Good Scribes Only #28 - 🌍🇹🇿 Paradise by Abdulrazak Gurnah
You don’t always need a plane ticket to travel; sometimes, all you need is a book. Fiction allows us explore worlds beyond our own, taking us out of life’s everyday tangles, and allowing us to move forward with a wider perspective. So rather than travel physically, Good Scribes Only is traveling to Europe, Africa, Central America, North America, Oceania, the Middle East, and Asia by way of literature. Stop two, Tanzania!
'Paradise' by Abdulrazak Gurnah is at once the story of an African boy's coming of age, a tragic love story, and a tale of the corruption of traditional African patterns by European colonialism. It presents a major African voice to western readers, depicting how Africans had to adjust to the new reality of European colonialism. The result is a page-turning saga that covers the same territory as the novels of Isak Dinesen and William Boyd, but does so from a perspective never before available on that seldom-chronicled part of the world.
Hosted by novelists and entrepreneurs Daniel Breyer & Jeremy Streich, Good Scribes Only is a podcast for curious minds to explore, challenge, and think differently through books. Sometimes even traveling to a place doesn't permit you to see it for how it really is for those who live there. Fiction, on the other hand, can. And thus, season 3 is about widening our perspective. We hope you're coming along can help do the same. Be sure to check out the Episode Cheat Sheet for an overview.
We hope you enjoy this discussion about 'Paradise' by Abdulrazak Gurnah.
Episode Notes
0-5 min — Intro
5-10 min — Casting the movie
10-15 min — Plot Summary
15-20 min — On “form” in novels
20-25 min — The multiculturality of Africa
25-30 min — History of Tanzania
30-35 min — European and religious influences
35-40 min — Plot continued
40-45 min — The garden motif
45-50 min — Underlying philosophies in the book
50-55 min — Yusuf’s coming of age and title significance
55-60 min — Conclusion and final thoughts