UK imperial literature was openly racist, says Nobel-winner Gurnah

PARIS: Nobel-winning writer Abdulrazak Gurnah says removing offensive words from the likes of Agatha Christie is “futile”, but says Britain did produce openly racist literature during the last century of its empire.

The British-Tanzanian author won the 2021 Nobel Prize for books such as “Paradise” and “Memory of Departure” exploring Europe´s colonial legacy. He is also a professor of English and post-colonial literature at Britain´s University of Kent.

Asked by AFP about the recent trend of publishers rewriting books by Christie, Roald Dahl and James Bond author Ian Fleming to remove racist and other possibly offensive words, Gurnah was ambivalent.

“Certainly as a scholar, I think it´s a futile thing to do,” he said. “I suppose one of the reasons why they´re doing it is that the publisher wants to make their product more respectable.”

Ultimately, he said, “I think there are bigger issues in the world to worry about.” While the current culture wars focus on tweaks to celebrity writers and hysteria over “cancel culture”, Gurnah is more interested in the much more extreme racism that appeared in British literature when its empire was under threat.

“There is a certain period during imperialism when the language used to describe the colonised became harsher and harsher,” he said. He cited a study linking this shift to the mutiny in India in 1857, an uprising that showed Britain it was unwanted and vulnerable, and which sparked a brutal crackdown on dissent. “There´s a kind of out-of-control rage with which the British responded,” Gurnah said.