Hanif Kureishi
Appearances
Fresh Air
How A Writer's Life Changed In A Second
Every day, as I described to you earlier. And that's part of an important part of our relationship. She works and I work and I have the dignity of my work. I've written Shattered. I'm writing other stuff, as I've said. And I feel that, you know, it's my part of the relationship, that I earn money, that I support us. I'm a father to my son.
Fresh Air
How A Writer's Life Changed In A Second
So I'm still doing stuff in the world and I have some dignity there. I haven't been robbed of my ability to function, to be creative. In fact, I'm writing more now, even though I'm disabled, than I did before, and I'm very happy to work. And I go to work in the morning with great energy and belief, and that's important in our relationship for both of us.
Fresh Air
How A Writer's Life Changed In A Second
We both feel that we are dignified, creative people doing stuff that matters in the world.
Fresh Air
How A Writer's Life Changed In A Second
Yeah, it's an interesting thing and something I've discussed with male friends of mine, mostly because, you know, when you get to our age, a lot of my male friends have problems with their prostates, as you can imagine. And some of those guys were, you know, very horny in their younger years. And then suddenly, when it's gone... It's an absence, but it's also a mercy.
Fresh Air
How A Writer's Life Changed In A Second
You do feel released from some terrible agency and you look with amusement at other people's bizarre activities, actually. So I don't particularly miss it. I don't particularly care about it because there really are other forms of human intercourse, other forms of human love, other forms of touching and kissing and being with somebody else in a sensual way.
Fresh Air
How A Writer's Life Changed In A Second
I'm thrashing my arm about a bit now as I speak to you, but I can't use my fingers. I can't grip. I couldn't pick up a pen or anything like that. I can move my shoulder. I can move my legs a bit. Obviously, I'm in a wheelchair. I can't stand up. But I can't actually use my hands. So I'm around the clock dependent, as you put it earlier. But I'm stronger than I was. And I have physio every day.
Fresh Air
How A Writer's Life Changed In A Second
I think probably it's a real narrowing of the sexual spectrum to think that there are only a few ways in which you can be sexual. I think sexuality and sensuality is a much broader thing than we grow up thinking, to be honest. So you can find other ways of loving other people that are not necessarily sexual in the most overt sense, actually.
Fresh Air
How A Writer's Life Changed In A Second
When I was in Rome, in the hospital, everyone was white. You never saw a person of color. It's the only monocultural country, Italy, really, in Europe. And Isabella says that I'm wrong about that, that it's beginning to change. But I didn't see any people of color in the hospitals in Italy, really. And then, of course, you come to London around the corner from here where I am in West London now.
Fresh Air
How A Writer's Life Changed In A Second
And obviously the whole of our huge NHS is run by people from all over the world. And it's just incredible to lie in bed, to be changed and washed by someone. And you have these incredible conversations with somebody from London. Africa, from the Philippines, from South Africa, India, Pakistan, and so on. It's incredible stew in great multiracial, multicultural society.
Fresh Air
How A Writer's Life Changed In A Second
But one of the things you become aware of, certainly in these British hospitals, is our dependence in Britain on immigration and other races, that the place... The hospitals, none of it. It wouldn't function at all without immigration, even recent immigration, to be honest. There were a lot of people who had recently come from the Philippines, people who had come from Africa and so on.
Fresh Air
How A Writer's Life Changed In A Second
And I began to realize that since we had Brexit, which was the breakup with Europe, that we were now importing people from other parts of the world in order to run the NHS.
Fresh Air
How A Writer's Life Changed In A Second
It's a terrible dilemma, really, for Britain, because originally our country was almost entirely dependent on the empire. As you know, before 1945, Britain had this huge worldwide empire from which most of its wealth was derived. And now, as a smaller society, we're entirely dependent on immigrants in order to look after people. a slowly ageing population.
Fresh Air
How A Writer's Life Changed In A Second
And if you saw the hospitals and the care homes and the transport system and so on here, you'd see it's entirely run by immigrants. But of course, it's hated, that dependency by people, and they wish to end it, to go back to being an entirely Caucasian society. But that can't happen.
