“Arriving at writing”: A Conversation with Abdulrazak Gurnah
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The following is a two-part interview conducted by Anupama Mohan and Sreya M. Datta with Abdulrazak Gurnah, wellknown novelist from Zanzibar, Tanzania, now living in UK. Gurnah is also Emeritus Professor of English and Postcolonial Literatures at the University of Kent. He has edited two volumes of Essays on African Writing, and has published articles on a number of contemporary postcolonial writers, including Naipaul, Rushdie, and Wicomb. He is the editor of A Companion to Salman Rushdie (Cambridge UP, 2007). He is a prolific novelist and his first book, Memory of Departure, was published in 1987. His fourth novel, Paradise (1994), was shortlisted for the Booker and Whitbread Prizes. His 2001 book By the Sea was longlisted for the Booker and shortlisted for the Los Angeles Times Book Award. His most recent work is Gravel Heart, which was published in 2017. In this interview, we wanted to explore Gurnah’s work in light of this Special Issue’s general thrust on the Indian Ocean as providing important insights into the limitations and possibilities of postcolonial studies and perspectives upon the world in the twenty-first century. At the same time, we wanted to understand how Gurnah’s novels probe the figures of asylum-seekers, migrants, vagrants, and nomads in a time of great political upheaval in Europe with its repercussions also marking out spaces and cultures that seem to be at a great remove from Europe but that are integrally tied to European developments through time, history, trade, and cultural contact.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".