阿•古尔纳【英国】：从自发到自觉的写作——古尔纳获奖演说

Writing cannot be just about battling and polemics, however invigorating and comforting that can be.

——Abdulrazak Gurnah

写作不应仅仅关于论战和申辩，不管那多么引人振奋，令人欣慰。

——阿卜杜勒拉扎克·古尔纳

从自发到自觉的写作

——古尔纳获奖演说

阿卜杜勒拉扎克·古尔纳作 谢娟译

写作一直是令人愉悦的事。儿时求学之时，在所有课程安排中，我最盼望的就是写作课的到来，我们可以写故事，或者老师觉得我们可能感兴趣的话题。每到这时，所有人都安静了下来，伏在桌面上，从记忆或想象中提取值得讲述的东西。在儿时的练笔过程中，从未有意去叙说什么特别的事，去回忆某段印象深刻的经历，去表达某个深信不疑的观点，或者抒发内心的委屈。这些写作练习都是老师为提升我们的论说技巧而布置的，并不需要除了老师之外的读者。我写作，是因为老师吩咐我去写作，也因为自己乐在其中。

多年以后，我自己也成了一名教师，这个经历倒了过来，开始由我坐在鸦雀无声的教室里，看着学生们埋头写作。这让我想起戴·赫·劳伦斯的一首诗，题名为《学校里最好的时光》，我现在从中引用几句：

我坐在教室的岸边，独自一人，

观察身穿夏日汗衫的男生们

低着圆圆的脑袋，忙碌地书写：

一个又一个，仰起脸来

望着我，

静静思索，

像在看着什么，却又没看见。

然后，又转回头去，带着劳作后的些许

欣喜和激动，又从我眼前转回头去，

已然找到自己想要的，取到势必要取得的。

我前面讲到的写作课，这首诗再现的写作课，正如后来发现的那样，都不是真正的写作。它没有驱动力，没有指向性，没有经过反复的思索，无休止的重组。在年少时的练笔过程中，可以说，我沿着直线写作，没有多少犹疑，没有多少修改，无比单纯。我读书同样有点随心所欲，同样没有方向，那时并不清楚这些活动之间的关联有多么密切。有时，不需要早起去学校时，我会读书到深夜，直到我的父亲，大概是个失眠症患者，不得不来我的房间，命令我把灯关掉。即便你有那个胆量，也不能跟他说，他自己都还醒着，为什么要让你睡觉，因为这样和父亲说话是不合规矩的。不管怎样，父亲失着眠熬着夜，却没有开灯，生怕影响到母亲，所以，他的关灯指令是有几分道理的。

后来的写作和阅读经历，与儿时的随兴所至相比，更有条理，但不变的是我一直乐在其中，不用勉强自己。尽管如此，这种愉悦的性质还是逐渐发生了变化。直到移居英国之后，我才充分意识到这一点。在英国，对故乡的思念，独在异乡的苦闷，使我开始反思很多先前没有考虑过的事情。在穷困而疏离的漫长日子里，我开始尝试一种不同的写作。有一点越来越清晰：有些事需要说出口，有些任务亟待完成，有些遗憾和冤屈亟待申诉以及检讨。

首先，我反思了自己匆忙逃离故土之时舍弃的种种。在二十世纪六十年代中期，一场影响深远的大混乱降临到我们的生活中，其中的是是非非都淹没在伴随一九六四年革命剧变而出现的暴行之下：关押、处决、放逐，还有无休无止、大大小小的羞辱和压迫。我置身于这种局面，又只有青少年的头脑，不可能想清楚正在发生的事具有怎样的历史意义，对将来又会产生怎样的影响。

