So disrespectful!
Who is he? "Novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah wins the Nobel Prize in literature."
He's from Zanzibar and is honored "For his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents."
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We live in a day when people will be judged by the color of their skin, not by the content of their character.
The ONLY THING, In The World, that Matters; is: BEING BLACK
And no one has heard of him prior to today.
How was it that Tom Wolfe never got the Nobel Prize? Too good?
"So disrespectful!"
Why? It's all that matters.
It's a new world. Your standards don't matter.
As if he wouldn't be noteworthy without the skin color......
Tanzania was first colonized by Islamists.
The Nobel in literature is often like the "Best New Artist" Grammy--a path to obscurity. Some rare exceptions, but...
I am sure NPR failed to identify him by name because they were confident everyone knew him by sight. Or maybe they only put what they thought was important in the headline.
Racists!
And talk about racist reductionism: what is the relationship of this cultured man from Zanzibar to a car-jacking thug on the west side of Chicago? According to NPR's logic, they are both black. Or perhaps both are victims of colonialism, although it could be argued that Mr. Gurnah is doing quite well out of colonialism.
So Physics goes to climate change scientists and literature goes to refugee-related writing. Why not just rename it the "Woke Prize."
You are your race. Nothing else matters. Everybody knows this.
He's actually an Arab, not sub-Saharan African black.
Couldn't they make this sound a bit more woke/political?
NPR has it's checklist. Who is never as important as 'What', meaning, what are they? Which boxes they can check off? And, for both the Nobel committee and NPR- this is a big day.
But...I owe the author a look. And I would never have come upon him had this not happened (and you not posted it). So I'll look over his books and maybe...select one to read.
Race Uber Alles
How come Obama didn't get it? He's black and writes fiction.
"Colonialism". lol. There we go again, blaming others for your lack of cultural heft.
What did colonialism do for him? Well, without colonialism he would be illiterate and probably dead as he is well past the lifespan for men from his region prior to Arab and Western colonialism.
But I'm sure he left that little bit out in his penetrating look at "colonialism".
At this stage of "diversity is our strength" one has to wonder if the work is even readable.
NPR is awful.
NPR had a round table on free speech where they didn't
have a single advocate for free speech. quite the opposite - they advocated to abolish free speech in the name of Trump-hate.
All these awards have become a joke...just like the Democrat party has.
"Hey, some black guy won. You know, what's his name."
LOL.
Anyway, the Nobel Prize for Lit? Who gives a Gluck anymore.
How does a guy living in the 21st century know the effects of colonialism which ended long before he was even a twinkle in his father’s eye? I guess you have to hand it to him for figuring out the narrative that would sell to white guilt-ridden Europeans and NPR listeners. Smart guy with a fertile imagination and an eye for the market. And by writing fiction no one can call BS on his imagined effects of colonialism.
I say give the guy a Nobel for entrepreneurship!
A different version of Joy Reid AKA "the media", complaining about the overboard media coverage when a white person is missing as opposed to a POC (minus asians). The mobius strip version.
According, to his bio he's actually an Arab who fled Zanzibar to the UK in 1968. So, he's been living as a poor oppressed minority at Cambridge U for 53 years. Anyway, he's sorta a tan: so to the Regime media that makes him "black".
Never heard of this guy. I’ll have to do some research and see why he deserves the Nobel. Who knows…maybe NPR did him a disservice by not naming him but just giving his race. That seems to be all NPR care about. Racists!!!
He certainly looks clean and articulate!
NPR adds that he's a refugee to England, and this is the first and "long overdue" award for a B/black writer since Soyinka 35 years ago.
On the plus side, he looks like a Nobel Prize winner....Whatever his merits as a writer, I've never had much interest in the problems of post-colonialism in Zanzibar. Even with a Nobel Prize, his books will be a tough sell. Maybe Netflix or HBO can do a prestige mini-series on one of his books.
I wonder if he talks about Islamic colonialism? You know the one that stripped millions from the coastal and accessible interior regions of Africa and sent them to be slaves in Muslims lands (a huge percentage of whom died on the trip itself).
