Asia Literary Review - Asian writing

POPULIST, POPULAR and down-to-earth in his depiction of the immigrant experience in Britain, for almost thirty years Hanif Kureishi has been a prophetic, entertaining and occasionally controversial force in British, Asian and World literature. As a writer comfortable with theatre, television and cinema, he has been able to reach beyond the literary milieu in examining, and participating in, the transformation of British society by emigrants from the Indian sub-continent, the ‘jewel in the crown’ of Britain’s expired empire.

Though his fictional universe rarely extends beyond a relatively tiny corner of London, he has become an icon of post-colonial literature, lauded by critic Sukhdev Sandhu as a ‘father figure to a whole generation of Asian artists … inspired by the fearlessness of his writing’.

His work is intimately engaged with questions of shifting identities – race and nationality, culture and religion, the local and the global, sexuality and gender. His artistic and commercial breakthrough, the Oscar-nominated screenplay for My Beautiful Laundrette (1985), centred on a gay relationship between a young Asian man and a former member of the National Front. Kureishi’s prose comprises a playful mix of influences, voices, genres and tones. Inspired as much by pop music as by Chekov, James Baldwin and The Mahabharata, his writing is comic, vulgar and erotic, but also emotional, philosophical and tragic. In form, he is a chameleon, producing plays, scripts for radio and television, novels, short stories, articles and a memoir. And while he is yet to publish any poetry, he does admit to trying his hand at verse.

What links all this experimentation is Kureishi – the born entertainer. Funny, sexy and accessible, his prose strives to connect with as large and as varied an audience as possible. Several of his works appear in more than one form – he adapted his debut novel The Buddha of Suburbia (1990) for a BBC television series; The Black Album (1995) transferred to the London stage in 2009.

Kureishi was born in Bromley, south London, in 1954 to an Anglo mother, Audrey, and a Muslim Indian father, Rafiushan. His father had emigrated after the partition of India and Pakistan and never returned. His heritage singled him out for especially harsh treatment as racial tension created by the influx of Asian immigrants to Britain flared into open violence through his teenage years. Kureishi found escape in music and literature. He fell in love with pop icons like The Beatles, fellow Bromley-boy David Bowie and Pink Floyd, and writers like Chekov, Orwell and Baldwin.

Described by the Daily Telegraph as ‘literary godfather to a generation of British Asians’, he told Sandhu in a 2004 interview: ‘I’m not an anti-racist writer; I write about people.’ His recent work on screen – The Mother (2003) and Venus (2006) – and in fiction, notably ‘The Decline of the West’ (2009), is populated by white, middle-class English people on the verge of nervous, romantic or financial breakdown.

Although he spent his adolescence writing a sprawling novel, his initial success came in the theatre. His first play, Soaking the Heat, was read at London’s Royal Court Theatre in 1976, when Kureishi was just twenty-two. His first full-length play was The Mother Country (1980), followed by Outskirts and Borderline (both 1981) and Birds of Passage (1983). Kureishi’s view then was that of an outsider who sees England and its inhabitants with a mixture of ambition, fear, amusement and confusion. ‘The English haven’t done anything good since 1945,’ says Asif in Birds of Passage. ‘We say you are a Third World country. You know, underdeveloped.’ Yet, present too is Kureishi’s inclusive humanity, his drive to understand the most racist characters even as he exposes them to censure.

Having grown frustrated with the limitations of fringe theatre, he wrote the screenplay My Beautiful Laundrette. Directed by Stephen Frears and starring Gordon Warnecke as Omar and Daniel Day-Lewis as Johnny, the film was a snapshot of Thatcherite Britain that few outside the beleaguered Asian community had witnessed. Although Kureishi’s London is characterised by violence, unhappiness, alienation and despair, this is not a world devoid of hope or even romance. Society may be increasingly riven by class, race and income, but this is also a city where working-class skinheads and ambitious Asian entrepreneurs can flirt and find mutual salvation. Kureishi was nominated for an Academy Award in 1987 for best original screenplay, but the Oscar went to Woody Allen for Hannah and Her Sisters.

