I MUST GET USED TO THE FACT THAT I AM DISABLED NOW. THE LOSSES ARE ABOMINABLE.
An interview with Dominic Cavendish of The Telegraph
Dear Readers,
The Kureishi Chronicles is a year old. Thank you for staying with me.
As always, if you have the means, and believe in paying for good writing, please do become a paid subscriber. Your contributions go towards my care.
Love to you all,
Hanif
It’s been just over a year since Hanif Kureishi’s world turned upside down. What should have been an idyllic afternoon, on Boxing Day 2022, savouring the delights of Rome, turned into a nightmare from which the author has not fully emerged. After going for a walk, he felt faint and collapsed in the apartment of his partner Isabella d’Amico, coming round to find himself paralysed – unable to move his limbs as a result of the fall and its impact on his neck and spine.
After spending a year in hospitals – in Italy and the UK – Kureishi, 69, returned to his home in west London last December. “I’m all the better for being finally at home,” he says simply from his motorised wheelchair, via Zoom. The house had to be reconfigured to accommodate his return – with a bathroom installed in his living room – and he has a carer to help out with his many needs.
“I’ve just been doing a physio session,” he tells me, as he manoeuvres into view. “I’m feeling a bit stronger in my shoulders, my arms, and my legs. But I can’t grip anything. I can’t hold anything. I can’t move my fingers. I’m hoping something might come back but the hands are apparently the last thing to come back.” There is some discernible movement in his arms – which might give the casual observer hope, but he explains there’s no clear roadmap to recovery. “The doctors will never make a prediction but they will say people continue to improve if they do physio and exercises – you’re not going to deteriorate at least.”
He talks with the clarity and concision that is a hallmark of his prose, with a dry detachment that mixes understated wit, unsmiling bemusement and sagacity. “People suddenly begin to speak well of you,” he notes. “Hundreds of people have been supportive and compassionate. It’s not something you would normally see – it’s normally something that happens to you when you die.”
The battle to contend with his nightmarish metamorphosis – which he has described as Kafkaesque – has been chronicled online, in a series of dictated dispatches on Substack, The Kureishi Chronicles, that have attracted the attention, and admiration, of thousands of subscribers worldwide. They have been formidably level-headed, often wry and quizzical, thinking aloud about how he, his partner, three sons (identical twins Sachin and Carlo, and Kier) and others will cope. To quote one example: “My accident was a physical tragedy but the emotional outcomes for all of us are going to be significant, but also very interesting.”
It perhaps risks rubbing salt into the wound to ask him to revisit what he has been through. But he obliges, reliving the terrible moment everything changed. “I was sitting in Isabella’s apartment, and felt faint. I put my head between my legs, and then passed out. Apparently when I passed out I stood up and took a couple of steps, and fell flat on my face. I was on the floor in a pool of blood, paralysed. Isabella was with me, and I thought I was going to die. I thought: ‘I’ve got four or five breaths left. It’s all over for me.’”
Few of us want to think about that moment; what passed through his mind? “It wasn’t the past that flashed before my eyes, it was my future – all the things I was not going to be able to do – to travel to Bali, or write a television series or see friends. I felt a tremendous sense of loss.” On surviving, he knew he “didn’t want to die”, he adds, despite being so incapacitated.
“The only thing I could do was speak – I was like one of those characters in a Beckett play, you know, just this chatter chatter chatter.” His experiences will be detailed in a new book, Shattered, to be published this autumn, but he gives me a glimpse of the “terrible” times he went through. “It was really lonely to be in hospital for so long, to have insomnia and to be lying there night after night. As a writer, I’m used to being alone but I got sick and tired of the loneliness of despair.”
As a longstanding atheist, did he reach out for any kind of divine succour? “When I was in hospital and at my most depressed, I did try the God thing. I thought I would give it a go, and tried for a couple of days. I thought it might be consoling to think there was an afterlife, but I couldn’t get it going.” The ghost of a smile; “I did my best – sorry God!”
It was interacting with those around him – staff and patients as well as visiting loved-ones and friends – that sustained him, he explains; that, and his writing, enabled by his amanuenses (especially Carlo). “Every morning from 10 till 1, I write, and that gives me a sense of purpose and the feeling I haven’t become completely useless.”
For him, there are parallels to his attitude now and his response to the visceral impact of racism that he experienced growing up in Bromley, south-east London, the mixed-race son of an Indian-born migrant father (who worked at the Pakistani embassy) and a white British mother. “What’s happened since my accident is that I’ve picked up a pen again, so to speak. Out of terrible events you become someone else. My reaction to those catastrophes was to find an opportunity to write, in a new way.”