The Progressive Left fits everyone into their groupings and sets, and woe to anyone who says he is more than that, that he are an individual with a will and mind of his own.
I assume — without bothering to read anything he has written — that he is the token affirmative action choice.
I get a non-zero feeling about the chances the Nobel committee is looking at a few of those Taliban guys sitting in Ghani's office for the Peace Prize.
I love it when MPR or the MSM call people from say, Nigeria, "African-Americans"
I wonder if he has reached the literary heights of that other great Zanzibarian, Faroukh Bulsara? "Scaramouche, scaramouche, will you do the fandango?" is pretty hard to top.
Imagine trying to construct a Canon from the output of the Noblitists!
Listening to Bob Dylan aside, there is only one person whose works I have read since Golding and Garcia Marquez won four decades ago, and few I have even thought of reading. There are about 20 I have read before that, out of 77, and I have read Knut Hamsun! A few others created stories that reached me through movies or TV, but most are left in deep oblivion. I guess leaving literary curation to Norwegians doesn't imply any guarantees of immortality.
From the Britannica article on Zanzibar
https://www.britannica.com/place/Zanzibar-island-Tanzania
"(Even today, most of Zanzibar’s African population calls itself “Shirazi,” in echo of the ancient Persian principality of Shīrāz, from which the earliest Persians came.)"
Dried Shirazi figs are delicious.
"Let the wokie win."
Not even first. Just the first in 28 years. Honor the man by using his name for God's sake. Progressives are so damn awful at self-awareness while being hyper aware of what everybody else is doing. Rename NPR the Karen Network.
From the Wikipedia article on Abdulrazak Gurnah:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abdulrazak_Gurnah
"He went to Britain as a student in 1968, after fleeing Zanzibar at 18 to escape persecution of Arab citizens during the Zanzibar Revolution."
From the Wikipedia article on the Zanzibar Revolution:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zanzibar_Revolution
"The ZNP [Zanzibar Nationalist Party] looked towards Egypt as its model, which caused some tensions with the British colonial officials, but Zanzibar had been for centuries dominated by its Arab elite, and the Colonial Office could not imagine a Zanzibar ruled by the blacks."
Such an interesting, ironic world we live in.
I'd change your tag to "race unconsciousness" or "soft bigotry" or "elite racism" or "condescending virtue signaling" or...
"He's from Zanzibar"
The former Sultanate of Zanzibar is now a region of Tanzania. Do we keep the old names when we're saying where someone is from? Is Melania Trump from the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia? Is the current Bangladeshi prime minister from East Pakistan? Is the current Palestinian president from the British Mandate of Palestine?
I wonder how many black people were killed by explosives?
A few commenters have already noted that he is Arab and fled Zanzibar for the UK in 1968 to escape persecution by actual Africans. I wonder if NPR even bothered to read the man's actual bio?
I have not heard of Mr. Gurnah before, but I am now inclined to read his novel Paradise. It is not clear that anyone at NPR had heard of him, read his books, or knows the slightest about East Africa and its diaspora.
I did spend much time on many visits for professional reasons in the 1970's in Tanzania, and my quick summary is that the country had a tangled history of many cultures ruling its coastal areas, with Zanzibar being an offshore, semi-autonomous center of trade with an independent economy. Zanzibar was the center of the slave trade between the Arab world (mainly Oman) and the Indian Ocean coasts of Africa until the British established a protectorate in their drive to abolish the Indian Ocean slave trade in the late 19th Century.
According to his Wikipedia biography, Gurhan fled to Britain in the 1960's to escape the anti-Arab violence following the Zanzibar Revolution. I assume that he, like many other East Africans of Asian descent, had access to a British passport and found refuge in Britain following the anti-Asian legislation, discrimination and violence which swept East Africa in the 1960's and 1970's. A very complicated story, which adds to my respect for the British empire.
I expect, to npr, blacks all look the same.
