Hanif Kureishi: Writing the Self
I wrote about Hanif Kureishi's Buddha of Suburbia last year and have been thinking about him for some time, partly as a result of his increased profile subsequent to a debilitating accident on Boxing Day 2022. His work, at least the first half of his oeuvre, is perhaps some of the only mainstream stuff which I could point to as a sort of decent representation of my general social background, as interesting or not as that may be: South London, suburbia, race and sex and fashion and subculture and visions of the subcontinent. And it is a predicament, for I am perhaps not so enamoured with the style that he writes in, nor the direction it has taken over the past couple decades. As a British Asian heavyweight, a postcolonialist in a very English tradition, he presents something problematic for the more critically minded. And so it was with that mindset I dove into Ruvani Ranasinha's Hanif Kureishi: Writing the Self, a copious biography masterfully weaving together biographical, literary and filial material into a huge portrait, encapsulating a period and dynamic that far surpasses the individual figure of Kureishi himself.
That said, I didn't really think I would read the whole thing; probably just dip-in-and-out for a flavour, such as these big tomes necessitate. But from the off I was drawn into this world. Most arrestingly Ranasinha describes how his father, Rafiushan (Shanoo), grew up in the colonial surroundings of the British Indian army, at one time living in a lovely bungalow in New Delhi, his own father being a colonel. The household was educated, secular and fairly liberal, offering Shanoo a wide variety of opportunities. In the wake of independence, and a choice having to be made regarding nationality, them being of nominal Muslim identity, Shanoo decides to move to England, while a chunk of his siblings move to newly-formed Pakistan and a chunk remain in a newly-independent India (this explains the ambivalence Shanoo and then Hanif have in identifying with either of the modern nation states of Pakistan or India). This is resonant as my paternal grandmother, who I grew up with, was also raised in a similar military colonial family, to eventually move to the UK and enter a phase of downward mobility. So, while Shanoo becomes a clerk for the Pakistan High Commission–having failed to crack the cultural elite scene of London–residing in a lower-middle class stretch of Bromley and sending his children to a rather average, monocultural state school nearby, my grandmother moves to Handsworth, Birmingham with her husband working in factories, sending their children to a poor local comprehensive, albeit predominantly non-white. These are comparable to a point in their narratives of downward mobility, where their offspring received less opportunity than themselves, despite living in the mother country; certainly not typical of most South Asian immigrants to the UK, though it speaks to the more general fact that it is the first generation of migrants who truly pioneered, building new narratives in the wreckage that colonialism wrought.
In fact, Hanif’s uncles were high-fliers in the new Pakistan and would frequently visit London, taking Shanoo and Hanif to wine-and-dine amongst the elites in Mayfair. Omar Kureishi was of particular note, a leading cricket writer of Pakistan and general socialite in Karachi circles. Hanif’s exposure to him cemented the idea he could escape the tawdry greyness of English suburbia and make a roaring career merely as a writer, something which didn't seem like hard work. This uneven cosmopolitanism shapes his initial chapters, but reaches a dead-end in the recesses of assimilation and upward mobility.
Hanif’s initial breakthrough was in theatre, as a playwright, working on realist productions off the back of the Angry Young Men. His opportunities were partly driven by his uncle's contacts and his fathers wide social circles; Haroon's conviviality in The Buddha of Suburbia (1990) was modelled directly on Shanoo. While initially Hanif avoids race as a topic, he is implored by those around to take it up as a topic of contemporary relevance. We can see Kureishi as an early recipient of a well-meaning consciousness of the need to diversify culture in Britain (this was the mid-to-late 70s). His novel way to deal with this topic is through everyday satire, something which shapes his work through the eighties, translating to film fairly well. But he never breaks out of a realist form, and ultimately assimilates to a relatively conservative conception of culture and aesthetics–and by extension: the nation–regardless of the new voices he brings to the table. While I do not blame him as such, it should serve as instructive.
It is telling that he never really manages to escape his youth, merely pulling material out of it while simultaneously socially climbing through the rather morose and droll corridors of the British cultural elites (London Kills Me [1991], one of his worst productions from his early period, was the only story not drawn from his direct personal life). After a decent career in theatre and screenwriting, ascending to some of the higher echelons of the cultural intelligentsia, he sets his eyes on the novel to cement his status as a serious writer, somewhat at the behest of his good friend Salman Rushdie.
The Buddha of Suburbia emerges from this context, drawing directly on a British picaresque tradition while documenting the author’s coming-of-age in the 1970s. It's a masterful book and does very well on the market, benefitting from the globalisation and growing monopolisation of the English-language booktrade. It would go on to shape the genre of the multicultural urban novel, for better or worse. Interestingly, Kureishi abandons an epic palimpsestic novel about the capital titled “The Mysteries of London”, instead turning to the more glib representation in BoS; it presents a great what-if moment.
