Article 5: My Beautiful
By RACHEL DONADIO
Published: August 8, 2008
One of the most revealing insights into
This seemingly casual exchange cuts to the heart of almost everything
that has animated Kureishi in nearly three decades as a playwright,
screenwriter, novelist and essayist. This is, after all, the man
who co-edited “The Faber Book of Pop” and whose films and novels — including
“My Beautiful Laundrette” and “The Buddha of Suburbia” — are filled with
raucous sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll. But this is also the man who had the
presence of mind to poke around in English mosques in the late ’80s and early
’90s, sensing that something might be stirring there, as indeed it was. Kureishi’s
novel “The Black Album,” set in 1989 and named after a Prince album, explored
the growing discontent, disenfranchisement and radicalism of some young British
Muslims. Not so many people were paying attention back in 1995, when it first
appeared, but 10 years later, when bombings rocked central
To many, Kureishi’s C.B.E. is a sign of needed change. His accolade,
along with Salman Rushdie’s being knighted in
June, indicates that these writers “aren’t voices from elsewhere, these are
voices from here, these are our voices,” says Hannah Rothschild, a friend of
both writers and a documentary filmmaker. “There’s no divide anymore. They are
us, we are them.”
When Kureishi burst onto the scene in 1985 with “My Beautiful
Laundrette,” his Oscar-nominated debut screenplay, few would have imagined that
he would wind up with the initials C.B.E. after his name. The film, directed by
Stephen Frears, detonated all kinds of cultural
assumptions with its depictions of a gay skinhead (played by a wiry young Daniel Day-Lewis), various Thatcherite Pakistani businessmen and their wives and
lovers. Today, Kureishi hasn’t quite mellowed, but he does seem to be enjoying
his evolution to honored eminence from angry young
man — or from rebellious son to adoring father of three young boys, whom he
talks about constantly.
KUREISHI DISCUSSED HIS LIFE and work with me not long ago as we sat in a
cafe in Shepherd’s Bush, the now-gentrifying corner of West London where he has
lived for years. “It was Blair, really, who started giving awards to trash,” he
said, half-joking. “Rubbish entertainers, people from the arts. Before that
writers didn’t get anything, really.” Then again, he added, “If it’s good
enough for Kylie Minogue, it’s
good enough for Hanif Kureishi, isn’t it?” With
intent, dark eyes and spiky gray hair, Kureishi tends to look perpetually taken
aback, as if he had just been struck by a cold blast of air. More reserved than
standoffish, he’s often reluctant to discuss certain questions, preferring
instead to deflect them with darkly comic self-deprecation. But when he seizes
hold of an idea, the power of his insights is formidable.
Kureishi’s latest novel, “Something to Tell You,” which will be
published in the
In our conversation, Kureishi described the novel as “a critique of the
notion of limitless pleasure,” a re-examination of the sexual revolution. “Is
this what we thought we would be in the ’60s when were dancing around with
flowers in our hair wanting a more erotic and a more sexual life?” he said as
he drank his peppermint tea. “If the society doesn’t install the values
anymore,” he went on to say, “your happiness and your pleasure is entirely up to you; you have to work and earn it and
install your own moral values.” This, he pointed out, accounts for a common
“complaint of the West against radical Islam: ‘Why do they have to keep asking
God? Why can’t they, as it were, make up their own minds?’ Well, it’s much
harder to install your own moral values than to have them imposed by other
people or by the system.” Things were “miserable” when he was growing up in the
’60s before the sexual revolution, Kureishi said, but now, he added, “we’ve
moved from repression to unrepression” — which comes
with its own strictures.
