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.
When your mum is no longer living, who she was then will become all she is. It is one of the nicest things about death of our parents. We only remember their voices and manner as they were.....competent, very or pretty healthy and ALIVE. Hang in there.
You’re not disappearing ……you’re more present in my life now - and maybe thousands of others, than you have been for ages.
You are extraordinary, brave , resilient ,persistent, honest … I’m sure the majority of your week is dealing with shit you wish you shouldn’t have to deal with… and it’s nothing to do with your creative flow and writing and all the other stuff that makes up the person you STILL ARE……..
It must be a mind fuck and I’m so sorry this has happened.
But….
We read your words and listen to your thoughts and the world is a slightly better place.
Isn’t life about walking through doorways to places other may not want or be able to inhabit? Nothing will change the fact that you are a writer (a door many of us will never walk through), although the machinations of how you write may well change. As a reader of your posts, I am often jolted into sadness by the stark reminders of the banal randomness of life-changing accidents and find myself, once again, wishing you some peace, joy and equilibrium.
I thought that was intentional as if to prove that the writer is correct when he says he feels that he is repeating himself. Very clever, or a fortuitous error...either works for me.
Dear Hanif, so sorry to hear about your struggles with your new, unsought identity. It reminds me of when the disabled parking sticker finally arrived for my daughter – I insensitively punched the air, thinking only of the practicality after 9 months of hassle to park in a suitable spot for a wheelchair – but my daughter’s eyes filled with tears at the idea of this official label, this new, unasked-for identity. About 10 months after her accident, I stumbled across the film “Patients” by Grand Corps Malade on Netflix, and asked her if she wanted to watch it (he describes the year he spent in a rehab facility after breaking his neck). Have you seen or read it? My daughter and I spent an emotional but very interesting and uplifting evening…
Obviously, all your readers here and out in the “real world” still think of you as a writer. Unless you’d prefer the designation “Dictator” until you can physically write again?! I loved the phrase “Out of horror, something new must arise”. My daughter (and I, by association) are at that phase, of creating something new. Tiens bon, as we say here in France, and please keep writing/dictating!
I'm sure you know, but it's impossible for me not to make the association, reading you today, that Henry James couldn't write his last novels and had to dictate them. For most critics (not for me, but it doesn't count) at least one of them (The Golden Bowl) is among the best things he wrote. He used to hate the sound of the typewriter used by the person who transcribed his prose, but then he got used to it and became quite dependent on this new soundtrack in his writing life. Wishing you all the best, Hanif, if I may, always from Rome.
Dear Hanif, Thinking about what you wrote, movingly, today about the designation "disabled person."
Others may also have mentioned this already but there's great writing, some with wide accessbility, by humanities scholars about "ablist" paradigms and bodies in pain: "crip theory" for example by Robert McRuer (overview here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_McRuer ), the work of Ellen samuels (Fantasies of Identification: Disability, Gender, Race (NYU, 2014)), and Travis Lau (his site is here with links: https://travisclau.com/) I heard Lau give a talk at the 2021 Modern Language Association entitled "Crip Politics, or Being Crip in Public," which I thought was brilliant. There are a lot of really great people working in these areas. During the pandemic a lot of talks went online and there were significant videos made of research in progress, some of it with a goal of reaching a broad audience and not just academics or fellow specialists. I suspect you might find quite a lot of these on youtube or vimeo (or on university servers in public access ways). Here's an example by Travis Lau on pain & disability: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ni-55f8hLCs I tihnk you might find that there are a good number of people working on these issues who really want their work to be read widely and care vividly about being read by those who are confronting complex identies or changed identities. I won't be surprised if your words here are being read by many of those working in these domains. I do not confront chronic pain in any way comparable to yours but I have accompanied close friends recently in their pain and learned too much lately from surprises that brought changes in my "validity." Some of this great recent research has raised my awareness of our responsibility to hear far more than the sorrows that are the ones we "know." We all have so much to learn from others who can give a voice to pain. You probably already know more than you want to about others managing pain, but I thought you might want to know that there are some really interesting voices out there on this subject--and I bet many of those writers and thinkers are listening to you and hoping you keep writing about your experiences. sending courage. --J
“meet Hanif Kureishi, he’s a writer”... “This is Hanif Kureishi, have you read his books?”