He’s buoyed by the impending revival of his stage adaptation of his film My Beautiful Laundrette (1985), opening in Leicester next week, while in April Emma Rice adapts The Buddha of Suburbia (1990), for the RSC. The latter was a Whitbread-winning debut novel that drew on his own experiences to create an unputdownable rites of passage tale of a bohemian-minded, mixed-race British-Asian teenager whose adulterous, eccentric father becomes a socially feted religious guru.
The former – a striking Channel 4 rom-com, directed by Stephen Frears, involving furtive gay love between a white skinhead (Daniel Day-Lewis) and an Asian former school friend (Gordon Warnecke), who kiss, cuddle and more while tarting up an old south London laundrette, transformed his life at the age of 29.
He perks up as he recalls his whirlwind success. “I was living in a housing co-op in west London and the film had come out. I got nominated for an Oscar out of the blue. I went to the local Oxfam shop with my then girlfriend to get a dinner jacket and the next day we were flying first-class to LA. I found myself next to Dustin Hoffman and Bette Davis. That’s how it should happen, isn’t it? That can never happen twice.”
The film’s tender relationship – revelatory given those prejudiced times – drew on his own experiences, albeit he keeps me guessing as to just how extensively, batting away the Wikipedia description of him as bisexual (“How would they know?”).
“The movie came out of one image. One day when I was about 15, a school mate of mine knocked on the door and he had become a skinhead. He had changed his look completely. I loved this kid, and the idea that someone I’d known since I was four had joined the skinheads, who were the enemies of immigrants, stayed in my mind.”
Later, in the wake of studying philosophy at Kings College London, he imbibed the punk era’s heady concoction of rebel energy combined with sensuality and curiosity. “Punk wasn’t only people throwing bottles and spitting, there was a sexualised and bisexual side to it too. We used to go to a lot of gay clubs – there was one called the Sombrero in Kensington High Street that David Bowie used to go to. That fed into My Beautiful Laundrette as well.”
The idea of a full-blown romance came relatively late, though: “I originally wrote it as a story of two friends running a laundrette, but that didn’t seem strong enough. I remember writing that they kissed, and thought: this makes it much better. It seemed quite natural for me to write about it, and in a way it might have been easier for a non-gay writer to do so, because there’s nothing in the story about coming out, or having some internal conflict. I took it for granted they knew they were gay.”
Such a refusal to feel constrained, and be neatly compartmentalised, seems almost to belong to a bygone era. “There is much more about that now – that if you’re not Asian you can’t write an Asian character, or if you’re not West Indian you can’t write a West Indian character. All of that can be very inhibiting for a writer. It’s a reductio ad absurdum. It’s just too restrictive, isn’t it? The great 19th-century novels of George Eliot and Dickens portray a huge sweep of English society, and that’s what’s wonderful about them. You can’t come from all those parts of society.”
He mourns what has become of Channel 4 since, especially so when I describe to him an impending reality television show called Virgin Island (which sees its participants pop their cherry for entertainment). “It’s a shame to see it collapsing into such terrible vulgarity. When it started it was a great opportunity for so-called minorities and people outside the mainstream of the BBC to work in television – it was really exciting.”
We touch briefly, too, on the current upset affecting the Royal Society of Literature, of which he is a fellow. Salman Rushdie, a close friend of his, whom he also describes as his “big brother”, and who has sent him constant messages of support since the accident, has expressed his anger at the Society’s failure to be more emphatic in condemning the 2022 New York (religious extremist) stabbing that left him blind in one eye.
“I was absolutely boiling about that, furious about what Bernardine Evaristo [RSL’s president] said, which is that when it comes to political matters they remain impartial. If you want to remain impartial when one of the greatest writers in the world is stabbed, as Salman pointed out in his tweet, it’s ridiculous. I’m really shocked by that and I think she should resign over that remark.”
Despite his medical travails, Kureishi clearly has no intention of being less vocal. “I don’t give a f--k what anyone else thinks, whether it’s in my family or outside my family,” he says at one point.
And he remains outspoken about Islamism, the creeping and worrying influence of which in UK society he was foresighted enough to manifest in his 1995 novel The Black Album and 1997 film My Son the Fanatic. He offers no solutions. “The problem is that you can’t persuade people that religion can only be a small part of their life because Islam doesn’t make that distinction – it’s all or nothing.” It’s a religious community he’s not much in touch with. “I never went to the mosque as a child. My father was a Muslim but not a religious Muslim. Islam wasn’t like that then – as a term it wasn’t used. We were immigrants, or Asians, and we called each other Asian. The Muslim thing didn’t really happen until the 1990s – it wasn’t a term of identification any of us ever used.”