Apart from BoS and its fine TV adaptation, Kureishi does still have a couple good moments in the 1990s–namely The Black Album (1995) (which duly deserves a TV adaptation) and the screenplay for My Son the Fanatic, both prescient works dealing with Islamic fundamentalism–however, his output, status and, crucially, drive wanes. Ranasinha does a great job of detailing a complicated and multi-layered life, wherein his relationship with Tracy Scoffield, mother of their twins, crests and falls; his sexual desires run amuck outside their couplehood; and drugs flow whilst estranging family and friends. His father dies in 1991 where thereafter his relationship with his mother and sister Yasmin falls apart.
What is important here is he turns to psychoanalysis to aid with understanding what is going on with him during this difficult time, and takes to Adam Phillips as his analyst. He sees it as a life-changing experience and it clearly shapes his thinking, as subsequent publications rely heavily on self-conscious self-questioning and the dynamics of intersubjective relations. This comes to a head with Intimacy (1998); to my mind quite a bland and trite self-narration of a middle-aged man abandoning his wife and children. It is clearly drawn from his own life, and remains an authentic document of a particular type of neurotic middle-class masculinity. We could talk about heteropessimism and the faltering of sexual liberation. It reveals a lot about what assimilation looks like, in a somewhat dispiriting manner, and where success leads.
In later novels, and the next on my to-read pile, Kureishi returns to his abiding interest: older Asian men. The disgraced psychoanalyst Masud Khan, an early supervisor of Phillips, provides typecast in Something to Tell You (2008), while a V.S. Naipaul-figure is central in The Last Word (2014). In fact, Masud Khan's Hidden Selves (1983) provided essential reading for Kureishi in thinking about colonised masculinity, and fathers and son, something which he explores in My Ear at his Heart (2004) as well as with Phillips. And Ranasinha does great work throughout the book in uncovering the many instances, particularly in Hanif’s earlier work, where Hanif pilfers Shanoo’s characters and plots from his own failed, unpublished novels. Many of the best desi characters in Hanif’s work are directly taken from his father, without acknowledgement, and seemingly to the great distress of Shanoo. It further encapsulates the pioneering work of the first generation who were never recognised, and the tendency to self-serving narcissism of the later generations.
I say this as it becomes clear that Hanif slips into parochialism, much like the bulk of his generation of subculturalists-gone-mainstream. The self-aggrandised London multiculturalism that he espouses, as progressive as it may seem from the vantage of the 1970s, appears increasingly provincial and unworldly in the hands of Kureishi and his peers. There is an inability to handle the genuinely oppositional and cosmopolitan, and certainly a shying away from a wider world-historical view; his views on the subcontinent are increasingly derivative and lazy, for instance, and he has little to say about blackness. His relationship with leftism ranged from ambivalent to critical, often sniping, though he was early on involved in the Labour Party, local campaigns in west London and benefited from housing schemes. Much of his engagement was usually mediated by more militant female companions, and one wonders if his involvement was driven by the desire to build a portfolio of experience from which to draw material from, rather than any genuine political conviction.
One also thinks about the way a realist aesthetic form is ultimately incapable of breaking from the logic of assimilation. You develop new stories, new voices, which are essentially new modules which can be easily affixed to a staid cultural hegemony, as liberal or not as that may be. We could talk about the extractive quality of the patrician elite and the lower middle-class bohemians that provide fuel for the cultural system, for instance. So Kureishi's parochialism is tied to a wider postcolonial British parochialism, a depressed lessening, incapable of understanding the great sweep of colonialism it presided over. Naipaul writes in The Arena of Darkness that only those living in the great auspices of colonies could truly understand the central meaning of Britain; that the Austens, Eliots, Dickens could never really tell you about Britain's global reach, in that they reflect an insulated provinciality that the mother country provides. One should read the assimilated British multiculturalist in the same light.
There is an erratic pulse in Kureishi's work, more so than in Naipaul and Rushdie, who represent parallel but much more worldly visions, albeit from a more reactionary and a more centrist viewpoint respectively. The problem is Kureishi never truly leans into the instability, he never truly gets to the underlying psyche, never breaks down the formal trappings of writing–as he cuts between media-forms, chasing the next hit–ultimately failing to establish his own terms for what stage he plays; ultimately failing to work out who he truly is, and perhaps by extension who we are. It is telling that he has trouble being an Asian elder or mentor. There is of course redemption here in his stories of laughter and shock and silliness, replete with genuine moments of brilliant insight and prescience, but it all runs a little thin as the decades have passed, once the dust has settled.