Dear Hanif, you will always be a writer. Let that reminder get you through the hard times ahead, as it did in your youth. SO excited by the thought of you going home, of the thought of The Buddha of Suburbia being adapted for the stage, to reach yet another audience. If I weren't in Australia, I'd be there on opening night. Hope you will be. Please remember, your presence matters. You are a writer; you always will be. Warm thoughts, Anna
For many of us here I suspect you are above all a Writer. Your accident has brought many of your identities into sharp focus and has given you a new identity, too, as you say. It has also brought your writerly identity and its importance (for you, for us) into focus, no? Before your accident I wasn’t aware of your current writing or even much interested in it, if I’m honest (sorry) but the power with which you articulate this current crisis of yours has changed that. I’m excited to learn about the 10k story you’re writing about Karim and offer you my services as amanuensis if you are concerned about exhausting the good will of others x
Thank you so much for sharing this. My sister, who had polio in 1950 at six years old, stayed at home in her bed for six years before going to the Georgia Warm Springs Foundation for the handicapped. Her life was defined by being in an iron lung, having her spine, stretched up in traction, and her legs put into braces, hoping that she could walk again. That never happened.
She was in a wheelchair, her entire life. Escorting her around when I went to visit her in Kansas City, Missouri, I could see how she adapted herself in the world of able-bodied people, and never let the identity of being handicapped (fondly referred to as gimp )really keep her down. I know there’s a big difference, knowing able-bodied- ness before coming into disability. But I can say a good life can still be experienced as long as the organs are functioning and one makes good friends. Life, in a wheelchair is cumbersome and uncomfortable, and there’s lots to complaining to do about things not being ADA compliant.
My sister found her niche of identity as the head of the English department, teaching, grammar and writing in a junior college in Kansas City Missouri. She influenced a lot of people. She also influenced all of her caregivers. Encouraging them to continue their education.
I suspect that you will find the right identity as this process slowly unfolds. Right now I’m just imagining you being able to get out of the hospital. Following your journey, here has been fascinating to me, and I appreciate your writing.
And much gratitude to your brother for helping further your expression. My sister was able to speak, and so at the insistence of her daughter, she made short videos of what her life was like over a different time periods. It is now her legacy on a website that her son-in-law created for her upon her death. It Chronicles, her life by decades. http://www.cherylgrosser.com/. You might gain inspiration. One never knows what will unfold next.
Sometimes when I read your Blog posts, I get depressed and lost in the first few paragraphs. But I’ve observed that your mood can change direction, and you’ve written in some hope-and even some satisfaction-by the conclusion. I’m so happy for your upcoming theater productions. This is great. This is a reality counterpoint to the grim hospital.
On Amazon, I’ve just ordered The Buddha of Suburbia, and I hope I can find the film version available.
You can’t know how much your terrible dilemma ties my stomach in knots. I’m an Artist and I think What if my hands could only lay on the paper, inert, useless tools defying my will, marooning my visual expression?
I send you very much love, warm hugs, and healing thoughts, always. Please keep partnering with Carlos to keep your thoughts, your writing out in the world. Your supporters love reading you.
Had you not become a writer, we would have been much the poorer. Even though the mechanics of communication have changed, your unique voice is still loud and clear. Many, many thanks. It’s brilliant about the RSC, too!
Dear Hanif, please keep identifying as a writer! That is who you are and we are so grateful! Everything else can and will change and especially if you envision your deepest desire. From everything you have written about your physiotherapy, I believe you will grow in strength and ability. Hold that vision just like you held the vision of becoming a writer when you were a young man. Look what happened! Thanks for sharing that story! ❤️
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
So will I ! !
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
When your mum is no longer living, who she was then will become all she is. It is one of the nicest things about death of our parents. We only remember their voices and manner as they were.....competent, very or pretty healthy and ALIVE. Hang in there.
Hanif,
You’re not disappearing ……you’re more present in my life now - and maybe thousands of others, than you have been for ages.