Fresh Air
How A Writer's Life Changed In A Second
And so there's a kind of deadlock in British society between those who want to hate immigrants and the rest of us who realize that without immigrants, the NHS, for instance, would break down. It just wouldn't work at all. And the NHS and our social system is understaffed as it is.
Fresh Air
How A Writer's Life Changed In A Second
And so I'm stretched out. I move a bit. But I think this is pretty much where I'm going to remain from now on.
Fresh Air
How A Writer's Life Changed In A Second
The nurses and doctors in the hospitals in which I spent a year were complaining all the time about they didn't have enough people to work there. So this is a real deadlock and a real problem because it's really fun to hate on immigrants. People really enjoy it. They're the one group of people in society that you can hate.
Fresh Air
How A Writer's Life Changed In A Second
And it's an absurdity because they're the one group in society in which you're entirely dependent and without whom your society would go down into darkness.
Fresh Air
How A Writer's Life Changed In A Second
My dad came from Bombay in India. He came from a Muslim family, but they were a secular family then. They were an upper middle class, wealthy intellectual family. And my dad came to England to study law. So many members of the wealthy middle class from India, like Gandhi and Jinnah and so on, great figures from India, they all came to the West to study. to be educated.
Fresh Air
How A Writer's Life Changed In A Second
And then normally they would return to India to, you know, to run the country. But my dad met my mom. He got married and he stayed in the UK and wanted to be British. He wanted to be an Englishman, in fact, and he liked England. He loved England and he always wanted to stay here.
Fresh Air
How A Writer's Life Changed In A Second
My family moved to Pakistan after partition. All my many uncles and aunts and cousins and so on, they moved from India to Pakistan to be safe in Pakistan, which is a Muslim state.
Fresh Air
How A Writer's Life Changed In A Second
Yeah, I have the physio every day. Someone comes to the house and I stand up in a standing machine and they stretch me out, manipulate my fingers and my feet and so on so I don't deteriorate. That's the main thing. I don't want to get worse. I'm doing a lot of stuff at the moment. This morning I was writing here at my kitchen table with my son Carlo doing my blog.
Fresh Air
How A Writer's Life Changed In A Second
Yeah, that's the story. My dad came to the UK around that time, so he didn't go to Pakistan. He stayed in Britain, but he worked in the Pakistan embassy and so became Pakistani even though he hadn't actually been to Pakistan. It sounds like an odd thing, but it's the case.
Fresh Air
How A Writer's Life Changed In A Second
That was a very common designation for anyone actually who was oriental looking or brown or whatever. We were all called Pakis, whether we were from Sri Lanka or India or Pakistan or wherever. Paki was the sort of ubiquitous insult thrown at us.
Fresh Air
How A Writer's Life Changed In A Second
Yeah, I mean, my father worked in the Pakistan embassy and so was very aware of what was going on, of how many people from Pakistan and India were coming to the UK. I mean, in those days, my father was automatically a British citizen. If you were born in India, which was then part of the empire, you were automatically British. So my dad always had a British passport.
Fresh Air
How A Writer's Life Changed In A Second
england was largely white but i think the the immigrant ethic is probably like the immigrant ethic in the in the united states you know that you were coming to a new country and it would be a new start for you it was a clean slate you would get educated you could bring up your kids um you know britain was a was a really civilized well-organized law-abiding country uh
Fresh Air
How A Writer's Life Changed In A Second
And he just left the chaos of India, you remember, after partition. And my dad thought it was fantastic. You get free education. You could go to the doctor, the dentist. We had the welfare state. There was a rising standard of living in the 1960s. There was the Beatles. There was pop. There was the 60s, what we called the 60s and so on.
Fresh Air
How A Writer's Life Changed In A Second
So my dad saw it as a great opportunity for us, his kids, to do really well. Of course, at that time in Britain, particularly where I was in South London, there was a lot of violence. There was a lot of racism. There were a lot of attacks on people like us of colour. and we were terrified of that, and we used to run and have to hide, and my father was frightened and so on.