Speaking of NPR, they have a young reporter, Ayesha Rascoe, who sounds like a moron. She badly needs to work on her diction, pronunciation, and grammar.
I don't expect Olivier or Dame Judy to read the news, but this poor woman's vowels slide around like pigs on ice, and her volume ranges from loud to shouty.
I suppose if NPR reviews his book, it will be about the cover.
"A very complicated story, which adds to my respect for the British empire."
Really? It decreases my respect to it. The Brits were fond of muscling their way into someone elses country and then importing some other race because they wanted cheap labor, or a "business class" between them and the "natives".
Nobody asked the Tanzanians whether they wanted East Asians or Arabs in their country. Its to the UK credit that they allowed them into the UK after they got kicked out in the 1960s. But they shouldn't have been there in the first place. And no, I'm not talking about Zanzibar which is more complicated.
"For his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents."
IOW, his writing sucks, and he won it for politics. Yes?
Clyde said...
"Let the wokie win."
Clyde wins
If he is British, isn't he on the side of the colonialists?
I wonder how many Brits moved the other direction, to Zanzibar? How come leftists always stay in oppressive countries and never move to live in solidarity with the oppressed?
The only thing I remember about Zanzibar is that it was an underrated Billy Joel song.
https://youtu.be/wAsicvdZfMQ
When I lived in Eastern Europe the local media would label black celebrities by the color of their skin: the black actress Whoopi Goldbergova or the black singer Whitney Houstonova. They would do it even in cases where there was a picture accompanying the article and skin color was obvious. It always struck me as a bit racist. It still does.
""Oh! The Nobel Prize in Literature! Who is it? Look, this is NPR. It doesn't say, just observes it's a black guy.""
If that makes you think this might be some kind of affirmative action Prize, you might as well start wearing a hood. No, the point is that it’s the first Black since 1993. That should make you scream in outrage, “That’s an outrage!!” and make a big donation to NobelPrizeInLiteratureSoWhite.
Listening to Bob Dylan aside, there is only one person whose works I have read since Golding and Garcia Marquez won four decades ago, and few I have even thought of reading.
Szymborska I have read, a bit. And Ishiguro. And Munro. Have skipped Lessing and Pinter.
Matt asked...
The former Sultanate of Zanzibar is now a region of Tanzania. Do we keep the old names when we're saying where someone is from?
well, No; BUT! If you were going to say where AOC is from, would you say:
a) the USA?
b) New York State?
c) NY City?
How about her ancestors? would you say that they are from:
a) the USA?
b) Puerto Rico
Narrowing someone down, to a well known island doesn't mean you're ignoring the larger governmental structure
NPR is hopeless, hopeless, hopeless. Beyond redemption, I would guess. I used to really enjoy listening to All Things Considered back in the 1970-80's, good leading journalism covering stories that, a week later, would start popping up in the network's coverage. But they have become so 'woke' they have lost their purpose.
Yesterday I attempted to listen to A.T.C. The announcer introduced an 'expert' on the topic, and they both sounded like they were maybe 23 years old. The 'expert' proceeded to roll out his analysis of the issue - but I couldn't listen after about 20 seconds. He was forcing a fabulism into his pronunciation and diction and delivery - it sounded like some idiot at Story Time Hour, trying to make some simplistic children's story thrilling and dramatic for the kiddies as he read from the page. I just couldn't listen to it. It was some fairly mundane current-events topic, like a discussion of the debt ceiling or immigration or something - I was so turned off by it I can't even remember the topic.
I really have come to believe that NPR thinks their audience are complete idiots with no attention span and little capacity for thinking critically, that have to be served up pablum in order to digest it intellectually. It's become insulting, the implied contempt they use as their basis.
I’ve never heard of this fellow either. He might be great, and I hope he is. But if someone had programmed a computer to generate a discerption of the most politically correct writer possible, I imagine something like this article is what the machine would have spat out.
"Let the wokie win."
1984: Prole feed
2021: Woke feed
Blah, blah, blah...
Is he left-handed? Gay? Double-jointed?
Who cares?
I'm darker than him right now...why don't I get special accolades and free stuff?
