A Refugee's Tale as told to Nobel Prize winner Abdulrazak Gurnah: Eight years on the edge of hell

Refugee Tales is a project based on the Canterbury Tales in which people who have sought asylum and experienced immigration detenion walk and share their stories. This is an edited version of one such story, relayed by Nobel Prize for Literature winner Abdulrazak Gurnah

I came by air. It may sound odd to say that – what other way then? Some people walked. Many drowned. They were desperate. I wasn’t desperate but I was very frightened because I had made some people very angry with me.

My crime was to tell the girls who attended my Sunday school that they should not agree to be circumcised. My Sunday school was supposed to be a reading and writing class but I slipped in the good word any how I could. I told them circumcision was genital mutilation and a barbaric and backward practice.

Men forced women to do it so they would know they were rubbish. The real intention was to hurt them and paralyse them and control them. When the day came for the girls to agree to the cut, six of them refused. I wasn’t there, but I discovered what had happened that same night when I heard angry voices outside my house, bidding me to come out and take a beating for interfering with their daughters.

It was a Muslim village in a Muslim country, and though I am a countryman, I’m a Christian who was now accused of interfering with their daughters. You can imagine my terror.

'At Lunar House a woman interviewed me, and wrote down all my details' (Picture: Scott Barbour) | Getty Images

When it quietened down outside and the angry people went away, perhaps to get more people to come and help them, I wheeled out my bicycle in the dark and rode away to safety in a nearby village. The next day I heard that the thatch of my house was set on fire that night and that the people who did it were still looking for me and talking bad, so I ran away to the city, to the office of the charity NGO I worked for.

The officer there was an Englishman, Bernard, he was my friend. He told me he would find out about the fire. A few days later he told me that the people who burnt down my house came to look for me at the office, and they said they had some unfinished business with me... These bad people went back to the office several times looking for me, and in the end Bernard suggested that I run away to Britain to seek asylum.

It is a Christian country, and you are a Christian worker persecuted for doing Christian labour, Bernard said. He knew I would be given sanctuary, he said.

***

At Lunar House a woman interviewed me, and wrote down all my details. I told her that I was a campaigner against female genital mutilation and my life was in danger in my home country. Yes, she said, I am going to assign you emergency initial accommodation, just sit there and wait now.

By the end of the day there were six of us waiting there and we were all put in a van and taken to Barry House. There were 12 of us there, and we could go out if we wanted... We told each other stories of our escape from danger and death. Then three of us were sent to live in a house in Newcastle where we stayed for a month.

Then after that I was given a flat in Glasgow and three weeks’ money, and all this time I was still waiting to be interviewed so that I could explain my need for sanctuary. I was eager for my interview because I knew that the officer would understand and sympathise with my reasons for coming here.

After one month in Glasgow I was called for interview. I was interviewed for five hours by three different people. All of them were calm and persistent, but I could tell from the way they asked me questions that there was something behind it.

They did not believe me and as the hours passed I began to think what I had not thought possible over the three months I had been waiting. They did not want me here. They did not like me. The result of the interview was that I was refused permission to stay.

I felt as if I was something broken and discarded, thrown away with other broken things. I could not get over the stubborn and unruffled hostility of the officers. Perhaps you knew all along it was going to turn out like this, but I did not expect it. I really thought I would be heard differently.

After two years my application at last was successful, but permission to stay did not mean the end of my arriver’s tale. I was not allowed to work. My allowance, which was loaded onto an electronic card, only allowed me to shop in certain shops and for certain things.

In the end I took a job working illegally a few hours a week in a motor parts shop, just for pocket money. I don’t know how the police found out, but they raided my flat at four in the morning, overturned everything they could overturn and took me away hurriedly as if I was a dangerous criminal.

All my papers and all my property were lost during the arrest because I was not allowed to go back and was held away out of sight as if I was a poisonous snake or an infectious animal for several months.

I was released only to return to the limbo I was in before. I am not allowed to work. I have now been here for eight years. I have no choice but to live where I am told to live and wait for the next hearing to allow my application to be considered. Do you know what limbo means? It means the edge of hell.

Abdulrazak Gurnah won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2021. His latest novel is Theft. The full version of “‘The Arriver’s Tale’ as told to Abdulrazak Gurnah” was published in Refugee Tales Volume 1.