Fresh Air
How A Writer's Life Changed In A Second
It was quite tough and rough, but on the whole, my father was really pleased that he had come to Britain and given us the chance as his kids to grow up in Britain and to do well. He thought it was a great opportunity for us, and he believed that I, his son, could become a significant writer, you know, that the world was our oyster, there were opportunities in Britain.
Fresh Air
How A Writer's Life Changed In A Second
And to be honest, he was right about that. I mean, when I was a young man, there were not many Asian artists in pop or photography or in the arts, people from South Asia at all. And there were certainly no writers, really, apart from V.S. Naipaul, writers of color who were successful in England. But we've changed it all, you know.
Fresh Air
How A Writer's Life Changed In A Second
Other writers like Salman Rushdie and, of course, Sadie Smith and so on. And the whole scene has changed and opened out now. And there's been a huge unfurling of these really, really talented people from South Asia.
Fresh Air
How A Writer's Life Changed In A Second
We're writing a movie based on my memoir Shattered. So, you know, it's a full working day for me.
Fresh Air
How A Writer's Life Changed In A Second
I think I responded to that in the way that I responded to my accident, really, which is in the only way that I knew how, which was to become a writer, which was to live through this stuff, to survive it, to suffer from it and find it painful and so on, which it is.
Fresh Air
How A Writer's Life Changed In A Second
And then one day you find yourself writing a novel about it and you find yourself writing a novel that hasn't been written before in Britain called The Buddha of Suburbia. with material in it that is fresh and new and from a part of Britain that is undiscovered and so on.
Fresh Air
How A Writer's Life Changed In A Second
So I think becoming a writer is a very good way, as it were, to organise and to think about your experience and not only that, to pass it on to other people for them to enjoy and to learn about their own country at the same time.
Fresh Air
How A Writer's Life Changed In A Second
I guess I don't know whether other people feel like this or other men feel like this or whatever. But I really started to enjoy the kids when I could have grown up conversations with them. You know, as they started to get older and we could talk about sport or politics or literature and we started going to the movies together and so on, they were more like equals to me.
Fresh Air
How A Writer's Life Changed In A Second
When they were little kids, you know, screaming their heads off and they wouldn't go to school and they hated you and they kicked you and et cetera, et cetera. I found all that a bit sordid. It wasn't much fun. But as I got older, I really started to enjoy them and I enjoy them now as adults. The twins are 31 now and the other boy is 26. But I'm not a big fan of babies, to be honest.
Fresh Air
How A Writer's Life Changed In A Second
Yeah, I buzz around my house. I can go out on the street, obviously with somebody else, and I can go up and down the road into coffee shops and I have lunch and I can do stuff. So it's not as bad as it might have been.
Fresh Air
How A Writer's Life Changed In A Second
They're okay, you know, for about half an hour. But what you really want is to go down the pub, sit down with a kid and have a beer and really talk about interesting things together, which is what I do with my kids now. We're all... And my son Carlos said to me the other day, he said, you're much better as a friend than you are as a father.
Fresh Air
How A Writer's Life Changed In A Second
I was rather hurt by that because I like to think I was quite a good father. But I enjoy them as adults much more than I did as kids.
Fresh Air
How A Writer's Life Changed In A Second
Yeah, I write all kinds of weirdo, as you can see from the book Shattered. I write all kinds of weirdo stuff about sex, about politics, about literature, about being a father or going to an orgy in one case or whatever and so on. They don't mind writing it down. It doesn't bother them at all. I don't see why it should.
Fresh Air
How A Writer's Life Changed In A Second
Yeah, well, I'm sure the same thing will happen to him, you know, when he has children and has to stay up all night with their vomiting in his shoes. Good luck to him.
Fresh Air
How A Writer's Life Changed In A Second
God, I hated all that. Yeah, you had to take them to karate and tennis and God almighty, driving them around London in the pouring rain when you just wanted to, you know, be at home smoking a joint. It just seemed ghastly to me. But, you know, I did it and I did my duty. So I can't say I didn't do it. I actually did do it. So, you know, you must give me some credit for that.