He is now coming to terms with being part of the disabled community and makes positive noises about speaking up on behalf of it. “When I start to feel stronger, I would be interested in trying to help disabled writers. A lot of attention is paid to writers of colour and women. But rarely do you hear people talking about disabled writers, so if there’s anything I can do in the future, to help them, in terms of equipment or agents, I would like to get involved with that.” Would he countenance the idea of the lead roles in My Beautiful Laundrette going to disabled actors? He lights up. “It’s not something I would have thought of before my accident – you never notice these things. But that would interest me now, in fact I would be thrilled by that.”
The post-accident Kureishi thinks of himself as a kinder person: “You see the world as being a much more perilous place than you saw it as before – you realise how frail the human condition is.” But he’s not going cuddly, and the RSC had better be warned that he will be casting a beady eye on how the sometimes toxic social atmosphere of the 1970s is conveyed in The Buddha of Suburbia. The P-word should stay in, he thinks. “If you take the context of the racism out, it’s not going to make any sense. I will be interested to see if the RSC attempt to censor that [on the grounds that] you’re not allowed to call someone a P--- these days. I would be very upset because that’s the reality of what happened, that s--t went on all the time, every day and it was relentless.”
What incredible work he produced in the wake of those rough early days. It seems against the odds that he would have triumphed so much on his own terms, but he reflects too that his father believed in British fair-mindedness. “If I ever said to him ‘Why would a young Asian kid from the suburbs become a famous writer, why would you think that’s possible?’, he would always say that the English people will give you a chance. I think that’s a moving and perceptive thing to say.”
He’s certain – and others, like Zadie Smith, have ardently echoed this assessment – that he helped to change the way we thought about the country: “I was writing about immigrants and their children, and the clash between the immigrant culture and British culture – that subject hadn’t really been portrayed before in British writing.”
“The nature of racism in the UK has changed,” he reflects, when I ask him to compare then and now. “There aren’t gangs of skinheads pushing excrement through front-doors, the discourse has changed. It’s mostly now about asylum seekers and refugees, the immigration figures. In those days the only politician who talked in that way was Enoch Powell and now race has become a subject for populism, throughout Europe”.
He will vote Labour at the next election, he reveals, but accepts that all the main parties are in a bind about immigration. “These are going to be issues for any government – and they’re connected: immigration, the NHS and an ageing population. Political parties have to claim they don’t want more immigration but they’re also aware that the NHS and the care-homes are not going to run without these people. It’s a real problem.”
He has to go and he seems touchingly grateful for my interest, when of course the feeling of admiration and gratitude must mainly be mine. I’ve only had the smallest window on to his daily battle to keep going, with writing his life-line. “It’s a mercy that the worst of it is over. I’ve just got to get used to the fact that I’m a disabled person now.” There’s no sugar-coating it, he realises. “The losses are abominable.”
My Beautiful Laundrette runs at Curve, Leicester from Feb 17-24; curveonline.co.uk; then tours to April 6. The Buddha of Suburbia runs at the RSC Swan, Stratford upon Avon, from April 18 - June 1 (rsc.org.uk); hanifkureishi.substack.com; Shattered will be published by Hamish Hamilton in October
Such a good interview. I feel as if I understand your stance on religion a lot better now. Watching from close up the growth of Islamism must have been a deeply distressing thing. Agree about Salman Rushdie and the crazy efforts some of these public figures make to be even-handed, so much so that they can't condemn senseless, horrific, terrible violence when they see it. There is violence in refusing to see it for what it is. As I write this I think of other situations in our complex world where some would push for condemnation, and others for support, and then I understand more. Yet and still, no: what happened to Rushdie is only condemnable, not tolerable. I'm glad you are still feeling the support from your substack followers enough to mention it. We are still here, always interested in hearing how you are, reading your thoughts.
When my health took a sudden life changing downturn, which eventually plateaued at a much diminished place, I flailed around looking for explanations and cures which did not come.
After some years of this new life full of fear and despair, an old family friend asked me “ What has this brought you?”. I wanted to strangle her - this disaster had brought me nothing, only misery, and I didn’t fancy propping up someone else’s fanciful worldview by looking on the bright side of a calamity.
But that question sunk in, and the answers were unexpected as they slowly emerged. It did bring me something. The crap still existed, but so did this light.