It’s been an unfathomably tough 18 months for Hanif Kureishi. In 2022, the esteemed British author went to Rome along with his spouse for Christmas, the place he fainted and fell. When he awoke in a pool of blood he had misplaced the usage of his arms, legs and arms. For greater than a yr, he was confined to hospital beds, questioned and prodded by medical doctors and nurses. He couldn’t sit, he couldn’t stroll, and he couldn’t decide up a pen to jot down.
So I’m struck by the optimism and humour of the person chatting with me over Zoom this morning. After I be a part of the decision, Kureishi is sitting erectly in his kitchen and joking with theatre director Emma Rice about their new stage adaptation of his novel The Buddha of Suburbia, which opens on the RSC’s Swan theatre this week. It seems the lengthy months of convalescence – Kureishi has hung out in 5 hospitals, undergone spinal surgical procedure, and solely returned to his residence final December – haven’t dampened his inventive spirit.
“I’ve had a number of time to suppose,” he says. “Notably once I was in hospital and it was so boring. Hours and hours of the day would go by with actually nothing for me to do. I can’t use my arms. I can’t play with my cellphone. I can’t play music. I can’t ship emails to folks. I’m simply sitting staring on the wall. However staring on the wall is an excellent means of producing creativity.”
Kureishi now makes use of a motorised wheelchair and has a carer, that means he has solely made it to 3 rehearsals, but the undertaking has renewed his sense of function. “It’s actually cheered me up that Emma is doing this play,” the 69-year-old says in his sometimes wry and concise method. “It makes me very blissful that my work remains to be alive after I practically died. It additionally appears wonderful that this guide has survived for therefore lengthy, that the story, the politics, the social background and tradition are nonetheless of curiosity to folks.”
Revealed in 1990, Kureishi’s debut novel was a sensation, praised by readers for its relatability and by critics for its satirical humour and social commentary. The semi-autobiographical story follows Karim Amir, a mixed-race teenager determined to flee Bromley for a extra thrilling life in a much less suburban a part of London. Over the course of 5 years, Karim navigates his relationships with family and friends – together with his father, a comical guru-like determine who teaches his neighbours about Buddhist self-discipline – whereas experiencing a variety of sexual and social awakenings.
“It’s relatively like what The Catcher within the Rye was for younger folks within the US,” Kureishi muses. “There’s one thing about Karim’s voice, his naivety, his vulnerability, and the thought of this child rising from a suburban home right into a world of ambition and politics and sexuality that could be very seductive. Everybody can establish with it.”
Karim faces hurdles within the guide that mirror Kureishi’s personal – like having to juggle two worlds and cultures, the Indian and English. Kureishi’s father got here from a rich Indian background, moved to Pakistan after partition after which to London, the place he met Kureishi’s English mom. Kureishi was the one youngster of color in his faculty within the Nineteen Sixties and endured racism and xenophobia. He was 14 when Enoch Powell made his “terrifying” rivers of blood speech.
In response, the teenager turned to books, music and trend as a way of escape, which in flip geared up him with a capability to seize the cultural and social surroundings round him. For his efforts, Buddha received the Whitbread award for greatest first novel and was made right into a BBC sequence soundtracked by fellow Bromley boy David Bowie. “There was one copy going spherical our faculty like contraband,” Zadie Smith as soon as recalled.
“It’s the most effective fashionable tales there’s,” says Rice, who was inventive director of Shakespeare’s Globe from 2016 to 2018, earlier than she based the Clever Youngsters theatre firm. “It’s like a modern-day Hamlet. I learn it once I was 23 and it blew my thoughts. It was like a bomb dropping culturally. It’s so humorous, so political and so tender.”
The pair’s collaboration ought to be distinctive. Kureishi, whose different notable works embrace the 1985 movie My Stunning Laundrette (incomes him an Oscar nomination for the screenplay) and the 1998 novel Intimacy, which noticed him described by the New York Occasions as a “postcolonial Philip Roth”. In the meantime Rice, whose directorial credit embrace The Crimson Sneakers and Wuthering Heights, has been referred to as the “Wes Anderson of the theatre world” for her idiosyncrasies.
Throughout our hour-long dialog, they talk about the issue and pleasure of making an attempt to distill a novel right into a theatre expertise. “After my first draft, Hanif instructed me I’d obtained it solely fallacious,” Rice says. “He’s constantly mentioned the story’s obtained to be political and humorous.”
Rereading the guide, I’m struck by how related it nonetheless feels, regardless of ending on the point of Thatcher’s victory. There are quite a few parallels between at present’s society and the Britain of the Nineteen Seventies, when inflation was excessive, staff had been putting, and folks took to the streets in protest towards a authorities that ignored them. Kureishi acknowledges this however is fast to focus on some main variations.
“Everybody’s rather more pessimistic now,” he says. “I believe folks within the 70s actually believed sooner or later and had been fairly optimistic about it, definitely on the subject of music, trend, the media and pictures. Karim and his good friend Charlie actually imagine they will make it, that they are often pop stars. However I don’t suppose my children are optimistic like that about Britain and the longer term in any respect.”
The world, Kureishi says, “is extra prone to make you loopy” now. “Persons are conscious that the problems dealing with us are so overwhelming, like local weather change.” He lists different issues to do with the dearth of social mobility, the failure of the NHS and the dearth of housebuilding. “One of many belongings you discover in regards to the younger folks in Buddha is that they by no means speak about cash. They don’t need to be wealthy, they need to lead fulfilling lives. However that’s modified. My children and their pals speak about cash on a regular basis.”