Fresh Air
How A Writer's Life Changed In A Second
Yeah. I didn't read it actually. Isabella read it for me and she told me what was in it. The reason I didn't read it wasn't because I wanted to keep to my own thoughts. It's that I didn't want to hear about his suffering. It so upset me what happened to him. I've known Salman since the early 80s and I love him and admire him as a man and as a writer he's like an older brother to me.
Fresh Air
How A Writer's Life Changed In A Second
And there was no way I was going to read about that awful thing that happened. I just couldn't face it. And he understands that. He's aware of that. And I didn't want to read about someone being in hospital and having to recover and so on. I can write about it, but I don't want to hear about it because my life is miserable enough as it is. I don't want to make it worse.
Fresh Air
How A Writer's Life Changed In A Second
Yeah, that's the story. I've been unwell with a stomach infection. And I've been taking a lot of painkillers and antibiotics and suppositories, all kinds of other stuff. So I was very weak. So I was at Isabella's apartment in Rome.
Fresh Air
How A Writer's Life Changed In A Second
No, no, he was attacked in August and I fell over at Christmas. And he would text me every day. He was really sweet about supporting me and loving me and I love and admire him for doing that.
Fresh Air
How A Writer's Life Changed In A Second
I met Salman probably around 1982, and Midnight's Children had just come out and won the Booker Prize. He was such an amazing figure, so super, super smart, a great writer, a great raconteur, a great party giver. He was at the centre of the scene in London in the 1980s, and I was quite close to him at that time, and I never stopped admiring him.
Fresh Air
How A Writer's Life Changed In A Second
Also, after the fatwa, the strength he showed, the fortitude, how he survived that, terrible period with those awful attacks from the Iranian government and so on I mean he's an amazing man very very brave and admirable and a man who's continued to be an important and amazing writer but also someone who's stood up for these profoundly important values like the freedom of speech for instance
Fresh Air
How A Writer's Life Changed In A Second
um i want to have a lot going on you know i'm doing a dance thing i'm writing another book i'm doing this movie with luca gardenino um i'm very excited about what i'm doing and i need to get up in the morning and look forward to the day and think what am i going to do today is it going to be exciting am i going to see a a really good friend?
Fresh Air
How A Writer's Life Changed In A Second
Am I going to have a conversation that I never had before? And I'm going to work on something that's fresh and new. And I'm really excited about my book, Shattered, coming out in the US, for instance. I haven't published a book in the US for a long time. So I want to read the reviews. I want to read the interviews. I want to find out how the book's doing.
Fresh Air
How A Writer's Life Changed In A Second
Yeah, about to become wife, actually. Okay. No one else wants me now, so. And then I fell faint. I put my head between my legs, as you're supposed to do. And then I blacked out. And I think what happened was I stood up at that moment. And I took some steps across the room and then I felt absolutely flat bang on my face and I broke my neck or damaged my spine very badly.
Fresh Air
How A Writer's Life Changed In A Second
I just want to be excited about the world after having gone through a year of hell, you know?
Fresh Air
How A Writer's Life Changed In A Second
Yeah, I'm going to do a dance thing. They asked me to supply some pages for them for a choreographer who we haven't chosen yet. And the pages that I will write, which will be about accidents. I'm going to call it the Hospital of Accidents.
Fresh Air
How A Writer's Life Changed In A Second
I'm going to give that to the choreographer and they're going to be inspired by the pages in order to create some kind of choreography, probably with disabled dancers, in order to create some kind of classical dance piece, which we're going to perform in Bradford in the middle of this year.
Fresh Air
How A Writer's Life Changed In A Second
That's really fun, isn't it? Yeah, I never thought I would end up creating a dance piece, but somebody just asked me randomly, and I thought, that's a great idea.
Fresh Air
How A Writer's Life Changed In A Second
Yeah, and it's really fun for me to collaborate. You know, I've collaborated all my life with dancers before, with directors, with musicians and composers and obviously actors and other artists. I love collaborating with other people because you can do stuff with them that you can't do alone.
Fresh Air
How A Writer's Life Changed In A Second
Unfortunately, yeah, they commented on it all the time. They never shut up. It's really fun to hear from other people when you're writing. I'll be doing that tomorrow morning.
