“What do these people want with us?”: Tourism in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s “Theft”

When the semester ended, I went to the library to find a few books to read at the start of the summer break before I turned my attention to some projects that I need to complete over the next few months. While there, I picked up Annie Ernaux’s Shame, J.M. Coetzee’s The Pole, Han Kang’s Greek Lessons, and Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Theft. For a few months now, I’ve Gurnah’s Afterlives on my to be read list, and I plan to get to it sometime this summer because I want to include it in a project I am working on. I picked up Theft because it just came out and I wanted to read some Gurnah before diving into Afterlives. Theft, takes place at the turn of the century in Tanzania, following the lives of Karim, Fauzia, and Badar. It taknes place, as the dust jacket reads, in a period where “tourism and technology reach their quote corner of the world, bringing unexpected opportunities and perils.”

Theft deals with a myriad of themes from familial conflicts and class differences to a changing world, and an I read Theft, specifically in the latter part of the book, I became really interested in the ways that the novel examines tourism and even humanitarian tourism. The novel begins to explore this when Badar gets a job at the Tamarind Hotel. One of the first lessons that Badar receives from Assistant Manager Issa is how to interact…