he would be asked about his father and his mother, and his sister and his brother, and what he had brought and would he hoped to take away. To none of the questions would he have anything but evasive answers. The seyyid could travel deep into strange lands in a cloud of perfume, armed only with bags of trinkets and a sure knowledge of his superiority. The white man in the forest feared nothing as he sat under his flag, ringed by armed soldiers. But Yusuf had neither a flag nor righteous knowledge with which to claim superior honour, and he thought he understood that the small world he knew was the only one available to him.

Yusuf is only a child when he is sold by his parents to the merchant he knows only as "Uncle Aziz." Aziz takes Yusuf from his home to his shop in a town by the coast, where he is put to work alongside his older "brother," Kahlil, who has grown up amid similar arrangements. But Aziz has more in mind for Yusuf than being a stockboy: once he has grown a little, he enlists him on one of his arduous trading journeys into the heart of Tanzania's bush land, where silk and textiles can be traded for ivory and rhino horn. The trip is a difficult one: there are animals--a man's face is eaten off in the middle of the night by hyena--and people who mean to do them harm, including the chieftains of isolated villages who operate according to superstitions that Aziz and his Swahili and Arab associates find frightening and strange. (And that's not even to mention the menacing safari guide who has sexual designs on the beautiful young Yusuf.) Yusuf grows up on the journey, becoming perhaps stronger and wiser in the face of such dangers.

One of the things that fascinated me about Abdulrazak Gurnah's Paradise was how neatly it resembled some of the classic European novels about Africa, like Heart of Darkness. Like Conrad's Marlowe, Yusuf travels into an African interior that becomes increasingly strange, violent, and terrifying; like Marlowe this journey mirrors one into the interior of the self where Yusuf must determine who he is and of what he is made. (He has premonition-like dreams that grow in intensity as they go further in, dreams in which he sees "his cowardice glimmering in the moonlight, covered in the slime of its afterbirth.") But how fascinating is it to see this narrative from an African perspective? Unlike Heart of Darkness, Paradise depicts an Africa where conflicts between civilization and its opposites, or whatever you want to call it, are already kindling before the European imagination can turn it into a single idea, with the "heart of darkness" at its center. Marlowe and Kurtz are simply far from home; Yusuf is searching for one. Everywhere "oppressive claims" are made on him, but he has no place of his own to claim.

The Europeans do loom over Paradise, which is set on the eve of German conquest of Tanzania. It may have already happened, in fact; German soldiers troop through towns and across villages, planting flags and making decrees, but for many the fact of German invasion is a strange notion with no real bearing on their day-to-day existence. When Aziz and Yusuf are captured by a hostile chieftain named Chatu on their safari, it is the fortuitous arrival of a German lieutenant that saves them, much to the surprise of Chatu, who seems neither to have seen nor heard of Europeans at all. The Germans save the merchant's life, but they also herald the arrival of a changing world, in which the old ways of trade will be disrupted and perhaps obliterated. There is a profound ambiguity to Yusuf's coming of age: though he observes sharply the merchant's methods and his attitudes, there seems to be little chance of a world in which these lessons can be used.

I really enjoyed this book. Something about it feels classic; there's a nineteenth century-ness to the coming of age narrative, and its adventure elements, that is stronger than just its setting. The characters are rich and the language is mutedly powerful, and it captures a time and place that are utterly unfamiliar to me in a way in a way that is recognizable. Somebody ought to give this man a Nobel Prize.

With the addition of Tanzania, my "countries read" list is up to 61!