Hanif Kureishi: Collected Essays

Writers are mad and promiscuous, if they’re lucky; they make people up for a living, give them something to say, enter their minds, toy with them and often ruin their lives. One might like to think of oneself as a realist, but a good proportion of the important world is insubstantial, being made up of dream, fantasy, paranoid projections and the imagination. The only figure which comes close to showing the whole chaotic caboodle is literature.

But if a novel is concerned with numerous voices, and wants to keep them in play until the dispute is done, an essay is a monologue, a form of direct speech, and a whisper at that. The essay is as flexible a form as a story or novel; it is amenable to most forms of content. It can be as intellectual as Roland Barthes, Adam Phillips or Susan Sontag, as informal and casual as Max Beerbohm, or as cool and minimalist as Joan Didion. Unlike academic writing, the essay is usually written for the general or ‘common’ reader rather than for experts or students; for someone in a deck chair rather than at a desk. There should neither be footnotes nor much information in an essay; as a form, it is a meditation rather than an act of persuasion — though Robert Louis Stevenson’s fine essay ‘An Apology for Idlers’ has encouraged me, as it should, towards a greater indolence: ‘Perpetual devotion to what a man calls his business, is only to be sustained by perpetual neglect of many other things.’

Idleness may be the midwife of art, but the desire to write has not diminished in me over the years. If anything, it has increased. There is still that daily pressure to achieve something true, or at least put down a few words. Or, best of all, to have a good idea before bedtime which takes the work forward. I like to be surprised by what I write, and sometimes I even laugh at what comes out. I am my own first reader, and if I enjoy something, the reader might too.

I often wonder if I haven’t said it all by now; I’d be happy to say it all again at half the price, but one doesn’t stop developing, burying old selves, seeking new difficulty and resistances in the material, and wanting to pin words to things. I’m not sure any writer gets over feeling clumsy, or, at times, over-facile. There are things he will never be able to get right, things he’ll want to work on. Ageing writers slow down, they read more, and struggle with despair. But there are few artists who have the desire to give up their creativity as they decline. It is always exciting to have a good idea. The end of a life is as interesting as the beginning. If anyone asks a writer which of their pieces is their favourite, the answer can only be the one to come.

Hanif Kureishi, August 2010

I was born in London of an English mother and Pakistani father. My father, who lives in London, came to England from Bombay in 1947 to be educated by the old colonial power. He married here and never went back to India. The rest of his large family, his brothers, their wives, his sisters, moved from Bombay to Karachi, in Pakistan, after partition.

Frequently during my childhood, I met my Pakistani uncles when they came to London on business. They were important, confident people who took me to hotels, restaurants and Test matches, often in taxis. But I had no idea of what the subcontinent was like or how my numerous uncles, aunts and cousins lived there. When I was nine or ten a teacher purposefully placed some pictures of Indian peasants in mud huts in front of me and said to the class: Hanif comes from India. I wondered: did my uncles ride on camels? Surely not in their suits? Did my cousins, so like me in other ways, squat down in the sand like little Mowglis, half-naked and eating with their fingers?

In the mid-1960s, Pakistanis were a risible subject in England, derided on television and exploited by politicians. They had the worst jobs, they were uncomfortable in England, some of them had difficulties with the language. They were despised and out of place.

From the start I tried to deny my Pakistani self. I was ashamed. It was a curse and I wanted to be rid of it. I wanted to be like everyone else. I read with understanding a story in a newspaper about a black boy who, when he noticed that burnt skin turned white, jumped into a bath of boiling water.

At school, one teacher always spoke to me in a ‘Peter Sellers’ Indian accent. Another refused to call me by my name, calling me Pakistani Pete instead. So I refused to call the teacher by his name and used his nickname instead. This led to trouble; arguments, detentions, escapes from school over hedges, and eventually suspension. This played into my hands; this couldn’t have been better.

With a friend I roamed the streets and fields all day; I sat beside streams; I stole yellow lurex trousers from a shop and smuggled them out of the house under my school trousers; I hid in woods reading hard books; and I saw the film Zulu several times.

This friend, who became Johnny in my film, My Beautiful Laundrette , came one day to the house. It was a shock.

He was dressed in jeans so tough they almost stood up by themselves. These were suspended above his boots by Union Jack braces of ‘hangman’s strength’, revealing a stretch of milk bottle white leg. He seemed to have sprung up several inches because of his Dr Martens boots, which had steel caps and soles as thick as cheese sandwiches. His Ben Sherman shirt with a pleat down the back was essential. And his hair, which was only a quarter of an inch long all over, stuck out of his head like little nails. This unmoving creation he concentratedly touched up every hour with a sharpened steel comb that also served as a dagger.

He soon got the name Bog Brush, though this was not a moniker you would use to his face. Where before he was an angel-boy with a blond quiff flattened down by his mother’s loving spit, a clean handkerchief always in his pocket, as well as being a keen cornet player for the Air Cadets, he’d now gained a brand-new truculent demeanour.

My mother was so terrified by this stormtrooper dancing on her doorstep to the ‘Skinhead Moonstomp’, which he moaned to himself continuously, that she had to lie down.

I decided to go out roaming with B.B. before my father got home from work. But it wasn’t the same as before. We couldn’t have our talks without being interrupted. Bog Brush had become Someone. To his intense pleasure, similarly dressed strangers greeted Bog Brush in the street as if they were in a war-torn foreign country and in the same army battalion. We were suddenly banned from cinemas. The Wimpy Bar in which we sat for hours with milkshakes wouldn’t let us in. As a matter of pride we now had to go round the back and lob a brick at the rear window of the place.

Other strangers would spot us from the other side of the street. B.B. would yell ‘Leg it!’ as the enemy dashed through traffic and leapt over the bonnets of cars to get at us, screaming obscenities and chasing us up alleys, across allotments, around reservoirs, and on and on.

And then, in the evening, B.B. took me to meet with the other lads. We climbed the park railings and strolled across to the football pitch, by the goal posts. This is where the lads congregated to hunt down Pakistanis and beat them. Most of them I was at school with. The others I’d grown up with. I knew their parents. They knew my father.

I withdrew, from the park, from the lads, to a safer place, within myself. I moved into what I call my ‘temporary’ period. I was only waiting now to get away, to leave the London suburbs, to make another kind of life, somewhere else, with better people.