I have read and screened a number of British/Pakistani writer Hanif Kureishi’s stories, novels, and films over the years. His early work ranged from the striking and ironic 1980s film he made with Stephen Frears, “My Beautiful Laundrette” (1985), to his semi-autobiographical first novel, “The Buddha of Suburbia” (1990).
Kureishi’s work was usually committed to an anarchic, impulsive sexual life, the enemy being bourgeois respectability and orthodoxy of any sort. My thoughts have centered on him because, while on holiday in Rome in December, Kureishi fainted and had a severe fall on his head.
Speaking from a clinic outside the Italian capital, he said losing the use of his arms, hands, and legs has been “illuminating as well as terrible.” Kureishi said the incident has left him feeling “like a piece of meat.” Since that mysterious fall on December 26, 2022, he has sent daily communications, dictated to his wife and son and published on Twitter and Substack, now amounting to 10,000 words.
Kureishi has never been a writer who tends to hide his feelings or avoid exposing himself. He writes telling his readers how many hours of sleep he’s had and what it’s like to think about sex when your body has ceased to be sexual. The general movement of Kureishi’s writing here shifts from self-pity and despair to insights about what body disorder can bring. The writing from his hospital bed has proven very popular. It’s clearly a time when the relationship between health and disease strikes readers on a profoundly personal level. We all seem to live on a precipice between these two states where we can easily fall off into disease and see our body ravaged.
What’s unique about Kureishi among writers who became infirm (e.g., Susan Sontag, Audrey Lorde, Hilary Mantel) is that his writing has been dictated to others—primarily his son and wife. He writes of being placed in a vertical position for physiotherapy: “The world seems completely at the wrong angle, everything is in the wrong place and the colors seem to fly around everywhere, unattached to any specific objects, like hallucinations.”
I have read a great deal of Kureishi, but one story that I can’t forget was “My Son the Fanatic,” which was first published in The New Yorker in 1994 and was reprinted in Kureishi’s 1997 collection of short stories “Love in a Blue Time.” It was also made into a good film (1997) directed by Udayan Pasad and written by Kurieshi.
The story centers on Parvez, an immigrant Pakistani cab driver in London. Parvez is nominally a Muslim, but has no use for religion, and he drinks alcohol, eats pork, and has a deep friendship with a prostitute. Parvez aims to become an assimilated Englishman—a culture he loves, because “they let you do almost anything here.” However, Ali, the son he dotes on and who is in college studying to become an accountant, suddenly abandons college, because “western education cultivates an anti-religious attitude.” Ali has contempt for the West, and embraces radical Islam (e.g., “My people have taken enough. If the persecution doesn’t stop there will be jihad. I, and millions of others, will gladly give our lives for the cause”) causing Parvez great confusion and anguish. Parvez can find no way to reach Ali, who has turned into a devout believer. Parvez’s level of exasperation is boundless, so, seeing Ali consumed by prayer, he kicks and pummels him. Ali doesn’t fight back and understands the irony of the situation with Parvez. Ali concludes the story with these words: “So who’s the fanatic now.”
Of course, Kureishi is not on the side of Islamic fanaticism, but, without a wasted word, he conveys Parvez’s disordered state of mind when dealing with a son who has rebelled against his notion of existence and totally undermined him.
Kureishi is a fine writer, who clearly will keep working despite being struck down without warning.
