Reading the World discussion

From the Nobel Prize winner, a coming-of-age story that illuminates the harshness and beauty of an Africa on the brink of colonization

[Gurnah’s novels] recoil from stereotypical descriptions and open our gaze to a culturally diversified East Africa unfamiliar to many in other parts of the world. —Nobel Committee for Literature at the Swedish Academy

Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Whitbread Award, Paradise was characterized by the Nobel Prize committee as Abdulrazak Gurnah’s “breakthrough” work. It is at once the chronicle of an African boy’s coming-of-age, a tragic love story, and a tale of the corruption of African tradition by European colonialism.

Sold by his father in repayment of a debt, twelve-year-old Yusuf is thrown from his simple rural life into complexities of pre-colonial urban East Africa. Through Yusuf’s eyes, Gurnah depicts communities at war, trading safaris gone awry, and the universal trials of adolescence. The result is what Publishers Weekly calls a “vibrant” and “powerful” work that “evokes the Edenic natural beauty of a continent on the verge of full-scale imperialist takeover.”

From website: https://thenewpress.com/books/paradis....

I enjoyed reading this coming of age story of Yusuf, a young man sold to a successful merchant to pay off his father's debts. Yusuf has gifts of seeing, listening and intuiting the motivations of others but he is largely not verbal and so we see the world he struggles with from a certain distance. Although gifted in some ways, being a strong handsome man, he also is slow to the realization of the constraints that have been placed upon his life. The novel takes place in what is now part of Tanzania but was at the time just becoming part of Germany's colony of East Africa. Gurnah does not present us with an ideal eden that the German's ruthlessly conquered. Rather it was a land of tribal conflicts, a land where people could be bought and sold, and a land whose focus was largely toward the Zanzibar coast, and then to Mumbai rather than to Europe. The merchants speak in Arabic and the religion that is generally practiced through the merchant class is Islam.
The plot has some parallels to the story of Joseph in the Bible with his own family selling him off. However, we do not get to see the ending of Yusuf's maturing. The novel only goes as far as the moment that Yusuf has the realization that in order to claim his freedom, he must act freely, rather than beg to be freed from his benefactor.
The author is gifted but this is probably not his best work, although reviewers seem to feel it is his first "break through" work.
I did learn a great deal about Tanzania at the turn of the century before the colonial period. The introduction of the German troops was very enlightening. The native people simply did not understand who these people were, where they came from, nor what they wanted. Why were they acting as if they owned the place instead of bowing down to their sultan? The people understood that the foreigners were bringing change and not for the better but had no grounds for uniting to drive them off. The Germans had only a few troops who had no great passion to be in Africa...but they did have something the natives had very few of. They had more guns.