His first novels, The Buddha of Suburbia and The Black Album, allowed him to probe more deeply such issues as identity, community and heritage that reflect Kureishi’s coming to terms with himself in an age when Britain as a whole was undergoing social upheaval. Karim, in The Buddha of Suburbia, is torn between the culture of his white, working-class mother and that of his father, an Indian Muslim bringing Buddhist meditation to middle-class London. It is a portrait of the author as a young man – albeit one who listens to Pink Floyd, drops acid and sleeps with anything in trousers. The exuberant tone darkens in The Black Album. Like Karim, Shahid is suspended between conflicting worlds: East and West, spiritual submission and personal liberation, political commitment and sensual abandon, abstinence and pleasure. There is the sense of identity, community and heritage provided by the group of radical and politicised Islamists. Fighting this in the battle for Shahid’s soul is the lure of liberal, cross-cultural and epicurean Bohemia that exists in London’s clubs and colleges, as well as the music of Prince.

Kureishi continues to write for the page and screen, while exploring, too, his own role and responsibility as a writer in the essay collections Dreaming and Scheming: Reflections on Writing and Politics (2002) and The Word and The Bomb (2005).

In 2004, he published a beguiling and tender memoir, My Ear at His Heart. The book was partly a creative autobiography, and partly an elegy for his father, who never fulfilled his dream of becoming a professional writer. The memoir confirmed for some what they had long suspected: that Kureishi had always been writing about himself. Indeed, his sister, mother and ex-partner have all complained of having their lives exploited and private history ‘fabricated for the entertainment of the public or for Hanif’s profit’.

ALR spoke to Hanif Kureishi in a café near his west London home about his experiences of racism, his desire to entertain and his need to dissect, and his complex relationship with Islam, his family and his Asian heritage.

James Kidd

Hanif Kureishi …

… on growing up in sixties Britain.

I grew up in a paradise really, apart from the racism. Between the 1950s and Thatcherism, there was free school, free university and cheap housing. My dad used to say, ‘It’s unbelievable that you don’t pay for your school in this country. I go to the doctor, and it’s free! In India, you wouldn’t even get a fucking doctor.’

I was in India [at the Jaipur Literary Festival]. You come out of Delhi airport and there are five-year-old children living on the pavement covered in filth. No shelter, no electricity, no proper food. There they live on the side of the road. It is extraordinary to think they can’t get housing.

Coming from India, my father made me very aware what the welfare state represented. He didn’t pay one penny for my education. Extraordinary. We thought that would go on forever – that safety, that sense of post-Second World War security. There have been a lot of blows to the narcissism of the West since then.

… on his father’s experience of racism.

There weren’t any Indians in my neighbourhood before my father turned up. If you were an Indian in England in the 1950s, people just thought you were inferior. If you were an English chap, you looked down on an Arab. You might be very polite to him, ask him how his family was, but you thought he was inferior. My dad was aware of that. He knew English people thought they were superior to him – because of class, the empire, the white man.

I never felt that. I experienced it, but I never internalised it. I could see dad had a very complicated relationship to that. Maybe that’s why he liked the white working class. They were like him. They were also patronised by the English ruling class. He had his wife, he had his kids and his house. That suited him. He could write.

… on his mixed-race heritage.

It was brave of mum. It wasn’t particularly brave of dad, because his family didn’t particularly disapprove. Several of his brothers married white women. It wasn’t a big deal. Only one of the brothers had an arranged marriage. My grandfather knocked off a few white women as well. They were all here during the war. It was controversial from the other side. But my mother’s family really liked dad. They were really fond of him.

We are all mixed race now – me, Barack Obama, Tiger Woods, Lewis Hamilton. In those days, you were despised if you were half-caste because people had this notion of purity. You could either be black or you could be white. The idea that you could be in between seemed like a dreadful mix-up. People were always asking, Where do you belong? Do you know who you are? Are you one of us or one of them? It would do your head in because I didn’t know really. Did I have to make a choice?

… on his formative political and cultural influences.