You are extraordinary, brave , resilient ,persistent, honest … I’m sure the majority of your week is dealing with shit you wish you shouldn’t have to deal with… and it’s nothing to do with your creative flow and writing and all the other stuff that makes up the person you STILL ARE……..
It must be a mind fuck and I’m so sorry this has happened.
But….
We read your words and listen to your thoughts and the world is a slightly better place.
Please don’t stop, now you are so present.
Love Kate XXX
Isn’t life about walking through doorways to places other may not want or be able to inhabit? Nothing will change the fact that you are a writer (a door many of us will never walk through), although the machinations of how you write may well change. As a reader of your posts, I am often jolted into sadness by the stark reminders of the banal randomness of life-changing accidents and find myself, once again, wishing you some peace, joy and equilibrium.
Lovely.
You will always be a writer to me, and an excellent one at that.👌🏾
Love and gratitude from a person who also used to be called “Paki.”
PS your story seems to have been pasted again so it appears twice in your post.
I thought that was intentional as if to prove that the writer is correct when he says he feels that he is repeating himself. Very clever, or a fortuitous error...either works for me.
Oh, I see what you mean! If it was intentional then yes, it was clever.
I wondered whether that was intentionally done or a Freudian slip!
The more I think about it now (after Cindy Young’s comment prompted me to), the more I think it was intentional.
Dear Hanif, so sorry to hear about your struggles with your new, unsought identity. It reminds me of when the disabled parking sticker finally arrived for my daughter – I insensitively punched the air, thinking only of the practicality after 9 months of hassle to park in a suitable spot for a wheelchair – but my daughter’s eyes filled with tears at the idea of this official label, this new, unasked-for identity. About 10 months after her accident, I stumbled across the film “Patients” by Grand Corps Malade on Netflix, and asked her if she wanted to watch it (he describes the year he spent in a rehab facility after breaking his neck). Have you seen or read it? My daughter and I spent an emotional but very interesting and uplifting evening…
Obviously, all your readers here and out in the “real world” still think of you as a writer. Unless you’d prefer the designation “Dictator” until you can physically write again?! I loved the phrase “Out of horror, something new must arise”. My daughter (and I, by association) are at that phase, of creating something new. Tiens bon, as we say here in France, and please keep writing/dictating!
Essential. Some of the most important writing I’m seeing, in an ideal if tragically unintended form.
I'm sure you know, but it's impossible for me not to make the association, reading you today, that Henry James couldn't write his last novels and had to dictate them. For most critics (not for me, but it doesn't count) at least one of them (The Golden Bowl) is among the best things he wrote. He used to hate the sound of the typewriter used by the person who transcribed his prose, but then he got used to it and became quite dependent on this new soundtrack in his writing life. Wishing you all the best, Hanif, if I may, always from Rome.
Didn’t know that--ah Henry...
Dear Hanif, Thinking about what you wrote, movingly, today about the designation "disabled person."
Others may also have mentioned this already but there's great writing, some with wide accessbility, by humanities scholars about "ablist" paradigms and bodies in pain: "crip theory" for example by Robert McRuer (overview here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_McRuer ), the work of Ellen samuels (Fantasies of Identification: Disability, Gender, Race (NYU, 2014)), and Travis Lau (his site is here with links: https://travisclau.com/) I heard Lau give a talk at the 2021 Modern Language Association entitled "Crip Politics, or Being Crip in Public," which I thought was brilliant. There are a lot of really great people working in these areas. During the pandemic a lot of talks went online and there were significant videos made of research in progress, some of it with a goal of reaching a broad audience and not just academics or fellow specialists. I suspect you might find quite a lot of these on youtube or vimeo (or on university servers in public access ways). Here's an example by Travis Lau on pain & disability: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ni-55f8hLCs I tihnk you might find that there are a good number of people working on these issues who really want their work to be read widely and care vividly about being read by those who are confronting complex identies or changed identities. I won't be surprised if your words here are being read by many of those working in these domains. I do not confront chronic pain in any way comparable to yours but I have accompanied close friends recently in their pain and learned too much lately from surprises that brought changes in my "validity." Some of this great recent research has raised my awareness of our responsibility to hear far more than the sorrows that are the ones we "know." We all have so much to learn from others who can give a voice to pain. You probably already know more than you want to about others managing pain, but I thought you might want to know that there are some really interesting voices out there on this subject--and I bet many of those writers and thinkers are listening to you and hoping you keep writing about your experiences. sending courage. --J
“meet Hanif Kureishi, he’s a writer”... “This is Hanif Kureishi, have you read his books?”
