Hanif Kureishi & Me
“Have you read Hanif Kureishi’s blog?” my friend Maryam asked me in January, on one of our occasional former roommate calls, checking in with each other’s lives from London, San Francisco, Los Angeles.
“Hanif Kureishi? I haven’t read anything by him in years.”
“You have to read this. Trust me.”
I trusted her. Maryam is a therapist with excellent taste in books. She was the one who gave me my first copy of The Buddha of Suburbia. I have taught it, recommended it, lent it many times; there’s a recent edition in the house I bought for my son.
The Buddha of Suburbia was exactly the book I needed to read when I moved to London in the mid-1990’s. England was a place that seemed alien, pale, stuck in the past, and inward-looking. Kureishi portrayed my new home as a place full of immigrants, roiled by change. As a Greek and Jewish American from suburban LA, I got so many of his riffs, as had Maryam, who grew up in Marin County with parents from Karachi. I loved Kureishi’s willingness to go anywhere in his writing, his humour and humanity. I watched “My Beautiful Laundrette”; I became a fan.
At the time, I was a poet with a few prizes and publications to my name, writing what turned out to be my first novel. I wanted to explore the hidden stories of my Greek American female ancestors, to dig deeply into the muck of sex and its epic narratives, food, family, mythology. Like other writers mining their heritage for new stories that had not yet been told, Kureishi’s work helped give me courage to break boundaries.
Then, gradually, we parted company. Or rather I should say, Kureishi continued to know nothing about me or his role in my imaginative life, and I disentangled him from my inner library of heroes and influences. I could forgive Virginia Woolf for being an upper-crust snob and antisemite, but I could not quite forgive Kureishi for having the persona of an arrogant, macho prick. I read his fourth novel, Intimacy, and could not see past the narrator. It was too much for me — the raw honesty of a self-centred man leaving his wife and two children.
Around this time, I saw Kureishi read at a PEN event. The evening was in honour of writers around the world whose work had been censored and whose writing put them at risk of persecution and state violence. Every single person there read the work of an oppressed writer, except for Hanif Kureishi, who read his own work. That was the final straw. I still opened to the page when he turned up in the paper, but I did not seek him out.
Occasionally, I would see Kureishi in person. We lived in the same neighbourhood. In the years of raising my two children, I often spotted him in the local park with his boys. I knew someone getting tutored by him. She said he was a good teacher. Every time I saw him, I felt a pang — because there he was, a living, breathing, productive and prolific artist writer. And I was farther away from my own writing than I had ever been. Sometimes I imagined having a conversation with him, and asking him the secret of his ruthlessness.
Then Maryam told me about Kureishi’s blog.
I read it and felt the immediate, visceral pull of a unique voice trapped inside a terrible, accidental circumstance.
There is a Greek saying — “in the middle of our happiness, they strike us down.” My mother used to mutter it in Greek. By “they” I think she meant the furies, the fates, the old dark ones. You could be walking along the street, thinking of meeting your lover for dinner and be hit by a bus. Your cough could turn out to be cancer. Or, like Kureishi, you could be on holiday in Italy with your girlfriend and wake up on the floor, paralysed from the neck down.
He could not hold a pen. He was dictating his experiences, insights and observations in a vivid and gripping flow gathered and published by his family. I would not wish what happened to Kureishi on my worst enemy. Yet here were his words and my compulsion to read them. I was both grateful and deeply curious about the news he was bringing back from the discovered land of his disaster.
What fascinated me most were Kureishi’s posts about his coming across a hidden world of dependency and care, of vulnerability and solidarity. Strangers he did not know were looking after him, with humour, empathy, kindness. He met others who were also floored by their own bodies.
This is a world that exists alongside the one that gets narrated, performed, discussed in our late capitalist society — that glittering, buzzing world of competition, striving, goals and aims. It is the world behind the world, the one we all come from and to which we will all return — of the fragile human body that cannot exist without the care and attention of other fragile human bodies.
I remember the shock of giving birth the first time. Firstly, the deep surprise that I had never before thought about how every single person on the planet had arrived as a helpless wet lump through a woman’s womb. Secondly, that my body was no longer my own; there was a vulnerable being completely dependent on me and whose existence exposed me emotionally in a way that I could not help, like losing my skin.
I was no longer the autonomous captain of my own ship, and that, I had been told, was the most important, most valuable, most desired thing to be. After 36 years of coveting, cultivating and celebrating autonomy, it was gone — in an instant. Motherhood was a slap upside the head, a doorway to enlightenment, a revelation. It was big news.
This news can come in many ways, and over the years I have known it to arrive via illness, disability, old age. It can be unwelcome and feel unfair; it can also bring out the best in ourselves and others. There is no room in our world for the truth of our mutual dependence and vulnerability. It is literally hidden away.
In recent times, as the reality of our mutual planetary disaster grows, it seems we are turning away from our human interdependence more and more, choosing leaders who ride to power on the back of a message that strength is power. Weakness is for losers. Vulnerability is something that happens to other people.
I remember one striking moment of hope during the Boris Johnson years of taking from the poor to give to the rich. The man the UK had elected as Prime Minister was fighting for his life with Covid. He stumbled out of hospital and thanked the “foreign” nurses who saved his life. I thought, maybe he will be changed. He will get it now and we can stop the juggernaut before it is too late. But as soon as he recovered, he went back to his old, self-centred and self-promoting ways. There was no “Wonderful Life” reversal for him or any of us.
Kureishi seems to have had excellent healthcare in Italy. He was looking forward to coming back to England. Now that he is here, his recent posts have revealed his anger, frustration and despair over how slow his progress has been, how awful it is to be so close to his old life and impossibly far away. Who can blame him? It is an awful situation that must often seem completely without meaning. Yet, he continues to connect through words with his growing community of readers. He signs his posts, “Your loving writer”; once again, I am one of his dedicated readers.