I was very impressed by the civil rights movement in the United States and by the Black Panthers – especially the demonstration at the Olympics [in 1968, by Tommie Smith and John Carlos]. I had lots of arguments in the neighbourhood with white people about it. They were really offended. That seemed to me one of the greatest gestures I had ever seen. Because I identified with what it was like to be talked about all the time as a Paki, as a half-caste, a reject. To see that was absolutely stunning for me.

Writers like James Baldwin also really helped. He was black and gay. He had been subject to the force of other people’s descriptions. Also pop music. Everyone was weird in pop. If you were a freak as a Paki, you could join the world of pop where everyone was a freak. It was Jimi Hendrix, and all that world, then, seemed very free.

… on his own experience of racism.

The racism my father experienced was of a different order. The bad stuff didn’t really happen until the end of the 1960s, when Paki-bashing became a thing. My mates from school would go out to beat up Pakis. We didn’t have a structure for understanding racism. A lot of the people who were abusive towards you were the authorities themselves. All the teachers were racist. They would say to me, ‘Hey, Paki.’ ‘Hey, brown boy.’ And there wasn’t another authority you could appeal to about the injustice of your situation. That is what is horrific about abuse of children. The very authority you go to for help is often the abuser. For me that was the case.

It was a strange and disturbing world. There were marches by the National Front from the 1970s through the 1980s. There was the big march in Southall when Blair Peach was killed. The racism of the skinheads became party-based. A lot of my friends became skinheads. People I had known since I was four turned up one day and they were skinheads. They remained my friends, though. Some black kids would also hang around with the skinheads because of the ska thing. It was quite a complicated picture. These skinheads would be chasing your dad down the street and then listening to Desmond Dekker at dance halls in Petts Wood with black boys wearing crombies and braces.

… on racism, art and being a writer.

I tried to make sense of it by writing it down. In that sense, writing is therapeutic. That’s what The Buddha of Suburbia and My Beautiful Laundrette are about. They are attempts to work out what the fuck I was doing, and whether I belonged anywhere. They are love stories to my friends. But to friends whose relationship with you is really ambivalent. It was very disturbing. I got out of Bromley as soon as I could and went to London. Once I got there, I was alright. Once I had become a writer, it was a counter-force to them saying I was a half-caste, a Paki, a mongrel. Being a writer is a real thing in the world. It is an identity. Back then, I needed to call myself a writer because they were calling me a fucking Paki. Other people need to call themselves Muslim when they are being called a Third World coolie. These are all defences that you need.

Becoming a writer and finding a subject that people might be interested in … [immigration and race] was happening already. I just noticed it, like Alan Sillitoe noticed that working-class people were joining the bourgeoisie. I was lucky. Any writer is lucky if you hit it for a bit. You get five years when what you are saying and the society you are saying it in are in the same place. Like John Osborne, or Salinger with The Catcher in the Rye.

… on racism and language.

It really is about language. It’s very traumatic to exist in a world of other people’s descriptions. Your own words have no force. You are bullied and disintegrate psychologically. That is why there were the big debates through the 1970s and 1980s about political correctness. We are still arguing about what you can say about Muslims, about what is free speech. For me, there isn’t a rule. If there was, you would know what you could say and couldn’t say. I do get offended, though. I was in Germany recently doing a book tour. People asked me questions nobody in England would ever dream of asking: Do you feel you really belong in England? Do you really feel you will be an Englishman? No one has said that to me for thirty years.

… on how race and immigration became central to his writing.

I realised I was very lucky to have grown up during this revolutionary transformation of Britain, from a white country to a brown country – what we call multiculturalism. This is a massive revolution. This is something that has never happened anywhere before. It wasn’t until I was eighteen or nineteen that I realised that this was what my writing would be about. I suddenly saw that this story, represented by my father, a Muslim man coming to Britain, was not only his story, but that of the West. No one else was writing about this. They would say to me: ‘This is very good, Hanif, but do they have to be Indians in a corner shop?’