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直到移居英国后的头些年里，我才开始有能力反思这些问题，反省我们能够施诸彼此的伤害多么可憎可恨，反观我们曾用以开解自己的谎言和假象。我们的历史都是片面的，对很多暴行都保持了沉默。我们的政治是种族化的，直接导致了革命爆发后的各种迫害：在孩子面前，父亲被杀害；在母亲面前，女儿被侵犯。移居英国后的我虽然已远离这类事态，心里却不堪其扰，假如当时身处如今仍然在承受其后果的人群中间，或许还不至于如此难以抵御记忆的侵袭。但是，令我苦恼不已的，还有一些与这类事件无关的记忆：父母残忍地伤害自己的孩子，人们被社会教条或性别教条剥夺了充分的言论自由，不平等的社会现实容许贫穷和依附关系的存在。这些问题存在于所有人类的生活，并非我们独有，但我们不会始终把它们放在心上，除非情势要求我们意识到它们的存在。我想，对逃离了创伤、远离了身后的种种、找到安居之所的人来说，这正是一大心理负担。最终，我将这些反思的一部分付诸文字，写得不是特别有条理、有组织，只是为了稍微理清自己一些混乱模糊的思绪。

然而，后来我逐渐发现有一种令人极度不安的现象正在发生。一种相对简单的新历史正被构建出来，将曾经发生过的事件改头换面，甚至直接抹杀，或加以重构，以迎合当下认定的“事实”。这种相对简单的新历史是胜利者的必然杰作：他们可以随心所欲选择和建构自己的叙事。这种历史也适合那些事不关己的评论家、学者，甚至作家：他们往往透过与自己世界观相吻合的框架来看待我们，需要“种族解放”与“进步”之类的熟悉叙事。

我们有必要抵制这种历史，因为它罔顾那些见证更早时代的物品、建筑、各种成就，还有使生命得以可能的温情。多年以后，我再次走在自幼生活的小镇的街道上，场所、风物和人无不是凋敝的景象；老人们头发花白，牙齿掉光，害怕失去关于过往的记忆。我们有必要尽力把那些记忆保存下来，用文字留住曾经的种种，打捞出那些人们得以支撑自己生活、理解自己的诸多故事和时刻。此外，还有必要记录下自鸣得意的统治者们妄图从我们记忆中清除的那些虐行和暴政。

我们有必要面对的还有一种历史理解；自从我离它的英国源头更近以后，它就变得更加清晰，比起在桑给巴尔接受殖民教育时，有过之无不及。我们这代人属于殖民主义的产儿，不同于我们的父辈，也不同于下一代人，至少所受的影响是不一样的。我的意思倒不是说父母所珍视的东西我们已觉得疏远，或者说下一代人已经摆脱了殖民主义的影响。我想说的是，我们成长与受教育的时段正是宗主国拥有高度自信的时期，至少在我们这个世界区域是这样，殖民控制的真面目被隐藏在各种委婉语之中，而我们也认同了这种诡诈的手法。我所指的时期是“去殖民化”运动声势浩大地蔓延整个地区，将我们关注的目光引向殖民统治造成的破坏之前。我们的下一代人有着后殖民时代的失望，也有聊以自慰的自欺假象，也许无法清楚或者足够深入地认识与殖民者的相遇如何改变了我们的生活，我们的腐败和滥政从某种程度上说也是殖民遗产的一部分。

我来到英国之后，这些问题变得越发清晰，倒不是因为有人在日常交谈或课堂交流中向我澄清过，而是因为我从某些途径更好地理解了像我这样的人的角色，包括：英国人在写作和闲谈中讲述的某些关于自己的故事，电视和其他地方的种族主义笑话所引发的哄堂大笑，还有在商店、办公室或者巴士的日常接触中我所面临的天然敌意。面对这种冷遇，我无可奈何，但是随着阅读理解能力的提升，有一种意愿变得日渐强烈，那就是通过写作来反驳那些鄙视和贬低我们的人群所给出的自以为是的判断。

但是，写作不应仅仅关于论战和申辩，不管那多么引人振奋，令人欣慰。写作并非关于某件事，关于这个或那个问题，这种或那种关注；它所关注的是人类生活的各个方面，所以，残暴、爱和软弱迟早都会成为它的对象。我相信写作还必须揭示：什么是与现实相反的可能性，冷硬而专横的眼睛无法捕捉到什么，身形看似矮小的人为何在别人的冷眼下仍能找到自信。所以，我发现也有必要书写这些东西，采用忠实的笔法，丑行与美德都能出场，人类个体摆脱简单化和刻板印象的限定。当此之际，某种美便会从中而生。