Although he calls the elevated chance of a change in authorities “a shard of sunshine”, he doubts “anyone is wildly optimistic a few Labour authorities”. The left, he says, “was rather more lively and coherent then. We don’t actually have an organised left anymore.”
Rice additionally displays on fashionable society’s sense of hopelessness. “I really feel that we’ve been let down by all people – by the church, by our legislators, by our TV presenters,” she says. “It’s exhausting to really feel like something we do in the mean time can create change.”
What lights each Rice and Kureishi up, nevertheless, is the progress that’s been made by way of identification and sexuality. When Buddha got here out, it was nonetheless scandalous for Karim to need to “sleep with boys in addition to ladies”. “Now, it’s very liberating to see that there are such a lot of new types of sexuality; that the binary story simply doesn’t present sufficient alternative,” Kureishi says. “It’s very inventive and modern. Persons are considering and speaking about gender, they’re exploring their very own our bodies and cultures.”
“Additionally, I don’t suppose persons are pressured into having intercourse to the identical extent that we had been then, when it was thought of to be virtually revolutionary. When you concentrate on what you do all day, you spend so little time truly having intercourse.” He smiles. “It solely takes about 5 minutes.”
“I really feel very optimistic watching my stepkids develop up,” provides Rice, “not labelling themselves in the way in which we did.”
And what of racism at present? As Kureishi has famous, there aren’t gangs of skinheads pushing excrement via folks’s doorways any extra. However some discourse stays acquainted – the federal government remains to be tying itself in knots over asylum-seekers and immigration figures. It’s one thing the author has been reflecting on in hospital.
“I might see that the NHS is solely run by immigrants,” he says. “A lot of the nurses doing the all-night and weekend shifts – and all of the care staff – are lately arrived immigrants. If you happen to reduce that off, you then’re going to have an ageing inhabitants that isn’t going to be taken care of.” He calls this “an actual dilemma” on the coronary heart of Britain. “You may’t fill these establishments with indigenous folks. It doesn’t work, all people is aware of that. And sending just a few folks to Rwanda isn’t going to deal with the issue.”
How will they be invoking all of this in a stage play? “The sound design is de facto key. We’re utilizing archive political footage,” Rice says. “I’ve additionally used a assemble to make a bridge between the 70s and now: Karim speaks right into a mic a bit just like the early standup comedians, actually telling the viewers the place the battle was.”
However for Kureishi, sound – and music particularly – has been a supply of ache lately. When he guest-edited BBC Radio 4’s Immediately programme final yr, he mentioned he couldn’t bear to take heed to music any extra as a result of “it might be too transferring”. However with music being so interwoven into Karim’s story, did he discover a strategy to cope? “I’ve gone again to music now,” he says gladly. “I simply couldn’t take heed to all of the stuff I cherished in that horrible, miserable environment with nurses and medical doctors. However I’m again at residence now, and I’ve obtained my children, my pals and my world round me. I’m making an attempt to renew my working life once more.”
Kureishi has been working exhausting on physio and has gained some energy in his legs and arms, though he has been instructed by medical doctors that motion within the arms is the very last thing to return. Nonetheless, he stays optimistic about his present state of affairs. “Though I’m tetraplegic, I’ve began to really feel like a standard individual. Writing provides me a way of shallowness and dignity. That I’m not only a damaged physique. I nonetheless have well being points; daily is a fortunate day for me. Working actually retains me believing in one thing worthwhile in my life.”
One of many issues he’s engaged on is his forthcoming memoir Shattered, which is predicated on his writings on X and on his Substack, The Kureishi Chronicles. The posts started a number of days after the accident, when Kureishi was nonetheless in ICU and making an attempt to make sense of what he calls his “Kafkaesque metamorphosis”. He started dictating his ideas to his son Carlo, who duly transcribed them. Since then, the dispatches have attracted 1000’s of worldwide subscribers – a lot of whom write to Kureishi about their very own tragic experiences. His X following has quadrupled.
Simply as he did when he was youthful, Kureishi says he finds himself writing “to speak with a wider world, with different individuals who can be sympathetic”.
“I actually wanted to do the weblog,” he continues. “It’s a brand new means of writing for me as a result of I’ve to dictate it to a member of my household – one in all my sons or my accomplice Isabella. My children name me The Nice Dictator as a result of I shout at them and so they write it down. It’s like a spontaneous bop chain of phrases. You kick off and off you go – you don’t know what you’re going to say, and also you make sense of it by the top. I’ve began to actually take pleasure in writing on this means. I write a lot faster. The opposite day I wrote for 2 hours, dictating, and I did 3,000 phrases, which is a shitload for me.”
The Buddha of Suburbia follows on the tail of a stage adaptation of My Stunning Laundrette, which was revived at Leicester’s Curve theatre. I ponder what makes theatre the best medium to inform these tales? “Buddha is a love letter to theatre,” Rice says. “That’s what drew me to it. And there’s an immediacy and a humanity to theatre. You’re going to really feel near an orgy, near a racist beating. You’ll really feel the warmth coming off the actors after they dance. Not like TV, theatre additionally brings creativeness and suggestion – the viewers can go anyplace.”
“Writing, theatre, appearing and music are actually what we’re good at on this nation,” concludes Kureishi. “That’s our cause to be optimistic.”
