Over 35 sessions held on second day of Lahore Literary Festival

LAHORE : The 2nd day of Lahore Literary Festival (LLF) opened with ‘Cricket in Pakistan’ and ‘Ghalib’, the two undisputed favorites of the people. There was a session of Abdulrazak Gurnah, the 2021 Nobel Laureate, in conversation with Alexandra Pringle in Hall 1 in which he said the hostility and panic at the presence of migrants is still there, only the targets change.

“Often what engages me is injustice, for example, the treatment of refugees or an intolerable action,” he said. He grew up in Zanzibar, now in Tanzania. “The first thing I read was the Quran. When I started going to school, the Quran class would be after school and a must. At school we were taught in Swahili till the age of 8 years. After that the medium of instruction changed to English. This is colonialism at work. The teachers were English or Scottish. They were strange-looking people talking in strange language. Switching language at first made life hard. I see it as a benefit—to have a cultural milieu deep inside you,” he said.

In 1964, the Zanzibar revolution happened. Gurnah was 16-year-old or so. “There was a lot of unpleasantness. The victims were Arabs or Indians. There was so much coming and going, there was terror, an element of fantasy.

Schools were shut,” he said. Gurnah was 18 when his brother took the step to move to England. “There was also great instability, cruelty,” he said.

“In the new land I found a degree of hostility, of loneliness. There was this dilemma of England offering sanctuary and the xenophobia,” he said.

“I write because there is some pleasure in it. Its like confiding, confessing, but when we are writing fiction, we want it to be read. I was reading everything that I wanted to. I have to make sure the reader believes in me. When people spoke of what African writing was, in the reading of that there was some misrepresentation of Africa. It’s a society, a culture that I have not seen in writing. In the European narrative too, our part was misrepresented,” he said.

Talking about his experience, he said he did all kinds of work in the 70s. “Migration teaches you to do whatever work is available. I worked as orderly, at the operation theatre where I would do whatever I was asked to do. I would even wash linen. I remember how people add insult to injury. I live in Canterbury and still live there, a pilgrimage site at one time. Migrants are like pilgrims,” he went on to say.

“Then I went to university and during my undergraduate studies I decided to teach in university and write novels. I teach in university and I love university. I am an academic and a novelist. I love both,” he said.

‘Paradise’ was his first historical novel. He talked about his book ‘Dottie’ in which a woman is the protagonist.

Gurnah said he has a mother, an aunt and four sisters and understands women quite well. He talked about his father. “My father was a child when UK colonised his land.

In 1984, my father was still alive. I saw him walking to the mosque. He did not see me or he would tell me to come to the mosque for prayer".

More than 35 sessions were held on the second day of the festival. In Shehbaz Taseer’s book launch, he talked candidly about what he went through and people liked him and said he came across as genuine.

Travelogues of Pakistani writers, translations of the renowned writer Hajra Masroor, and a seminar, ‘Sleeping Distances’, were also held. More than 30 sessions will be held on the third and last day of the festival.