这种看待事物的方式为脆弱与软弱，为残酷中的温情，为在意想不到的地方寻找善意的能力腾出空间。恰因如此，写作一直以来都是我生命中值得投入、令我流连忘返的部分。当然，我的生活还有其他部分，但它们与此刻的话题无关。说起来有点奇妙，我刚开始说到的那种年少时的乐趣数十年过后依然丝毫无减。

最后，我要向瑞典学院表达最深挚的谢意，感谢将如此重要的荣誉颁给我和我的作品。非常感谢！

演说原文

Writing

Writing has always been a pleasure. Even as a boy at school I looked forward to the class set aside for writing a story, or whatever our teachers thought would interest us, more than to any other class on the timetable. Then everyone would fall silent, leaning over their desks to retrieve something worth reporting from memory and imagination. In these youthful efforts, there was no desire to say something in particular, to recall a memorable experience, to express a strongly-held opinion or to air a grievance. Nor did these efforts require any other reader than the teacher who prompted them as an exercise in improving our discursive skills. I wrote because I was instructed to write, and because I found such pleasure in the exercise.

Years later, when I was myself a school teacher, I was to have this experience in reverse, when I would sit in a silent classroom while the pupils bent over their work. It reminded me of a poem by D.H. Lawrence which I will now quote a few lines from:

Lines from 'The Best of School'

As I sit on the shores of the class, alone,

Watch the boys in their summer blouses

As they write, their round heads busily bowed:

And one after another rouses

His face to look at me,

To ponder very quietly,

As seeing, he does not see.

And then he turns again, with a little, glad

Thrill of his work he turns again from me,

Having found what he wanted, having got what was to be had.

The writing class I was speaking of and which this poem recalls, was not writing as it would come to seem later. It was not driven, directed, worked over, reorganised endlessly. In these youthful efforts I wrote in a straight line, so to speak, without much hesitation or correction, with such innocence. I also read with a kind of abandon, similarly without any direction, and I did not know at the time how closely connected these activities were. Sometimes, when it was not necessary to wake up early for school, I read so late into the night that my father, who was something of an insomniac himself, was forced to come to my room and order me to switch off the light. You could not say to him, even if you dared, that he was still awake and why should you not be, because that was not how you spoke to your father. In any case, he did his insomnia in the dark, with the light switched off so as not to disturb my mother, so the instruction to switch off the light would still have stood.

The writing and reading that came later was orderly compared to the haphazard experience of youth, but it never ceased to be a pleasure and was hardly ever a struggle. Gradually, though, it became a different kind of pleasure. I did not realise this fully until I went to live in England. It was there, in my home-sickness and amidst the anguish of a stranger’s life, that I began to reflect on so much that I had not considered before. It was out of that period, that prolonged period of poverty and alienation, that I began to do a different kind of writing. It became clearer to me that there was something I needed to say, that there was a task to be done, regrets and grievances to be drawn out and considered.

In the first instance, I reflected on what I had left behind in the reckless flight from my home. A profound chaos descended on our lives in the mid-1960s, whose rights and wrongs were obscured by the brutalities that accompanied the changes brought about by the revolution in 1964: detentions, executions, expulsions, and endless small and large indignities and oppressions. In the midst of these events and with the mind of an adolescent, it was impossible to think clearly about the historical and future implications of what was happening.

