Voice without illusions

Race, family and sexuality are the big themes of Hanif Kureishi’s era-defining fiction – but
he also stands accused of misogyny and exploitation. He tells Johann Hari about
psychoanalysis, fundamentalism, and disillusionment

EVER since I read his first novel, The Buddha of Suburbia, I have imagined Kureishi to be a living version of the novel’s protagonist, Karim. He is a beautiful mixed-race boy from the suburbs, determined to dream and shag and saunter his way to the big city. But what, I always wondered, happens when the Buddha of Suburbia sags into late middle age? Where did Karim go? Over the years I had heard depressing rumours about Kureishi — that his story dissolved into the success-cliché of hard partying and hard drugs, and he ended up half-mad and suicidal and scribbling nasty novellas about his ex-wife.

When he walks into Cafe Rouge in Shepherd’s Bush, those stories deflate with a small hiss. Here is a slim, short 54-year-old with a lingering, raddled handsomeness. At first glance, he looks like a vaguely trendy north London GP. He greets me with an emotionless voice — as if asking about my symptoms — and we sit in the corner and coolly order coffee.

And then the therapy session begins. He almost immediately announces his new mission to discard the illusions that clutter our minds — and his method is psychoanalysis. It is the subject of his new novel, Something To Tell You, and of his life. Three times a week, Kureishi lies on a couch and tries dispassionately to understand the workings of his subconscious. "It has stopped me doing things that are mad and stupid and self-destructive," he says. "You don’t just lie there. It’s not a narcissistic bath. It’s quite violent. It’s about how your sexuality and your aggression are destructive. Your dreams show you that. The rest is just surface."

At first, this commitment to a bonfire of illusions sounded, to me, like a conceit — a fancy self-dramatising illusion itself. But as we spoke, he emptied his discarded delusions on to the table one by one, and dismantled them. He admits: yes, I was suicidal and paranoid. Yes, my "semi-broken" father hated me, even as he loved me and tried to make me into a replica of him. Yes, I hated my grandparents’ Islam, with its Holy Book bearing "a threat on every page". Yes, I reacted to the Paki-bashing of my youth by internalising racism, and wishing my brown skin away. Yes, male sexuality is cold and dark and has nothing to do with love.

He says it all in an affectless voice, as if he is discussing how to fix a car engine. And yes, it is a voice without illusions.

You can’t interview Hanif Kureishi alone. He is always accompanied by the spectre of his father, Rafiushan Kureishi. "If you think the living are difficult to deal with, the dead can be worse," one of his characters says. His father pushes his way into Kureishi’s conversation punctually, at least once every five minutes. "Yeah, I think about my dad every day. The whole time," he says. "I still want to be like him, and I still hope one day to coincide with him. Sometimes, I think I go to my desk only to obey my father."

Rafiushan washed up in the white English suburbs of the 1950s, determined to be a writer. It was his only way of overcoming "his sense of defeat" — yet he failed at it. He had been born in colonial Bombay into a wealthy family, and went to school with Zulfiqar Bhutto, who became Pakistan’s prime minister and patriarch. But the family lost everything during Partition and fled to the newly created Pakistan — so Rafiushan was scattered in his early 20s to the imperial mother-country. He never went home again. Instead, he toiled in "suburban semi-sleep" in south London, as Hanif puts it, working as a clerk at the Pakistani embassy, and writing novels every night that were never published.

"He seemed to be living his life in the negative, as though there was someone bad inside him," Hanif says. He transmitted his failed ambition to his son — but when his son succeeded, part of him was enraged and affronted. When Hanif first had a play performed at the Royal Court in his early 20s, his father sat in the back row, flicking V-signs. How did he feel? He won’t say; he instead empathises with his father. "It was really difficult for him," Hanif says. "He came to Britain from India in his 20s and I think it traumatised him. He never saw his mother again. He found it very difficult to be in England, because if you were an Indian then, people on the whole thought you were inferior... My father was much patronised. He came from a very distinguished family, but he was seen as a Paki the whole time."

Their relationship was "riddled with Oedipus complexes", Hanif says now. His father was sick throughout Hanif’s childhood, and he became terrified his rage would kill his father. My sons and I" — he has three — "have huge fights, and it’s good for us all. It’s rather invigorating. We can have these huge fights and I’m there the next day. With my father, I was worried I would kill him with my strength or with my talent or intelligence or whatever. You wonder who is the parent and who is the child."

