Kozhikode: Abdulrazak Gurnah keeps having to say what he is not. He is not Yemeni, though his father was. He is not a representative of anyone but himself. He is not writing “postcolonial literature”, though his novels unfold in places shaped by colonial violence. “I am just writing,” he says at one point, “and it is happening within a context. But I don’t think, OK, let’s have another crack at colonialism.”The corrections come gently, sometimes with a glint of humour, sometimes with visible impatience. When a question arrives heavy with theory, he might tease, or shrug it away. Confronted with a dense invocation of decoloniality, he says, “I don’t even know what you mean by decoloniality. Maybe we should have a seminar and you could tell us what decoloniality is.”The audience attending his sessions at the Kerala Literary Festival laughs, but the laughter doesn’t release all the tension.Gurnah is not being unkind. At festivals like this one, fiction writers – especially if they come from formerly colonised places, especially if they are famous – are often asked to do more than discuss their books. Visitors, readers and journalists expect them to explain history, diagnose political change, speak for communities, make sense of their own displacement and sometimes even offer solutions.Nobel laureate Abdulrazak Gurnah at the Kerala Literature Festival in Kozhikode (Calicut).Gurnah, now well into his seventies, seems to have no interest in completing that task for the world.During one session on Theft, his newest novel, a long, well-crafted question outlines colonial extraction, postcolonial aftermaths and the moral weight of theft. When asked what kind of “theft” concerned him – of land, labour, futures? – while writing, he answers obliquely. There are stolen texts, yes, but also stolen lives. And yet, theft is not always final. “What was taken can sometimes be retrieved,” he says, bringing the listener back where she was before he answered.When pressed later about ambiguity in the novel – about whether a young man accused of stealing was innocent – Gurnah draws a firm line. “It’s not my business to say who was the thief,” he says. The accusation never stood because it was true, but because power allowed it to stand. That is the point. Resolution would be sort of a lie.Again and again, he pulls discussions away from abstraction and back towards the ordinary. “I don’t know big stories,” he says at one point. “I don’t really know very important people or great political leaders. Most of the people I know are people like me.”His novels bear this out. They are crowded with characters unaware of grand designs in store for them. Tourism, NGOs, volunteerism hover in their lives, rearranging people and situations, but often without malice or understanding.“I was more interested in the impact,” Gurnah says, when asked about foreigners and NGOs, “rather than making judgements about them.”What becomes striking over the course of Gurnah’s day at the festival is not any single answer but a pattern: He does not turn fiction into allegory or position himself as therapist or healer.In one of the quieter audience exchanges, he responds plainly: “In writing, I don’t represent anybody. I represent what I think. I don’t speak for anybody else.”Also read: Hydrocolonialism: How Books Travelled from Colonial Ports to Personal ShelvesMore than once, he says, “I don’t know.”That phrase surfaces in a shorter interview conducted earlier in the day for The Wire. Asked about migration – about the difference between displacement and alienation, about whether leaving is ever an answer – Gurnah speaks slowly, carefully. People leave because they have to, he says. Or because ambition pulls them elsewhere. Or because staying becomes unbearable. He still asks himself what the right choice is – he had left, too, when he was just 18 years old.“Do you have an answer?”“No,” he says.“A different answer every time?”“No, no. I compare this and I compare that. I think: He stayed and look, and that one left, look.”“What people find there isn’t always what they think they will find there,” he says. And leaving one place does not erase it – in fact you never lose it. “And so that becomes another burden.” In the end, he adds, almost mischievously, “Better to stay at home, I think, on the whole.”He resists the expectation that exile must always be anguish. He speaks instead of belonging. Zanzibar, he says, is home. England, where he has lived for decades, is also home. “I belong to both,” he says. “I’m only speaking for myself.”When asked why his writing so often returns to Zanzibar (Tanzania), the answer is unromantic again. It is not nostalgia or memory that take him there. It could be familiarity. It is where he knows how families argue, how secrets are kept and revealed. “I’m just drawn there,” he says. “I really don’t know.”His work is autobiographical only in the sense that all experience feeds the imagination. What we read in his novels did not really happened to him in that way. “A few years ago I said, no, of course my writing is not autobiographical. But now I have got a better way of answering that question by saying autobiographical does not mean I’ve lived through it,” he says.A woman in a brightly patterned dress, part of Gurnah’s entourage, watches a member of the audience ask him questions during a later session. She shakes her head as he is asked yet again to explain colonialism and displacement. She mutters, “Ask him about his craft!”Seen together, these moments – the teasing deflections, the clipped answers, the gentle exasperation in the hall – form a portrait that feels truer than reverence would. Gurnah is serious about literature and words and uninterested in performance. He will describe the world as he sees it, but not pretend that seeing grants him authority over what things mean.What he appears to claim, instead of being made to account for history, is a responsibility to write with care. “You should be able to write whatever you want to write,” he responds to one questioner, “but you also have to get it right. You can’t write nonsense.”In one exchange near the end of a session (his third), someone asks whether colonial influence enters his characters intentionally or organically. This seems to make him pause. Writing, he says, is always intentional. “It is not like you turn on a tap and it just comes out,” he says.But it is also not the same as instruction.“I am just writing,” Gurnah says.It is the simplest statement and yet the hardest one to accept.