Fresh Air
How A Writer's Life Changed In A Second
I was back in the hospital last week. I had a very serious and incredibly painful infection in my bladder. So they rushed me to hospital and pumped me full of antibiotics and painkillers, which worked. So today, as you're speaking to me, I can tell you that I'm all right, but it's not necessarily going to last.
Fresh Air
How A Writer's Life Changed In A Second
Yeah, I have. Thank you for having me on your program, Terry. Let's do it again.
Fresh Air
How A Writer's Life Changed In A Second
And when I woke up I was in a pool of blood and I was unable to move my hands or any other part of my body. I could still speak.
Fresh Air
How A Writer's Life Changed In A Second
Well, in the beginning it's very odd because... You're upside down on your head. You're bleeding from your forehead. And then I saw these objects out of the corner of my eye and I didn't know what they were. And then I began to realise that it was my hands, but I had no agency over them. I thought that they were, you know, sort of live creatures, curled live creatures.
Fresh Air
How A Writer's Life Changed In A Second
And then I became convinced that I was going to die and that eventually I would sort of suffocate.
Fresh Air
How A Writer's Life Changed In A Second
It was really because when I was in the ICU in Rome, I was just a body to the nurses, to the doctors. I was in the medical industrial complex and they were working on me and doing stuff to me and, you know, washing me and feeding me and then I had an operation and so on. But I wasn't really a person. I'd lost myself, really.
Fresh Air
How A Writer's Life Changed In A Second
And the way that I could remind myself of who I was, a writer with a history, a person in the world, was to start writing again. So I started writing to my long-suffering partner, Isabella, who would sit at the end of the bed, tapping into her phone. And I started to issue statements or blogs about exactly what was happening to me.
Fresh Air
How A Writer's Life Changed In A Second
And then Carlo, my son, he put the blogs on Substack, where I had an account. And then he started putting them on Twitter and so on. And they started to go around. And people started paying attention and the figures went up and up and up. So I did one one day, then I did one the next day and one the next day. At that point, even though I was really ill,
Fresh Air
How A Writer's Life Changed In A Second
and really bombed out of my head on painkillers and so on. I was writing a blog every single day about my condition and it was very exciting that people were interested in what I had to say and what had happened to me. And then people started to write pieces about me in the New York Times and in Australia and India and so on.
Fresh Air
How A Writer's Life Changed In A Second
So it was a very strange period because, you know, I was completely done for alone, lying in hospital full of drugs and tubes. And my material was going very quickly around the world and increasing numbers of people were interested in what I was saying. And that really cheered me up. You know, I had something to do.
Fresh Air
How A Writer's Life Changed In A Second
I had a platform, and I was back as a writer, which is what I am, which secures my identity.
Fresh Air
How A Writer's Life Changed In A Second
What I was doing was writing the blogs in my head. You described the nights very accurately, but what I was doing, I could write the paragraph and then another paragraph and another paragraph, and I could hold it in my head and try and remember.
Fresh Air
How A Writer's Life Changed In A Second
the blog until the next day when I would see someone who would then commit it to paper so that that was kept me going that was an interesting thing to do for me to to start not only to write about my present life but of course lying in bed for so long as you describe you obsess about things but thinking about my childhood about my parents about growing up and my reading and anything that occurred to me and I could put it in a blog and then publish it the next day
Fresh Air
How A Writer's Life Changed In A Second
I think what you say is very interesting because a baby is a tyrant.
Fresh Air
How A Writer's Life Changed In A Second
I remember a phrase from some writer or another who says, the fascist face of the baby. I've had three babies, and I can tell you that there are times when they are like fascists, when they overwhelm you. And then suddenly I was in that situation again. I was helpless in bed. I couldn't. feed myself, brush my teeth or do anything. I was entirely dependent on other people.
Fresh Air
How A Writer's Life Changed In A Second
And I hated being so dependent. And the only way I could ever get anything done was to ask someone to do something for me, you know. And that's my situation now. Today I'm in that situation. And I hate it and I resent it. I want to, you know, get up and make my own tea and breakfast, you know. So I suddenly became aware of that in order to get anything done, I had to demand things.
