四位小说家，一个海洋
2022-06-20 16:16阅读：
小说创造世界。小说能创造出人们对一个地方的直观感觉和心理形象。小说产生的空间感觉影响着读者对世界的看法，就像地图一样。
对于早期的后殖民文学来说，小说的世界常常就是国家本身。后殖民小说通常设定在国界之内，在某种程度上涉及国家层面的问题。
有时，小说的整个故事被当作一个国家的寓言，无论是印度还是坦桑尼亚。
跨越海洋
我的新书《书写海洋世界》探索了小说的另一种世界：不是乡村或国家，而是印度洋世界。
这本书描述了以印度洋为故事核心的一系列小说。它关注阿米塔夫·高希、阿卜杜勒-拉扎克·古尔纳、琳赛·科伦和约瑟夫·康拉德这几位小说家。高希是在印度和美国生活的作家，他的作品包括印度洋历史小说；古尔纳是来自桑给巴尔的小说家，获得了2021年诺贝尔文学奖；科伦是毛里求斯的作家和活动家；约瑟夫·康拉德是英国正典文学的关键人物。
这四位作者因为在他们的大部分小说中都以印度洋世界为中心而值得关注。他们每一位都覆盖了印度洋的一个重要地区：高希是东部、古尔纳是西部、科伦是群岛，而康拉德是帝国外来者的视角。
他们的作品揭示了一个外向型的世界——充满了移动、跨越边界和南方国家的互联性。它们彼此都截然不同——从殖民倾向（康拉德）到彻底反资本主义（科伦），但他们通过主题、图像、比喻和语言，共同利用并塑造了更广泛的印度洋空间感。这造成的结果是重绘读者心中的世界地图，以相互关联的全球南方为中心。
找到非洲
正如肯尼亚小说家伊冯娜·阿迪安博·奥沃尔所说，非洲与世界互联互通的故事“似乎在我们的后独立和后殖民想象中迷失了”。正如她所说，“非洲如此之多的地方沉入海底”。
拙作旨在吸引读者潜入小说，在那里可以找到非
洲。
“印度洋世界”这个词用来描述东非、阿拉伯海岸、南亚和东亚海岸之间非常持久的联系。印度洋的地理位置使这些联系成为可能。
纵观历史，海上交通要比陆上交通容易得多，这就意味着相距遥远的港口城市彼此之间往往比与距离近得多的内陆城市之间更容易联通。历史和考古证据表明，我们现在所说的全球化最早出现在印度洋。
英语印度洋小说是一个规模不大但很重要的文学类型，还包括M·G·瓦桑吉、迈克尔·翁达特杰、罗梅什·古纳塞克拉等很多人的作品。
高希、古尔纳、科伦甚至康拉德所参照的那套历史和地理与最常见的英语小说中的历史和地理不同。后者大多以欧洲或美国为中心，以基督教和白人为背景，提到巴黎和纽约等地。
重绘地图
相反，本书中的小说强调的是一个基本上属于伊斯兰教的空间，角色多为有色人种，聚焦于马林迪、蒙巴萨、亚丁、爪哇和孟买等港口。
举例来说，在古尔纳的小说《海边》中，桑给巴尔的一名教师正在向他的年轻学生展示他们在世界的位置，他在非洲东海岸周围画了一条很长的连续的线，向上转到印度，穿过马来群岛和印度尼西亚群岛，一直延伸到中国。他说，这就是我们所处的位置，他绕着桑给巴尔，向东指向大海。就在教室外面：
成群的帆船一排排地停泊在港口中，船上的垃圾漂浮在海面上，泛着星星点点的光……街道上挤满了索马里人、阿拉伯人或信德人，买东西的，卖东西的，还有不知为什么打起架来的，他们夜晚在空地上露营，吟唱欢快的歌曲，泡茶……
这是一幅极具想象力和感官性的南方世界性文化图景，提供了在这个世界中更强烈的位置感。
这种地理重置对于体现非洲的地位尤为有效。在小说中，水手和旅行者并不都是欧洲人。非洲并没有被描绘成一个排斥海洋、只接收而不输出探险者的大陆。非洲以及印度和阿拉伯角色是商人、阿拉伯三角帆船船长、逃亡者、恶棍、传教士和活动分子。
这并不意味着印度洋的非洲被浪漫化。移徙往往是被迫的；旅行被描绘成遗弃而不是冒险；自由不属于妇女；奴隶制盛行。
真正的意思是，非洲在印度洋世界漫长而丰富的历史中发挥了积极的作用，因而也在更广泛的世界发挥了积极作用。
Four novelists, one ocean: how Indian Ocean literature can
remap the world
In her book, Charne Lavery focuses on novels that highlight the
area as an Islamic rather than Eurocentric space
BY CHARNE LAVERY
Novels make worlds. They create an intuitive sense and mental image
of a place. And the senses of space produced by fiction shape how
readers see the world, like maps do.
