Hanif Kureishi - Love + Hate - Stories and Essays

Teenagers don’t need to be reminded that wherever they are, their body is with them as an object. Teenagers have always been keen on harming, piercing and marking themselves. Now they go to the gym and shave their bodies and wax their hair; they hyperventilate over blackheads and what they’re eating, and look critically and in wonder at themselves and each other. My boys check other boys’ bodies before they check the girls. In this exile, this period of freedom between loves, hypereroticised, wild hedonists, they can really only love themselves. One day they will look at photographs of their younger selves and be shocked by everything they couldn’t see or appreciate in themselves. And however beautiful they might be, any adult will remember that most of us when young felt a lot like Holden Caulfield or Esther Greenwood in The Bell Jar, awkward, not ready for the world, and disputing with our too-present or too-absent parents, to draw them closer, or push them away.

The age of fifteen to twenty in a kid is tough for a parent, with many cruel exchanges. The art the young are fascinated by — pop, hip-hop, video games, vile jokes, horror films — looks gratuitously sadistic. If they are fortunate enough to be able to develop all their capacities, our children, among other things, will have to become aggressive and even destructive. It is shocking, the way they say ‘fuck you’ all the time and mean it. Their necessary hatred, from the parent’s point of view, seems so final. But it is nothing like the cruelty of adults, and this sudden invasion of the nasty and unkind, of a particularly unpleasant version of reality, is an important break from the past, a form of entry into the grown-up world. The machines the kids prefer to real people — computers, phones, video games — are transitional objects for semi-adults, and function as links between life stages.

But there is something else at this time, equally violent or shocking in its own way, a shock which perhaps never diminishes, and which pornography inadequately reproduces but also illustrates. I mean the radical disturbance of sex in its aggression and need. Of how violent, gross and hateful sex can seem, or needs to be, if one is to be abandoned in it.

For me this initiation was not only into my own sexuality, but a move away from adolescent solitude and narcissism — towards a woman, women, and more interesting dangers. This is one of the most difficult and important questions for a young man: how do you engage with or understand female sexuality? My parents’ relationship never seemed sensual; it didn’t appear to be that kind of love: they were companions who cared for one another. Appearance, yearning, or the game of love, didn’t seem important to them, even in their speech.

Where do you learn how to desire, then? How do you allow a woman to teach you about their pleasure? At least I grasped that I would have to make a space for desire to occur. Then, I suppose, one just had to pay attention. Living more authentically, and being more politicised and aware of their situation and who they were — women becoming subjects in their own right, as it would have been put then — the women I knew were far ahead in the way they considered their identity and what they wanted to be.

I was afraid of excitement, of women, of sex, of losing my bearings and my mind. I must have been seventeen when a woman gave me acid, pulled up her top and invited me to lie down so she could masturbate me. She did it slowly, almost as an exercise, to show me what was possible, how she might control me and how I could learn to synthesise pleasure. Lying there, I witnessed her concentration, and then I let go and tripped in my head. At the end I felt paralysed, and it took me a few minutes to learn to walk again. A little older than me and more knowledgeable about everything, she was experienced enough to say — when I came round — that that wasn’t all.

There was something else. It was, she explained, difficult for her to masturbate in front of a man; she felt exposed and embarrassed. But if she could get over that, I might see something essential or even useful for the future. After all, it took a man to know a woman, to understand her needs and passion, to look at her as she wanted to be seen. So she pulled down her clothes and showed herself. You have to admire the nerve of someone who could do that. She came quickly, and a few times more. I held and kissed her, amazed and fascinated by the beauty and intensity of this form of education, and I wondered what she needed me for, and what I could be for her, if anything. She said, well, you can’t hold your own hand, and you can’t desire or make love to yourself, can you?

*

My father and I would walk in the park on the weekends. Dad always had the immigrant’s optimism. He believed we ought to succeed in the new country; that was why he wanted to be here. Yet I still don’t know how his conversations were so inspiring. It was a great thing he had, knowing how to make you excited about the future, about what could be achieved and the pleasures which were possible. Not, of course, that you were allowed to leave him behind. My father, neglected by his own father, indeed by both his parents, broke and re-established the trans-generational inheritance, and became a good father himself. Yet he required his children as friends and accomplices. Now I am like him, and much different. He’s long dead but every day I am in conversation with him. I’d like him to be here so I could kiss him or kill him.

*

My youngest son and I, on our run, slow down. My legs are tired; we walk together. I like to walk slowly. This is how we can talk about schools, sports, magic tricks, concentration, his friends, and how he’d never read anything I’d written. It’s a lovely long moment between conflicts. From the parent’s perspective, it is not hard to frighten or control young children, even when they are maddening. But — difficult to intimidate and almost impossible to charm — teenagers generate more hate, rage and envy than even the steadiest people can bear. A teenager can turn a fine person into a maniac in ten seconds. The more they need you the more anger they might need to get away — hatred is an important catalyst for change — and you can only have power over those who are dependent on you. You’ll never get anywhere with a teenager by appealing to your own interests, but they usually respond to money, and if you can involve them in something they like, or want to say, they can, for a bit, be good, amusing company.

There is a lot here for the parent to learn about separation. For what the kid sees as growing up and freedom is, from the angle of the parent, a fatal break-up. During the long divorce of the child’s teenage years, it can feel as if you are slowly being deserted by one of your dearest friends. You will ask yourself what is left now you have almost completed this job. I can recall wondering at the time I left home, in the mid-70s, who my father would discuss literature and sport with.

Now I must remind myself, since Muslim fathers are very present, that I am the son of a mother too. Not that my mother much enjoyed being maternal; it was all a nuisance. She liked us as an excuse or obstacle, so we could appear to be in the way of something better. Yet when we were gone, nothing new happened. At the time I was leaving home, Mother seemed to become defensive and almost inert, as if she’d lost her vitality under layers of her own body. Television had been a novelty when I was a kid; we were amazed it existed at all. Soon Mum barely moved from the intoxicant of the TV, which she watched with increasing avidity. To me, she had fallen in love with something or, indeed, someone else, an insidious thing, a shadow-world, which appeared to provide no suffering or condemnation, unlike sex or alcohol, but only a constant, mild level of diversion. Eternally distracted by the only truly living figures in what we misguidedly called the living room, it soon seemed as if television was the single life which could compel her — people on a screen she couldn’t actually reach and didn’t have to talk to. In a way, I had lost both my parents.