Questions around identity have been among the most important and confusing of our day. Some are appalled that our society is being divided up into tiny tribes where people with a few common characteristics create identitarian units. Surely this isn’t strange, particularly in a culture as atomised and accelerated as ours. You like to be with people who are like you. It is defensive as well as reassuring.
The first time I was aware that I had an identity, and that it could be useful, was when I decided as a teenager that I wanted to be a writer. I started to call myself, in my mind, a writer. No one else knew that I was a writer because I hadn’t written much and they certainly hadn’t read it, thank God. But the notion that I could put this identity on like a new set of clothes, or a suit of armour, really helped me out. As a child and young man, I suffered racial abuse; I was at times, at school and on the street, known as ‘Paki’. Calling myself a writer was a self-designation which protected me. If I hadn’t yet become a writer, I would become one - it was an ambition, it made a future, and I wouldn’t be the first person to take on a moniker long before they were ready to inhabit it. So I can see the point and use of names.
I would walk about the city trying out phrases like, “meet Hanif Kureishi, he’s a writer” or “This is Hanif Kureishi, have you read his books?” I liked the sound of that. I’ve been a writer my whole life since then, and I’ve never grown less fond of the designation. I am proud of it, it got me places. But since my accident on Boxing Day 2022, I have become more of a patient than a writer. I am a patient all day, a more or less anonymous body to the nurses who take care of me. I can feel my identity slipping as if I am forgetting who I am and becoming someone else, or almost nothing. This has been traumatic; I never thought I would lose my identity, for it to be scrubbed out or superseded by something else.
I guess I keep my identity as a writer going with these blogs, which I dictate to my son Carlo. I think about the blog all week, but it takes about one to two hours to write. The rest of the time I am a patient.
I feel dull today, and I worry that I am repeating myself now, that I am running out of juice. My imagination is muted. At the end of this week, I have lost my spark a bit. It has been so difficult here in the hospital and my circumstances have become so strange that I can’t find an idea of myself to contain me. I can’t write fiction: stories, movies or novels, because my circumstances are so urgent and immediate that inhabiting other worlds won’t work for me at the moment.
It is odd though, that as I sit in this grim hospital room, things are going well for me. The Curve Theatre in Leicester is reviving their excellent production of My Beautiful Launderette, which will tour around northern towns early next year. At the same time, The Royal Shakespeare Company are doing an adaptation of my first novel, The Buddha of Suburbia, which will rehearse in the spring, and open at The Swan, Stratford, before coming to London. Two years ago, I wrote a ten-thousand-word story, set in the present, which concerns a meeting between Karim Amir, the hero of The Buddha of Suburbia, and Matthew Pyke, the older theatre director with whom Karim has a turbulent relationship.
The story was written in the third person, rather than in the first - as it was in the novel - because I couldn’t inhabit Karim’s voice today. I still wanted to write about him. I would like to try and get this ready for publication on Substack, but I am anxious about writing a substantial piece of fiction without being able to type or write by hand. I guess I will have to figure it out, and collaborate with a family member. I will probably do it when I get home, which isn’t so far in the foreseeable future now. The end of my hospital stay is in sight, and it would have been nearly a year, which is an extraordinary thing. It will be a pleasure to work on something with somebody else; this is a new form of writing for me, a necessary collaboration, which is intimate, creative and fast. Out of horror, something new must arise.
I will have a new identity, an additional one I guess, as a disabled person, something which at the moment I am not prepared for. It isn’t a welcoming designation. I don’t want to be seen like that, and yet I may well have to get used to it. This is a conflict for me. My house is already being altered for my return. This is real. It had to be done. And so, if I was ever tempted to think of all this as a dream, the workers currently disturbing Isabella in the house make it clear that this is reality.
Dearest Hanif, I am absolutely beside myself with excitement at the news that the RSC is doing an adaptation of The Buddha of Suburbia. I have just finished reading it for the umpteenth time and it never grows old. I'll be buying a ticket the minute they go on sale and hope that you will be well enough to be there on the opening night. x
Hi Hanif - you have just given words to something I have been experiencing since about five years ago when Alzheimer’s took more of my mum than it left. I visit her weekly and wonder who she is now - and I don’t know. Things change quickly. She says and does things that are outside my lifelong experience of her. She sounds and looks very different. The mum I talk to when I am going about my life, is the mum before Alzheimer’s. I try to integrate the two but can’t make it work. Maybe something will shift and it will make sense - but maybe not. It might always be unfathomable. Please keep writing writer.
Sandy X