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 with the guests, most of whom are tourists from former colonial powers in Europe. Issa tells Badar that the tourists come to the Tamarind because it provides them with an opportunity “to rub shoulders with local people and eat street food.”

When an older European woman passes Issa and Badar, telling them she left her book in the dining area, Badar notices that Issa doesn’t smile when she addresses him and he tells her, in a deapan voice, that the book is probably still on the table. Badar, on the other hand, looks the guest in the eye and smiles at her, to which she reciprocates. This act prompts Issa to lecture Badar on how to interact with guests. He tells Badar,

Smile if you have to but always speak directly. These people don’t like cringing. They want you to serve them politely and them get out of their sight. Always remember, they are ony tourists. It’s just their money we want, not their love. Don’t argue, don’t answer back. Don’t be cheeky. Don’t stare at the men, especially when they wear stupid clothes. Don’t make jokes and don’t laugh out loud. Don’t touch them!

Issa tells Badar to be invisible, to have no extended interaction with the “tourists” who stay at the hotel. They come to “rub shoulder with local people,” not to become friends with local people. Issa’s lecture calls to mind Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place where she directly addresses the ugly tourists that descend upon Antigua with no care about the inhabitants of the island. Kincaid writes, “The thing you have always suspected about yourself the minute you become a tourist is true; A tourist is an ugly human being.” Kincaid points out that a tourist can descend and then leave, oblivious to those who “live day in, day out in a place that suffers constantly from drought” and who must pay heed to “every drop of fresh water.”

Issa’s warnings to Badar prove prophetic when Geraldine Bruno, a white woman from England working for an E.U. funded program digitizing health data in Tanzania, stays at the hotel and leaves destruction in her wake. Badar begins to get close to Geraldine, eating meals with her at night and even planning to go out with her one night, but when he can’t go out with her, he suggests that she go to dinner with Karim. This dinner leads to an affair and results in the destruction of Karim and Fauzia’s marriage. Geraldine doesn’t care about this. She has her “fun” with Kamir, meets his family, including his daughter Nasra, and then leaves, not even contemplating the rubble that lies in her wake.

When Fauzia leaves Kamir, she returns to her childhood home with her parents. Once settled, Fauzia’s mother Khadija contemplates Geraldine’s actions and tries to explain the lack of decency and respect that Geraldine, as an “ugly tourist,” enacted upon all of their lives. Khadija refers to Geraldine as a “tourist vagabond,” someone who enters a space and individual’s lives and then leaves in the same manner, with no intimacy or prolonged connection. She continues by asking, “What do these people want with us? Why do they come here?” Kadija answers her questions by telling Fauzia,

They come here with their filth and their money and interfere with us and ruin our lives for their pleasure, and it seems that we cannot resist their wealth and their filthy ways. What do they want with us? Everywhere you go you see them, in the narrowest alley and street, there they are, looking into people’s houses and down people’s throats, and alongside them will be one our shameless young men, grinning like a monkey while he does his blather. Don’t they have seas and beaches in their own countries? They come here with their heedless ways to add to the troubles we’ve see. There was something we knew about living that we no longer know now. We have become shameless of our own accord.

The “giants and pygmies of memory, of belief,” as Lillian Smith calls them in The Journey, have followed Geraldine and the other European tourists to Tanzania. They tell the tourist to go this way, not that way, leading them into a myopic view of their trip, a view that centers themselves above all others, with no inclination towards the inhabitants of the place they have descended upon for their holiday. The inhabitants become invisible, or if visible merely scenery that the tourist can call upon once they return to their homes. The inhabitants do not exist, as Issa tells Badar.

Khadija calls Geraldine a “tourist vagabond,” and Fauzia corrects her mother, reminding her that Geraldine is a volunteer. To this, Khadija simply responds, “What’s the difference? . . . Volunteer! You see them in their big new cars, bringing us their goodwill. They should stay in their own countries and do their goodwill there.” Khadija points out the hypocrisy of volunteer tourism and by extension the history of missionary work that sought to evangelize to “uncivilized” individuals while ignoring the systemic issues of poverty, race, and other issues in their own homes.

Theft covers a myriad of themes, but the lack of honor and decency of tourists/volunteers like Geraldine stands out to me the most. Gurnah dissects the ways that “ugly tourists” from former colonial continue their pillaging and destruction of former colonies through their tourism and supposedly humanitarian efforts. Geraldine is the epitome of Kincaid’s “ugly tourist,” the one who enters, wrecks everything, then leaves without a care in the world.

What are your thoughts? As usual, let me know in the comments below. Make sure to follow me on Twitter @silaslapham.