Abdulrazak Gurnah
Set just before the beginning of the first World War, Paradise by Abdulrazak Gurnah explores the life of Yusuf, a teenager sold as an indentured servant to pay off his father’s debt to Aziz, a rich and powerful Arab merchant.
Yusuf works in Aziz’s shop and then joins him as he treks Africa’s interior in a trade caravan. The journey exposes him to an Africa rife with tribal warfare, brutality, corruption, bribery, disease, superstition, and slavery. He encounters African Muslims, Arabs, Europeans, and Indians; tribes that are hostile and tribes that are welcoming; terrain that is taxing and terrain that is breathtakingly beautiful. After his return to his village, Yusuf encounters the German army as it forcibly assembles village males to serve as soldiers in preparation for the war. The novel concludes with Yusuf running towards the German army instead of running away from it.
This story of an African boy’s coming of age is set against the background of a pre-colonial, turbulent Africa. Snatched from his parents at a young age, Yusuf lacks a firm grounding. His exposure to the different ethnicities and systems of belief continue to baffle him and leave him without a firm foothold. His odyssey depicts him as a pawn in the hands of others. More acted upon than acting, he is tossed about from one location to the next, going where he is told to go and doing what he is told to do. He is stripped of all agency. His good looks garner unwelcome advances from both men and women, advances which he is constantly having to thwart. One such attempt at seduction is strikingly similar to Zulaikha’s attempt to seduce the prophet Yusuf in Surah 12 of the Qur’an. Tragically, because he has never been free, Yusuf opts to be included in the German army rather than experience the alternative—the terror of freedom.
A complex novel, episodic in nature, that is as much about the exploitation of a young boy as it is about the exploitation of a whole continent in the hands of its European colonizers.