During his time in Rome on St Stephen’s Day 2022, Hanif Kureishi, an acclaimed author and dramatist, was engrossed in a football match on TV while enjoying a pint, when he unexpectedly blacked out and toppled over. Waking up on the floor, he felt like his life was slipping away. Observing his own arms out of control, he pictured them as sea creatures. This frightful episode, that led to permanent injuries, is detailed towards the conclusion of his self-reflecting documentary, namely, In My Own Words: Hanif Kureishi, directed by long-time companion, Nigel Williams, featuring past snippets from his personal and professional life.
Kureishi, a member of the dwindling league of British male writers who enjoyed a status akin to rock stars, rather than pale, introverted writers, possesses an intriguing past to explore. Significantly, the late David Bowie enjoyed participating in the BBC version of his novel, The Buddha of Suburbia. This unique club of authors also featured Christopher Hitchens and Martin Amis, who, like Kureishi, were known for their controversial landscape and an uncanny skill for ruffling feathers.
Criticism was not confined to outsiders but also extended to his own kin. The debut of The Buddha of Suburbia in 1990, where Kureishi used his own family among first-generation Pakistani immigrants in a rather revealing and critical manner, rubbed them the wrong way. Particularly, his father resented being depicted as an unfaithful spouse while in truth, his usual pastime was “watching Dad’s Army like anyone else,” Kureishi pointed out.
The documentary In My Own Words: Hanif Kureishi portrays Kureishi as a refreshingly candid author who, at 69 years old, remains indifferent to general opinion about him. Always maintaining a stern demeanour, he exhibits scarce interest in reminiscing about his youthful days as a dramatist and the triumph of his iconic gay love narrative, My Beautiful Launderette, from 1985. Directed by Stephen Frears, Kureishi was the brilliant mind behind this script.
The film narrative revolves around Omar (played by Gordon Warnecke), a British-Pakistani individual, who embarks on a laundry enterprise and develops a romantic relationship with his skinhead business partner (portrayed by a young Daniel Day-Lewis). Kureishi, upon retrospective observation of ‘My Beautiful Launderette’, which he hasn’t seen since it first showed, perceives it as a uncanny tribute to Thatcherism. The Pakistani-British society in which he was raised encapsulated Thatcher’s admired spirit of entrepreneurship: they launched businesses, toiled diligently and refrained from grumbling.
Often perceived as a peculiar kind of Englishman or a type of new breed, Kureishi confesses feeling more at home in a London filled with pubs and football matches rather than the Pakistan known to his father. The emergence of Islamic extremism in the wake of Salman Rushdie’s 1988 publication of ‘The Satanic Verses’ left him confused. “This was Britain’s initial exposure to this form of fanaticism and its strange and threatening nature,” he expresses.
Unlike many of his contemporaries, Kureishi was perpetually self-aware, a dual-edged sword. He abandoned his partner and their children shortly after becoming a father, driven by an inability to renounce the hedonistic lifestyle of a literary social butterfly. He chronicles these experiences in his semi-autobiographical work, ‘Intimacy’, published in 1998 – a shimmering introspective exercise in self-disgust. “The protagonist is quite the prig,” he remarks. “Parenthood involves self-abnegation. It ranks the children as more important than oneself.”
An accident has significantly altered his circumstances. He now relies entirely on his adult sons to jot down his ideas, enabling him to perpetuate his career as a writer. Moreover, he has obtained a unique understanding of the human body’s fragility and the value of trustworthy individuals in one’s life.
“You find yourself oscillating between an ill and a near-death state. You become conscious of the proximity every person has to complete vulnerability,” he shares, “I remain the same pesky individual I was, except now I am fully dependent on others.”