Fresh Air
How A Writer's Life Changed In A Second
I have to ask people to do things for me. And it's embarrassing to have to do that all the time. If I'm in my kitchen and Isabella is cooking and then she does the shopping and then she has to feed me, then she has to wash up, there's nothing I can do to help her and it's shameful and embarrassing.
Fresh Air
How A Writer's Life Changed In A Second
And so the nature of our relationship was completely transformed by this accident where I am entirely dependent on other people and also profoundly ashamed that I'm not able to do what I could do before. The only way to get around this is to enjoy it.
Fresh Air
How A Writer's Life Changed In A Second
And enjoy the conversations you have with other people, to enjoy their generosity, to enjoy the love that they have for you and how they like to help you and to serve you. So it's a big kind of...
Fresh Air
How A Writer's Life Changed In A Second
That emotional and intellectual turnaround I'm just describing here from being an independent, you know, person with agency in the world who can do stuff to becoming this tyrannical baby that I am here now talking to you.
Fresh Air
How A Writer's Life Changed In A Second
Yeah, I have one person 24-7 who lives in the house, who looks after me, and then carers who come in one in the morning to wash me and get me dressed and ready for the street. And then in the evening, someone who helps put me to bed and cleans me and gets me ready for the night.
Fresh Air
How A Writer's Life Changed In A Second
I felt all those things as you have to adjust to a new life. One day I was an ordinary, normal person walking about the world doing stuff. The next day, and this may happen to many of us, to all of us, you're entirely dependent on the kindness of strangers for your life. And it's a big adjustment. And at the beginning, it's very humiliating. You feel really embarrassed.
Fresh Air
How A Writer's Life Changed In A Second
You know, people touch you all the time. Strangers come into my house every single day and they touch me, they turn me over. They talk above me as if I'm not there. And my circumstances have entirely changed. But I have to say, you get over it.
Fresh Air
How A Writer's Life Changed In A Second
Well, I think at the beginning there was a lot of anger, you know, from me mostly. When you have your life, as it were, your normal life, your ordinary life snatched away from you by an illness, as I say, as will happen to so many of us, you are absolutely furious. And you become furious with the people around you. You become furious with your life.
Fresh Air
How A Writer's Life Changed In A Second
You can't believe this horror has happened to you. It's a contingent, random thing that's happened to you just out of the blue, you know. I'll give you some examples. When I was in hospital in North London in the rehab room, I was on a ward of accidents. Everybody on the ward had had an accident. One guy had dived into an empty swimming pool by mistake.
Fresh Air
How A Writer's Life Changed In A Second
Another guy had fallen down the stairs while drinking a glass of wine. Another guy had fallen over his rake in his garden and just tripped over it and fell down and broke his neck and was paralyzed. So we all had these random, rather contingent accidents, which suddenly, in a moment, completely change your life forever and there's no going back. That is absolutely enraging.
Fresh Air
How A Writer's Life Changed In A Second
You think, you know, why couldn't I have been doing something else at that moment? You know, why did that moment... To me, why have I been chosen? What have I done wrong? You go through all these terrible, awful thoughts about who has done this to you and why it's happened. And it makes you an angry person.
Fresh Air
How A Writer's Life Changed In A Second
So I think there are moments, quite rightly, where you deserve to feel angry, but it's tough on the people around you.
Fresh Air
How A Writer's Life Changed In A Second
I guess because I'd never done anything like that before. I look after Isabella and she looks after me. We're equals. But the idea that I would then devote my life to her being disabled and being in a need, I can't answer that. But I think I would now. I'd do it for anybody now because I know so much about suffering and disablement, which I didn't know before.
Fresh Air
How A Writer's Life Changed In A Second
So the answer would be, yes, I would do that. But I don't know whether I would have done it when I was healthy. But as I say, it's not a question one can answer.
Fresh Air
How A Writer's Life Changed In A Second
Unlike most of the people that I was in hospital with, They can't go back to work. None of them have gone back to work. You know, if you're a truck driver or you're a street cleaner or you're a postman or whatever, none of those men or women can go back to work. So they go back home and they lie in bed and they watch TV. My job, thankfully, is a talking and writing job. And I work outside.