Adopted by Britain, then abandoned

MORE than the flag went down in the chain of plumed and lofty rituals with which Britain released herself from her colonial possessions in the middle of the last century.

In many places, but particularly in Africa, there was the implication that a torch was being ceremonially passed, an order created and bestowed. Barely was pomp finished when it became clear that circumstance was being carried off among the traps and trappings of the former rulers.

Coups, civil wars, dictatorial regimes and ethnic killings undid the civic and constitutional structures the British thought to leave behind. How superficial or even hypocritical that thought, and how jerry-built those structures: Such has been a theme for history and political science ever since. And, less directly, for literature.

By implication and often overtly as well, it is a principal element in the novels of Abdulrazak Gurnah. Born and raised on the island of Zanzibar (now part of Tanzania), Gurnah has lived, taught and written in Britain for nearly 40 years. He comes from a community -- East Indian settlers -- that has felt itself particularly abandoned by the British departure. Their position, protected under colonial rule, was shattered under the turbulent nativist upsurge that followed independence.

Gurnah’s work has been overshadowed by that of more powerful writers of South Asian origin -- Michael Ondaatje, Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy, Rohinton Mistry -- but it has a subtle if sometimes stiff poignancy that has won it attention, though more in Britain than here.

Not least that is because he frames the theme of abandonment largely by portraying the cultural and social marooning of a generation brought up to think of itself as part of the British version of Western culture and order, only to find that as exiles (nearly 100,000 East Indians fled to Britain from Uganda alone in the early 1970s), they have been set apart, condescended to and worse.

“The earliest lesson I learned in London was how to live with disregard,” says Rashid, a character in Gurnah’s latest novel “Desertion” and the author’s alter ego.

The son of schoolteachers in Zanzibar, Rashid was encouraged by his British instructors and he worked diligently for years to win a scholarship to the University of London. It seemed a glittering prize, an entry ticket to a place in the great civilization and culture promised by Britain’s empire and history. It turned out to be a second-class ticket to a canceled destination. At best, since Rashid refused to be defeated (by no means the same as winning), it meant a post at a provincial university. (Gurnah teaches at the University of Kent.)

Rashid’s disillusion with the future he’d struggled for -- coupled with shame at enjoying even a crabbed form of success while his cultivated family back home fell victim to a corrupt and brutal post-colonial populism -- is only one of the themes in “Desertion.” The novel is awkwardly divided into three parts as it treats three Zanzibarian generations. It is intended as a roman-fleuve but the connection is schematic -- not a river but separate aquifers, each of very different composition.

The first part, which goes back to Zanzibar of the early 1900s, tells of Pearce, a British scholar-explorer, beaten and abandoned by his guides and succored by Hassanali, an East Indian shopkeeper. Pearce and Rehana, Hassanali’s sister, fall in love. She follows him to the Kenyan port town of Mombasa, lives with him as his mistress, bears his baby and returns disgraced to her family when he goes back to London.

It is told not as melodrama but as a puzzle with missing pieces. Gurnah writes with the effect of ellipses; more than the story we get the slow, complex rhythms of rural Zanzibar of a century ago and a suggestive array of cultures and characters: the East Indians, the old Arab families, an English official who manages both to believe in the beneficent rule of empire and to doubt it. The official’s real love is English literature. (Gurnah raises, more suggestively than some may expect, the colonialist aspects of planting Shakespeare and Keats along with the flag.)

The second part moves ahead a generation. It portrays Rashid’s parents, their middle-class Zanzibar home, intellectual bent and, in the father, a devout Muslim belief and practice. Its heart is the passionate liaison between Amin, Rashid’s gentle brother, and Jamila, who is older, beautiful, sophisticated and with something of a scandalous reputation. Gurnah writes beautifully: The brief affair all but burns on the page until Amin submits, tragically, to his father’s outrage and breaks it off.

These sections, with their rich presence and unspoken regret for particular worlds and times, contrast sharply with Rashid’s chilly solitudes and indignations in England. They frame Rashid’s dryly told story: the marooned student from the ex-colony, his stubborn pursuit of his studies, the narrowness of academic success and a brief, fleshless reference to marriage with an Englishwoman and eventual divorce.

Each section has its charm or interest, but, though Gurnah’s intention to link them is evident (Jamila turns out be the granddaughter of Rehana in the first part), the connection is more willed than achieved. *