As is clear from his new novel, Kureishi often uses a psychoanalytic
lens. He himself has been in therapy since the ’90s — “you start to feel better
after about 10 years,” he joked — and related that it has been “very
stimulating in terms of ideas” and “ways of seeing the world.” But for him, the
return of the repressed transcends Freudian cliché. It’s a crucial theme, a key
to understanding recent history, not just family dynamics. In Kureishi’s view,
radical Islam and radical sexuality intersect. “They produce each other in some
way,” he said. Indeed, to Kureishi, the rise of radical Islam is nothing less
than the return of the repressed writ large. “You can’t help but laugh,” he
told me. “The project of the West, the Nietzschean
project, has been to drive out religion and to produce a secular society in
which men and women make their own values because morality is gone. Then
suddenly radical religion returns from the
Kureishi’s work is filled with immigrant parents not entirely at home in
This embrace of pop culture came through loud and clear in “The Buddha
of Suburbia,” Kureishi’s semi-autobiographical first novel, published in 1990.
Set in the 1970s in the
The novel and a subsequent BBC mini-series made Kureishi a hero to a
generation of British Asians and other nonwhites, a kind of postcolonial Philip Roth who brought to the mainstream
themes that were previously relegated as “ethnic” and added lots of sex and humor. “What, above all, made Kureishi a talismanic figure
for young Asians was his voice,” the critic Sukhdev Sandhu wrote in The London Review of Books in 2000. “We had
previously been mocked for our deference and timidity. Kureishi’s language was
a revelation. It was neither meek nor subservient. It wasn’t fake
posh. Instead, it was playful and casually knowing.” But that doesn’t mean it
went over well with parents. Sandhu recalls how his
father — who left India for England in 1965 and worked in a Nestlé factory, and
was taunted by local schoolchildren and punks as he walked home with sacks of chapati flour — beat him up after Sandhu
insisted that the family watch “My Beautiful Laundrette” on TV. With nudity,
gay sex, Pakistani businessmen cheating on their wives and a drug smuggler
disguised as a mullah with heroin sewn into his fake beard, the film wasn’t
just a wake-up call to white Britain; it also flew in the face of the
traditional immigrant narrative. “Why are you showing us such filth?” Sandhu’s father asked him. “My father was right to be
appalled,” Sandhu wrote. “The film celebrated
precisely those things — irony, youth, family instability, sexual desire — that
he most feared.” It taught his father, Sandhu added,
“that he could not control the future. And control — over their wives, their
children, their finances — was what Asian immigrants like him coveted.”
When Kureishi’s films and writing first appeared in the mid-’80s, the
literary world was just waking up to
Over the years, Kureishi has “pulled off a high-low thing,” says Robert McCrum, a former literary editor of The Observer in
KUREISHI HAS HAD A PROFOUND EFFECT on younger South Asian and black
writers. Zadie Smith, at 32 one of the
brightest lights in the next generation of British novelists, fondly recalls
reading “The Buddha of Suburbia” at age 15. “There was one copy going round our
school like contraband — when it was my turn I read it in one sitting in the
playground and missed all my classes,” Smith wrote to me recently in an e-mail
exchange. “It’s a very simple pleasure that white readers take absolutely for
granted: I’d never read a book about anyone remotely like me before.” Today,
“The Buddha of Suburbia” is taught in some schools. (At the public reading in
After the success of “The Buddha of Suburbia” and the intensity of “The
Black Album,” Kureishi’s later fiction hasn’t always been well received. Sandhu’s essay, which begins with high praise, evolves into
withering critique. “Kureishi is not a prose writer of any distinction,” he
wrote, referring to Kureishi’s 1999 novella “Midnight All Day.” In the end, Sandhu argued, Kureishi lacked Roth’s literary brilliance.
“Like his characters,” Sandhu continued, “Kureishi
seemed to have reached an impasse.” But his new novel seeks to propel those
characters forward into new and treacherous times.
