Hanif Kureishi’s award-winning books, plays and films reflect on contemporary multicultural British society. His screenplay for the film My Beautiful Laundrette was nominated for an Oscar in 1987. His later book The Buddha of Suburbia centred on the experiences of an Asian-British boy growing up in the 1970s. Written with Kureishi’s characteristic black humour, the novel explored Kureishi’s own search for identity as a mixed-race teenager, and his ambitions of escaping suburbia. Later books tackled the pressures of adult life. One of Kureishi’s most “savage,” he says, was Intimacy: it explored the evolution of the modern family from the point of view of a break-up, something that the author was going through at the time.
meet waldo
Kureishi’s latest novel The Nothing introduces Waldo, an immobile, impotent former-filmmaker, who discovers that his wife has been cheating on him. At a presentation for the book, Kureishi began by talking about what appealed to him about Waldo.
Hanif Kureishi (English accent): The book is the story of a man who is very vital, despite the fact that’s he’s dying, he’s alive, he likes to be alive, he loves things in the world. He is a creature of the sixties, really. And what I was interested in writing about in this book was really how when you get older you begin to lose everything. You lose your career, you lose your mobility, your friends start to die ... and in the story he loses his wife to somebody else. So I was interested in aging as a series of losses. And these losses are tragic but you can enjoy them as well.
HAPPY BUT HOPELESS
While Waldo is a creature of the 1960s, his helpless physical state can be seen as a metaphor for the modern world, says Kureishi.
Hanif Kureishi: When I was writing this book I was watching a lot of [film] noirs – American movies and some French movies from the forties through the fifties. I thought the noir was a good form for the contemporary world where we feel that we’ve been fooled by the promises that we were given. That the ideals that I grew up with in the sixties and through the seventies in some sense they have been fulfilled: the struggle for gay rights, the struggle for racial equality, these are important and they’ve moved forward, but there’s another sense in which we are now also exhausted. The system that we have seems to be not working. I have three kids and you can see that they will not get work, they will not get housing, they don’t have a future – which doesn’t mean that they’re not happy. But they don’t have any sense of hope, of the possibility of a new world.
A FICTIONAL HISTORY
Kureishi went on to talk about the way he explored polemical political ideas through characters that we can empathise with.
Hanif Kureishi: My Beautiful Laundrette is the story about the new Thatcherite enterprise of the 1980s, but really it’s a gay love story; it’s a fairy story about a gay skinhead and a gay Pakistani falling in love. The Buddha of Suburbia was set earlier than Thatcher. I like to think that all the things I do relate in some way to the contemporary world. To the political world. But I like to write about politics from the side.
DANGEROUS MINDS
The growth of the British economy was reliant on immigration. But still, says Kureishi, there is a terrible misconception today that the immigrant is a threat.
Hanif Kureishi: During the whole Brexit debate the figure of the immigrant, particularly the figure of the Muslim, became a sort of zombie figure. A figure, I mean, who had no reality but that was a figment of the imagination of the racist. And it’s for me the most terrifying period. Not in terms of individual street racism, which was very common when I was a child, but in terms of a political movement that resembles fascism because it’s organised around the figure of the migrant and particularly of the so-called Muslim.
ANGRY WHITE PEOPLE
And, he believes, this institutionalised racism foments the discontent of the most vulnerable in society.
Hanif Kureishi: Now, it’s becoming easier for people of colour to reach the higher echelons of the arts, mostly, but also in soccer, the sports ... But also it’s more difficult for people from the bottom of British society, particularly for working-class children, to make their way up now. You can see now that we have a popular uprising in the UK. Their jobs have been taken – so they see it – by immigrants, they don’t have any social mobility. The welfare state is being destroyed, the trade unions have been destroyed and they are really, really angry – and you can see why.
STAYING ALIVE!
Yet despite his concerns, Kureishi remains optimistic. He says that this is reflected in The Nothing in the humour and libido of its protagonist.
Hanif Kureishi: It’s quite dark, it’s quite cynical, but it’s also quite cheerful! On the whole, despite everything, I remain reasonably optimistic. He’s an impotent old man and he can barely move, but his mind is still working and he can still fantasise. Which of course most people’s sexuality is fantasy. If you have a strong libido you’re very, very lucky because you might say that the libido is your engine. It’s the libido that drives you, it’s the libido that makes you get up in the morning and rush out of the house and go and live and do things. His libido is still going and it makes him furious and he’s still engaged with the world and I think, if that had gone, then there would be nothing.