Appreciate silence

The hero, whose name remains unnamed until the end of the novel, leaves Zanzibar to study in England. However, neither education, nor further teaching work, nor the family he created with an Englishwoman can make him completely his own in his new homeland. A man with skin color that betrays him as an emigrant, at the first meeting here will be taken more for an uneducated loser from the slums than for a literature teacher... But the former life in Zanzibar has also become too distant. Meeting with fellow countrymen after many years only accentuated irreconcilable differences. The understanding comes: here you are also a stranger, so there is no longer a place you could call home. The novel "Appreciate Silence" has a noticeably autobiographical character. It is a story with a bitter aftertaste, but Nobel laureate Abdulrazak Gurna tells it with irony, which gives the novel lightness. Although written in 1996, its relevance only grows in our time of global mobility and porous borders. In the dilemma of a native of a former African colony, one can see the collision of two worlds - the colonized and the colonizers. Faced with the wealth and grandeur of the metropolis, the hero realizes that England owes its monumentality and the universal sense of superiority, formed over many centuries, to the oppression of countries such as his native Zanzibar.