I ask him what his father would make of him now, and his voice becomes varied in tone and louder for the first time in the interview. He smiles broadly. "He could still be alive. He’d be in his late 80s." But all he can name that his father would like is his grandchildren. "He would be very proud of my boys," he says.

Kureishi was sunk in a dilemma faced by so many children of immigrants: second generation blues, where you don’t belong in your father’s country, but you aren’t accepted in the country where you were born either. When he went to Pakistan, people laughed out loud when he said he was English — but they also said he would never belong with them. "One man said to me, ‘We are Pakistanis, but you will always be a Paki."

Today, European Islamists are reacting to this alienation. They are, Kureishi says, "souls lost in translation" — at home nowhere. So they seek to build a pure identity for themselves in a Puritan religious fanaticism based on Medina in the seventh century.

Kureishi reacted very differently. At first, he fantasised about eradicating the Asian part of himself. "From the start I wanted to deny my Pakistani self," he says. "I was ashamed. It was a curse and I wanted to be rid of it."

His mother was white, so he lived on a racial fault-line where this was possible, for a while. He was sometimes accepted by white gangs as one of them. "My friends at school used to say to me, ‘We’re going out Paki-bashing tonight, do you want to come with us?’ And I knew my dad would be walking home from work, and they might beat him up. They didn’t see the contradiction?"

But as he dropped out of school and skidded around on the dole, Hanif began to deal with this dissonance by discarding his self-hate and turning to art. "I used my creativity to put together all these things I couldn’t put together in the world. I wrote a screenplay (My Beautiful Laundrette) about a skinhead and a Pakistani boy running a launderette together, and they were in love. So you create a unity." At the same time, he began to be wooed by the best values of his mother’s country. He became a "hippie socialist kid", he says, "obsessed with sexual freedom and novels and making social change. We thought all of us — black people and gay people and feminists — were part of the same fight."

"We were so innocent," he says, remembering how he came to be nominated for an Oscar for writing My Beautiful Laundrette. He was 29, living in a council flat in west London, and he’d been on the dole for years, writing plays for the Royal Court. "After I heard the news, I went down to Oxfam and got a DJ (dinner jacket) on, and I got the bus down to Gatwick and went off to the Oscars. I sat next to Bette Davis and Dustin Hoffman, and all the studios send flowers to your hotel room and it’s just amazing. And then at the end you go back and you end up at Gatwick and you get on a bus back to West Ken and you think, ‘Oh. This is miserable.’"

Suddenly glistening with success, he found that "a lot of people hate you and envy you. And it really affects a lot of your friendships – particularly with people that you’ve known for a long time. And I wasn’t prepared for that at all. You know, not everybody thinks, ‘What a lucky man! You’re talented – you’ve done well.’ A lot of people think, ‘Why has that happened to you?’ Bitterness and hatred is really disturbing."

He began to take drugs full-time, "as though I were trying to kill something, or bring something in myself to life". Coke, LSD, Ecstasy. "You use drugs and sexuality as a cure for depression – you crash, then you use again, and it’s a cycle of stupidity." He began to have intermittent insane thoughts, "thinking people have been sent in cars to kill me".

He believes it is psychoanalysis that saved him. In the world of PET scans and ever-more-detailed understanding of the brain, it’s fashionable to see the talking cure as a crude, unscientific leftover from early 20th-century Vienna. Kureishi scoffs. "As though only something scientific could improve your state of mind! That would be like saying to somebody who had read a novel by Dostoevsky and says, ‘This has changed my life and had a profound effect on me,’ that their view is unscientific. It misses the point. Psychoanalysis is more like poetry. It’s more like literature in its deepest sense: this is where we think about who we are. It’s not a mathematical thing."

When your illusions are gone – dismantled and dead on a psychoanalyst’s chair – what do you have left? Kureishi leans forward. "Other people. The people you love. Your family. Your group. Your work."

This is our parting sentiment. For hours, he has told me you can be unillusioned without being disillusioned. He has said you can let your ugliest feelings speak freely without being conquered by them. He has said it in a persuasive monotone. But standing outside Caf`E9 Rouge in the west London chill, I peer back through the window, at Kureishi with his spectral father hanging over him, and I wonder if it is true.

— By arrangement with The Independent

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