Writing runs in the Kureishi family. Hanif’s
father, who worked for decades as a civil servant at the Pakistani Embassy in
After breakfast at the local cafe, I persuade Kureishi to let me see his
house and study. Earlier, he told me he was reluctant to have me “round” since
“the missus” doesn’t like journalists, but it quickly becomes clear from Proudlove, a self-possessed woman with slate-gray eyes who
greets us in the entrance hall, that it’s Kureishi who’s protective of his
privacy. In the living room, which is dominated by a drum kit, I was struck by
the juxtaposition of books on the shelf: some novels by Henry James, Caroline Moorehead’s
biography of Bertrand Russell, Jean-Paul Sartre’s “Situations” next to
Naipaul’s “Among the Believers” next to Roger Scruton’s
“Sexual Desire: A Moral Philosophy of the Erotic.” Definitely
guidebooks to Kureishiland. The writer works
in a roomy study upstairs, its walls filled with images: a photo of the young John Lennon, a poster of a painting by William
Blake, a Matisse-like painting of Monique. There are stacks of CDs on the desk
— Prince, Jeff Buckley, the soundtrack to “Trainspotting” — and some photos of Kureishi’s sons. Above
the desk I also notice a small black-and-white image: a man on his knees, his
face firmly planted between the legs of a naked woman.
This is not surprising. Kureishi’s books are extremely raunchy. Nearly
every page you turn, someone is being fellated, spanked, tugged on — or is
thinking about it. Nipples are clamped. Wax is dripped. Things are inserted
into places you would hardly have imagined possible. In the ’70s, Kureishi even
wrote literary pornography under the pen name Antonia French. I ask him about
his interest in pornography, which seems to go beyond the strictly
anthropological. “When I was a kid and you wanted to come into contact with
something sexy or dirty, you’d read a book,” Kureishi said. “Can you imagine?” Harold Robbins, Henry Miller, the Marquis de Sade. “D. H.
Lawrence, can you imagine, as a sexual aid?” Today, literary pornography is a
lost art, he says, but dirty pictures are available everywhere. “The much more
interesting question might be, ‘What else is it that people need to make a
life?’ It might be very easy to find sexual satisfaction, but getting someone
to love you for a long time or loving someone might be more interesting.” This
is a thoughtful observation — but it doesn’t entirely answer the question.
When you get down to it, there are two types of people in Kureishi’s
work: those running toward sex and those running away from it. The seekers of
sex, or at least pleasure, are the suburban teenagers (and their parents)
coming of age in “The Buddha of Suburbia” and the immigrant movers and shakers
in “My Beautiful Laundrette.” In Kureishi’s most recent film, “Venus,” an aged Peter O’Toole takes up with a potty-mouthed
young woman (Jodie
Whittaker), and in his film before that, “The Mother,” a new widow (Anne Reid)
takes up with her daughter’s intense boyfriend (played by Daniel Craig, before
he became James Bond).
Meanwhile, the sex-avoiders are the conflicted young Muslims of “The
Black Album” and “My Son the Fanatic.” In “My Son,” directed by Udayan Prasad, Parvez, the
immigrant taxi driver, cannot understand his son Farid’s
new interest in Islam. Farid explains what he’s
seeking. “Belief, purity, belonging to the past,” he says insistently. “I won’t
bring up my children in this country.” In another scene, a dissolute and
despondent Parvez strikes his son over and over,
until Farid finally shouts, “Who’s the fanatic now?”
KUREISHI FIRST HAD THE IDEAS for “The Black Album” and “My Son the
Fanatic” (a short story before it became a film) when the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini announced a fatwa
against Rushdie in 1989, after Rushdie’s “Satanic Verses” was published. In
“The Black Album,” he wrote about the appeal of British mosques, oases in an
otherwise rigidly hierarchical country “where race and class barriers had been
suspended.” In the novel, some of the young Muslims burn copies of “The Satanic
Verses.” The Rushdie fatwa was a galvanizing moment, a coming-of-age experience
for young Muslim radicals in
Like Parvez in “My Son the Fanatic,”
Kureishi’s Pakistani father “was educated by both mullahs and nuns, and
developed an aversion to both,” Kureishi wrote in the introduction to his
collected screenplays. “He came to love Nat King Cole and Louis Armstrong, the music of black
American former slaves. It is this kind of complexity that the fundamentalist
has to reject.” Kureishi first visited
Although Kureishi recognizes the sense of powerlessness and sting of
racism that have helped push many young British Muslims toward radicalism, he
is intolerant of such intolerance. “The antidote to Puritanism isn’t
licentiousness, but the recognition of what goes on inside human beings,”
Kureishi wrote in the title essay of “The Word and the Bomb.” He added:
“Fundamentalism is dictatorship of the mind, but a live culture is an
exploration, and represents our endless curiosity about our own strangeness and
impossible sexuality: wisdom is more important than doctrine; doubt more
important than certainty. Fundamentalism implies the failure of our most
significant attribute, our imagination.”