Remember when it used to be exciting waiting to hear who won these prizes, now it's Identity Group Bingo.
freddie mercury was from zanzibar, his parents were zoroastrians,
I recall John Brunner's book "Stand on Zanzibar" but I can't recall whether the actual island figures in the story. Memory is an iffy thing.
The title phrase was from someone's calculation that if the earth's population stood together at 1 meter distances, everyone could stand on Zanzibar.
Why do Europeans pick who the top writer is every year? Doesn't that seem kind of presumptuous? It seems like somebody could fund an African Nobel Prize type of thing, an Asian one, find the best people from each region as judged by those people?
Maybe we should have a Eurovision type contest to pick the best writer in the West and not pretend that that writer is the best writer in the world.
>>What did colonialism do for him?
Obligatory Life of Brian reference: "What did the Romans ever do for us?" Besides the roads, the aqueducts, the medicine, etc., etc.
Though nothing can top John Cleese's Latin lesson in LoB for anyone who's ever learned Latin.
Jeopardy had a nice but pretty easy "translate into Latin" category tonight. Unfortunately, the man on the stair who unfortunately *WAS* there ("how I wish he'd go away") won again.
Bialik, whom I generally like as a host (and liked better than most of the other candidates), finished up saying “A pleasure to watch you play.” I beg to differ; it's a tedious and annoying bore to watch this robot bulldoze the other contestants. And I hate, hate, hate bottom fishers who start out with all the higher value clues, which, to me, ruins the game by making the ending of each round an anticlimax where nobody can gain much of anything.
--gpm
Aggie:
NPR's audience is almost entirely Democrat, middle class, College educated. Althouse when she was younger was their target audience. Its basically Gays, Women, and Minorities. The same demographic for Broadway musicals.
For some reason, I'm always hitting the NPR station on saturday AM, when they have some guy on talking sports. Its really odd. The castrated male news anchor always tries to sound really excitied about the latest female sports champ, the lastest Gay athelete, or Major league Baseball, but it seems forced and fake.
@tim in vermont-- search "world literary prizes." There are about ten given in Africa--including Ghana's Golden Baobab Prize for children's or young adult literature.
And most countries have their own national awards.
Never underestimate the ability of the literati to devise ways to celebrate themselves.
@gpm--Bialik shouldn't stroke the guy like that, and I can't watch the show again until he's gone.
It's just reparations. Like the State Farm commercials where the white ladies give Jake free food.
Forty years ago the same smug lefties would be talking about how he's a "Credit to his Race".
'Forty years ago the same smug lefties would be talking about how he's a "Credit to his Race".'
And apparently, he's articulate : )
Bunky: "It's just reparations. Like the State Farm commercials where the white ladies give Jake free food."
I disagree that State Farm is abusing good old Jake, or referencing reparations. The woman, whose color is irrelevant, are showing a normal human reaction to extreme kindness, reciprocal gift giving. The joke is that Jake knows he has done nothing to deserve the gifts, since the "great rates" are from State Farm, not him directly. And yet out of human decency he accepts their kind offerings. I see nothing approaching equivalence with reparations in this storyline.
As to the validity of State Farm's claims of great rates - I am insured by them, and their rates are exactly as great as all the other insurers. One advertises what one wants the buyers to believe, not what is real. See Ford's "Quality" commercials, for example, or the Coke commercials that are about anything except fizzy sugar water.
Were Jake to represent Blacks and the commercials to reference reparations from whites, Jake would be demanding free pizzas and steaks from people he didn't know, who were unaware of any basis for such odd, unfounded claims. And I suspect State Farm would fire good old Jake were he to do so.
Derek Wolcott, 1992. Also first Nobel literature winner from St Lucia. His work is amazing. He's the Seamus Heaney of St. Lucia.
James Baldwin should have won it. John Updike too.
Toni Morrison? Nah. She had transformative ideas -- only they were Faulkner's transformative ideas. Then again, who doesn't? Lots of white people didn't deserve the Nobel Prize either.
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