Dear Hanif, you will always be a writer. Let that reminder get you through the hard times ahead, as it did in your youth. SO excited by the thought of you going home, of the thought of The Buddha of Suburbia being adapted for the stage, to reach yet another audience. If I weren't in Australia, I'd be there on opening night. Hope you will be. Please remember, your presence matters. You are a writer; you always will be. Warm thoughts, Anna
For many of us here I suspect you are above all a Writer. Your accident has brought many of your identities into sharp focus and has given you a new identity, too, as you say. It has also brought your writerly identity and its importance (for you, for us) into focus, no? Before your accident I wasn’t aware of your current writing or even much interested in it, if I’m honest (sorry) but the power with which you articulate this current crisis of yours has changed that. I’m excited to learn about the 10k story you’re writing about Karim and offer you my services as amanuensis if you are concerned about exhausting the good will of others x
Thank you so much for sharing this. My sister, who had polio in 1950 at six years old, stayed at home in her bed for six years before going to the Georgia Warm Springs Foundation for the handicapped. Her life was defined by being in an iron lung, having her spine, stretched up in traction, and her legs put into braces, hoping that she could walk again. That never happened.
She was in a wheelchair, her entire life. Escorting her around when I went to visit her in Kansas City, Missouri, I could see how she adapted herself in the world of able-bodied people, and never let the identity of being handicapped (fondly referred to as gimp )really keep her down. I know there’s a big difference, knowing able-bodied- ness before coming into disability. But I can say a good life can still be experienced as long as the organs are functioning and one makes good friends. Life, in a wheelchair is cumbersome and uncomfortable, and there’s lots to complaining to do about things not being ADA compliant.
My sister found her niche of identity as the head of the English department, teaching, grammar and writing in a junior college in Kansas City Missouri. She influenced a lot of people. She also influenced all of her caregivers. Encouraging them to continue their education.
I suspect that you will find the right identity as this process slowly unfolds. Right now I’m just imagining you being able to get out of the hospital. Following your journey, here has been fascinating to me, and I appreciate your writing.
And much gratitude to your brother for helping further your expression. My sister was able to speak, and so at the insistence of her daughter, she made short videos of what her life was like over a different time periods. It is now her legacy on a website that her son-in-law created for her upon her death. It Chronicles, her life by decades. http://www.cherylgrosser.com/. You might gain inspiration. One never knows what will unfold next.
Love the Frank Auerbach drawing-so much energy on the paper.
Hanif,
Sometimes when I read your Blog posts, I get depressed and lost in the first few paragraphs. But I’ve observed that your mood can change direction, and you’ve written in some hope-and even some satisfaction-by the conclusion. I’m so happy for your upcoming theater productions. This is great. This is a reality counterpoint to the grim hospital.
On Amazon, I’ve just ordered The Buddha of Suburbia, and I hope I can find the film version available.
You can’t know how much your terrible dilemma ties my stomach in knots. I’m an Artist and I think What if my hands could only lay on the paper, inert, useless tools defying my will, marooning my visual expression?
I send you very much love, warm hugs, and healing thoughts, always. Please keep partnering with Carlos to keep your thoughts, your writing out in the world. Your supporters love reading you.
Paddy
Washington, DC
Had you not become a writer, we would have been much the poorer. Even though the mechanics of communication have changed, your unique voice is still loud and clear. Many, many thanks. It’s brilliant about the RSC, too!
Dear Hanif, please keep identifying as a writer! That is who you are and we are so grateful! Everything else can and will change and especially if you envision your deepest desire. From everything you have written about your physiotherapy, I believe you will grow in strength and ability. Hold that vision just like you held the vision of becoming a writer when you were a young man. Look what happened! Thanks for sharing that story! ❤️