For early postcolonial literature, the world of the novel was often
the nation.Such novels were usually set within national borders and
concerned in some way with national questions. Sometimes the whole
story was taken as an allegory of the nation, whether India or
Tanzania. This was important for supporting anti-colonial
nationalism, but could also be limiting — land-focused and
inward-looking.
My new book, Writing Ocean Worlds, explores another type of world
of the novel: not the village or nation, but the Indian Ocean
world.
The book describes a set of novels in which the Indian Ocean is at
the centre of the story. It focuses on writers Amitav Ghosh,
Abdulrazak Gurnah, Lindsey Collen and Joseph Conrad. Ghosh is a
writer based between India and the US, whose work includes
historical fiction of the Indian Ocean; Gurnah is a novelist from
Zanzibar, who was awarded the 2021 Nobel Prize for Literature;
Collen is an author and activist based in Mauritius; and Joseph
Conrad is a key figure of the English literary canon.
These authors are notable for having centred the Indian Ocean world
in the majority of their novels. Each also covers an important
region thereof: Ghosh the eastern part, Gurnah the western part,
Collen the islands and Conrad an imperial outsider’s view.
Their work reveals a world that is outward-looking — full of
movement, border-crossing and south-south interconnection. They’re
all very different — from colonially inclined (Conrad) to radically
anti-capitalist (Collen), but together draw on and shape a wider
sense of Indian Ocean space through themes, images, metaphors and
language. This has the effect of remapping the world in the
reader’s mind, as centred in the interconnected global south.
As the Kenyan novelist Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor has said, the
narrative of particularly Africa’s interconnection with the world
“seems to have been lost in our post-independence, postcolonial
imagination”. As she says, “so much of Africa lies hidden in the
sea”.
My book aims to tempt readers to dive into the fiction where it can
be found.
The Indian Ocean connection
The Indian Ocean world is a term used to describe the long-lasting
connections among the coasts of east Africa, the Arab coasts and
South and East Asia. These connections were made possible by the
geography of the Indian Ocean.
For much of history, travel by sea was much easier than by land,
which meant port cities very far apart were often more easily
connected to each other than to much closer inland cities.
Historical and archaeological evidence suggests what we now call
globalisation first appeared in the Indian Ocean. This is the
interconnected oceanic world referenced and produced by the novels
in my book.
The Indian Ocean novel in English is a small but substantial genre,
including works by MG Vassanji, Michael Ondaatje, Romesh Gunesekera
and many others.
For their part Ghosh, Gurnah, Collen and Conrad reference a
different set of histories and geographies than the ones most
commonly found in fiction in English. Those are mostly centred in
Europe or the US, assume a background of Christianity and
whiteness, and mention places such as Paris and New York.
The novels in the book highlight instead a largely Islamic space,
feature characters of colour and centralise the ports of Malindi,
Mombasa, Aden, Java and Bombay.
To take one example, in Gurnah’s novel By the Sea, a teacher in
Zanzibar is showing his young pupils their place in the world and
he draws a long continuous line around the east coast of Africa, up
and around to India, and through the Malay and Indonesian
archipelagos, all the way to China. This, he says, is where we are,
circling Zanzibar and pointing eastward and out to sea. Just
outside the classroom: crowds of sailing ships lie plank to plank
in the harbour, the sea between them glistening with slicks of
their waste ... the streets thronged with Somalis or Suri Arabs or
Sindhis, buying and selling and breaking into incomprehensible
fights, and at night camping in the open spaces, singing cheerful
songs and brewing tea ...
It is a densely imagined, richly sensory image of a southern
cosmopolitan culture which provides for an enlarged sense of place
in the world.
Representing Africa
This remapping is particularly powerful for the representation of
Africa. In the fiction, sailors and travellers are not all
European. And Africa is not portrayed as a hydrophobic continent
which only receives rather than sends out explorers. African,
Indian and Arab characters are traders, nakhodas (dhow ship
captains), runaways, villains, missionaries, activists.
This does not mean Indian Ocean Africa is romanticised. Migration
is often a matter of force; travel is portrayed as abandonment
rather than adventure; freedoms are kept from women; and slavery is
rife.
What it does mean is that the African part of the Indian Ocean
world plays an active role in its long, rich history, and therefore
in that of the wider world.