It was only in the early years that I lived in England that I was able to reflect on such issues, to dwell on the ugliness of what we were capable of inflicting on each other, to revisit the lies and delusions with which we had comforted ourselves. Our histories were partial, silent about many cruelties. Our politics was racialised, and led directly to the persecutions that followed the revolution, when fathers were slaughtered in front of their children and daughters were assaulted in front of their mothers. Living in England, far away from these events yet deeply troubled by them in my mind, it may have been that I was less able to resist the power of such memories than if I had been among people who were still living their consequences. But I was also troubled by other memories that were unrelated to these events: cruelties parents inflicted on their children, the way people were denied full expression because of social or gender dogma, the inequalities that tolerated poverty and dependence. These are matters present in all human life and are not exceptional to us, but they are not always on your mind until circumstances require you to be aware of them. I suspect this is one of the burdens of people who have fled from a trauma and find themselves living safely, away from those left behind. Eventually I began to write about some of these reflections, not in an orderly or organised way, not yet, just for the relief of clarifying a little some of the confusions and uncertainties in my mind.

In time, though, it became clear that something deeply unsettling was taking place. A new, simpler history was being constructed, transforming and even obliterating what had happened, re-structuring it to suit the verities of the moment. This new and simpler history was not only the inevitable work of the victors, who are always at liberty to construct a narrative of their choice, but it also suited commentators and scholars and even writers who had no real interest in us, or were viewing us through a frame that agreed with their view of the world, and who required a familiar narrative of racial emancipation and progress.

It became necessary then to refuse such a history, one that disregarded the material objects that testified to an earlier time, the buildings, the achievements and the tendernesses that had made life possible. Many years later, I walked through the streets of the town I grew up in and saw the degradation of things and places and people, who live on grizzled and toothless and in fear of losing the memory of the past. It became necessary to make an effort to preserve that memory, to write about what was there, to retrieve the moments and the stories people lived by and through which they understood themselves. It was necessary to write of the persecutions and cruelties which the self-congratulations of our rulers sought to wipe from our memory.

There was also another understanding of history necessary to address, one that became clearer to me when I lived closer to its source in England, clearer than it had been while I was going through my colonised education in Zanzibar. We were, those of our generation, children of colonialism in a way that our parents were not and nor were those who came after us, or at least not in the same way. By that I don’t mean that we were alienated from the things our parents valued or that those who came after us were liberated from colonial influence. I mean that we grew up and were educated in that period of high imperial confidence, at least in our parts of the world, when domination disguised its real self in euphemisms and we agreed to the subterfuge. I refer to the period before decolonisation campaigns across the region hit their stride and drew our attention to the depredations of colonial rule. Those who came after us had their post-colonial disappointments and their own self-delusions to comfort them, and perhaps did not see clearly, or in great enough depth, the way in which the colonial encounter had transformed our lives, that our corruptions and misrule were in some measure also part of that colonial legacy.

Some of these matters became clearer to me in England, not because I encountered people who clarified them to me in conversation or in the classroom, but because I gained a better understanding of how someone like me figured in some of their stories of themselves, both in their writing and in casual discourse, in the hilarity that greeted racist jokes on the TV and elsewhere, in the unforced hostility I met in everyday encounters in shops, in offices, on the bus. I could not do anything about that reception, but just as I learned to read with greater understanding, so a desire grew to write in refusal of the self-assured summaries of people who despised and belittled us.

But writing cannot be just about battling and polemics, however invigorating and comforting that can be. Writing is not about one thing, not about this issue or that, or this concern or another, and since its concern is human life in one way or another, sooner or later cruelty and love and weakness become its subject. I believe that writing also has to show what can be otherwise, what it is that the hard domineering eye cannot see, what makes people, apparently small in stature, feel assured in themselves regardless of the disdain of others. So I found it necessary to write about that as well, and to do so truthfully, so that both the ugliness and the virtue come through, and the human being appears out of the simplification and stereotype. When that works, a kind of beauty comes out of it.

And that way of looking makes room for frailty and weakness, for tenderness amid cruelty, and for a capacity for kindness in unlooked for sources. It is for these reasons that writing has been for me a worthwhile and absorbing part of my life. There are other parts, of course, but they are not our concern on this occasion. A little miraculously, that youthful pleasure in writing that I spoke of at the beginning is still there after all the decades.

Let me end by expressing my deepest gratitude to the Swedish Academy for bestowing this great honour on me and on my work. I am very grateful.

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