And the global theme for me was immigration: the way Britain was changing faster and faster as more immigrants arrived. In Bromley, we were the only Indian family. Then the corner shop was run by Indians, and then the launderette, and so on. You could see us pouring into the country. Nobody foresaw that in three generations the whole of the racial landscape of the country would completely change. But I could see a process that was taking place, Britain becoming India. That was what I wanted to write about.

… on Islam and Islamic fundamentalism.

It really bothers us, doesn’t it? It’s odd that we would be shocked by people believing things so profoundly. It’s as though we don’t expect people to believe anything with fervency or conviction any longer; that they are willing to die for something. I am fascinated by Islam, by the idea of authority and by the protection that religion offers you: the rules and the hierarchy. Throughout history, most people in most parts of the world have lived, not in democracies, but in authoritarian regimes ruled over by cruel dictators. There is a deep need for the safety and the security. The sort of consumer vertigo that we live in now is quite an unusual thing.

… on China.

I had always thought of economic power and cultural power going together – look at Holland – [but] China seems to be a country in which people have a lot of money, but no freedom to speak. That seems to me a very odd thing, but it also seems like the future – economic freedom and cultural censorship. I can see this as a model for Malaysia, Indonesia, perhaps India, where you have religion and consumerism. So why would you want freedom of speech or political freedom? I grew up in the 1960s and took it for granted that people would want that. For me, there is no thought without speech.

… on art as entertainment.

When I am teaching – and I think it is a duty to teach – I tell students they are in showbiz. Writing isn’t for their benefit; they are making stories for other people. Why order it, make it sophisticated, make it into a narrative? It has got to work for someone else. It has to entertain them in some way.

I have always liked performance. I grew up on pop music, so my heroes were always performers. I went to work in the theatre and then the movies. It happened by accident, but it also wasn’t an accident. The idea that I would leave university and just sit in a room and write alone for the rest of my life seemed very depressing. I like working with other people.

… on his recent and future work.

I write every day. I am doing some short fiction at the moment. I want to write more quickly now. As you get older, you want economy. You want to say it more quickly. I don’t want to start something now and maybe it will come out in five years. Salman does that. I can’t bear it. It is too long for me now.

… on the writing process.

Writing is a very dreamy process. You start with a very vague idea, and then you sit there for days working on it. After a couple of weeks you realise it was a terrible idea, and throw it away. Except there is a little bit of the story that you think might make a good idea. You sit there for another three weeks, fiddling around with it, and something comes out. You don’t know what it is, where it comes from, but eventually you might have something. You are panning for gold, but you have to go though a lot of dirt.

These days I tend to work stories out in my head much more. You may see me lying on the sofa with my eyes closed, but I am actually thinking about it. I am writing a movie at the moment, an adaptation of Aravind Adiga’s White Tiger. I thought about it a lot, before I wrote anything down.

I have been thinking a great deal lately about what a waste of time [writing] is. But the waste of time makes it possible. There is anger and boredom about the stupidity of what you are doing. Then you quieten down and get on with it. I rather resent it. It’s like my dad’s making me go to work. Then I realise I am doing it because I want to.

… on why he wanted to be a writer.

I wanted to be an artist, but more importantly I wanted to be a professional writer. For me, that is more of a deal than being an artist. Can you make a living at this? Can you support your family? How is this a real job in England? Your father is an immigrant. You are a Pakistani. Are you a bum or are you a person who can support their family, which is a source of dignity and integrity?

Dad wrote his books to be published. He would have hated the fact that I would have written about reading his book [in My Ear at his Heart], and that I was the only person to have read them.

… on the key lesson he has learned about writing.

It’s a discipline. It’s a love, an obsession, and it never runs out. Henry James says something like, ‘art makes life’. It makes life more interesting and makes you more interested in it. It makes the world more alive to me when I think about it in a literary way. Art and life are interlinked. That’s why culture is important. That’s why the Chinese need more of it, why free speech is important. It’s a creative interaction with the world. We talked earlier about people crushing you with their descriptions. They own the language. They have the power. There is something very destructive about doing that to somebody: You are a Paki; you are nothing. It empties you out. To speak, to be creative and to write, that seems to me to be really authentic.