by ABDULRAZAK GURNAH
My earliest reading memory
Undoubtedly the Qur’an. Growing up in Zanzibar I started in chuoni, which is what we called Qur’an school, at the age of five and did not start government school until a year later, by which time I was certain to have been reading the short suras. Quite early on in government school, one of our class texts was a Kiswahili translation of Aesop’s Fables, with illustrations of the fox making a futile leap at the grapes and the hare lounging by the roadside as the tortoise came trundling by. I can still see those images.
My favourite book growing up
A Kiswahili translation of abridged selections from Alfu Leila u Leila (A Thousand and One Nights) in four slim volumes. It was there that I first read the story Kamar Zaman and Princess Badoura, which has stayed with me since. The translator and all those thanked in the preface are colonial officials, yet the language makes me think there were one or two native informants who supplied nuanced detail. Until I was about 10 or so, the only books in English I read were comics and a school prize. Its title was People of the World, and I read that again and again for a year or two. There was no mention of Zanzibar in it, though.
The book that changed me as a teenager
This is a difficult one. I remember lying on a mat in my uncle’s modest house in Mombasa reading from a dilapidated copy of Anna Karenina. I don’t know how it ended up there; my uncle was not a reader. I was probably 13 and could not have understood much of it, but I still wept and sobbed throughout. Our reading was haphazard, depending on what was available in the school library: mostly donations from departing colonial civil servants. I was 15 when I read James Baldwin’s Another Country and I remember how thrilling that was. Our teacher also lent me VS Naipaul’s The Mystic Masseur, which I think is the first novel I read in which I saw people I recognised in real life.
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