BACK AT THE CAFE IN SHEPHERD’S BUSH, I asked Kureishi about some vexing
recent developments that received a lot of attention in the British press: a
state agency for assessing public religious schools had given a top rating to a
Muslim school that was advocating a return to the Caliphate; the interior
minister at the time, Jack Straw, came under fire for suggesting
that it might be difficult for a community-relations functionary to meet with
constituents who wear a full veil; an Indian woman living in England was lured
back to India and murdered in an honor killing; the
archbishop of Canterbury said he thought England might consider making some
accommodation for Shariah, or Islamic law. What, I
wondered, did Kureishi make of all this?
“There aren’t any answers to these questions,” he replied. “They’re just
questions that everybody has to engage in and think about. What is it like to
make a multicultural society? How far do you go in multiculturalism? Do you
have parts of the country under Shariah law, for
instance? What would that mean? How does that work? You have to take this stuff
seriously.”
Kureishi told me that he and Stephen Frears, who remains a close friend,
sometimes used to joke about what would happen if Shariah
law were to come to the “godless” people of
As if it weren’t already clear, Kureishi isn’t a moralist. In one
conversation, he was adamant that he’s “not advocating anything,” just
observing. (He did, however, say he was opposed to Muslim women in
Kureishi is currently at work on two screenplays, one set in
The effects of the transformation are still in progress. In
The bombings figure in “Something to Tell You,” Kureishi’s new novel,
where they touch all the characters and kill a few of them. The novel, with its
protagonists fitfully grappling with middle age, brings together everything in
the Kureishi repertoire: fathers and sons, psychoanalysis, kinky sex, drugs,
Muslim radicalism — leavened with biting wit and sardonic cultural observation.
Omar, the young laundrette entrepreneur from “My Beautiful Laundrette,” makes
an appearance; he’s made a fortune producing television “for, by and about
minorities” and has been made a peer, Lord Ali of Lewisham — under Blair, of
course. “Being gay, Omar Ali was smart enough to know how hip and fashionable
minorities — or any outsiders — could become, with the right marketing, as they
made their way up the social hierarchy.” Charlie Hero, the punk rocker from
“The Buddha of Suburbia,” also makes a cameo, as does Mick Jagger. Old scores are settled,
and there’s a not-so-subtle parallel drawn between 1970s-era anticapitalist radicals who seek to harm a factory owner
and today’s Islamic radicals. But above all, “Something to Tell You” is a
raucous love song to London and everything it stands for — everything the July
7 bombers were intent on destroying.
ON MY LAST DAY IN LONDON, I wandered around Bloomsbury, past the British Museum, with its crowds of tourists, past
stately
In the hollow marble underneath the Gandhi statue, visitors had placed
flowers wrapped in colorful cellophane and a few
candles. A pale sun shone through bare brown branches. The square was a living
monument to liberal democracy and egalitarianism, a microcosm of cultural
achievement, the full flowering of Modernism and modernity. The new British
Library was a few blocks away, as was the
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/10/magazine/10kureishi-t.html
Academic year 2008/2009
© a.r.e.a./Dr.Vicente Forés López
© Emma Corbín García
emcorgar @alumni.uv.es
Universitat de València Press