Kureishi, Hanif

views updated May 18 2018

KUREISHI, Hanif

Nationality: British. Born: Bromley, England, 5 December 1954. Education: King's College, London, B.A. Career: Film director, playwright, screenwriter, novelist; writer-in-residence, 1981 and 1985-86, Royal Court Theatre, London. Awards: Themes Television Playwright award, 1980, for The Mother Country; George Devine award, 1981; Evening Standard award, 1985, for screenplay; Rotterdam Festival's Most Popular Film award, New York Film Critics' Circle Best Screenplay award, and National Society of Film Critics' Best Screenplay award, all 1986, all for My Beautiful Launderette; Whitbread book of the Year award, and Booksellers Association of Great Britain and Ireland first novel category, both 1990, both for The Buddha of Suburbia. Agent: Sheila Lemon, Lemon and Durbridge Ltd., 24 Pottery Lane, London W11 4 LZ, England.

Publications

Novels

The Buddha of Suburbia. London, Faber, and New York, Viking, 1990.

The Black Album. London, Faber, 1995.

Love in a Blue Time. New York, Scribner, 1997.

Intimacy. New York, Scribner, 1999.

Short Stories

Midnight All Day. London, Faber, 1999.

Plays

Soaking Up the Heat (produced London, 1976).

The Mother Country (produced London, 1980).

The King and Me (produced London, 1980).

Borderline (produced London, 1981). London, Metheun, 1981.

Cinders, adaptation of a play by Janusz Glowacki (produced London, 1981).

TomorrowToday! (produced London, 1981).

Birds of Passage (produced London, 1983). London, Amber Lane, 1983.

Outskirts, The King and Me, TomorrowToday! London, River Run Press, 1983.

Mother Courage, adaptation of a play by Bertold Brecht (produced London, 1984).

Sleep with Me. London and New York, Faber, 1999.

Screenplays:

My Beautiful Launderette, 1985; published with other works as My Beautiful Laundrette and Other Writings, London, Faber and Faber, 1996; Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, 1987.

Radio Plays:

You Can't Go Home, 1980; The Trial, adaptation the novel by Franz Kafka, 1982.

Other

Editor, with Jon Savage, The Faber Book of Pop. London and Boston, Faber and Faber, 1995.

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Critical Studies:

Hanif Kureishi: Postcolonial Storyteller by Kenneth C. Kaleta. Austin, University of Texas Press, 1998.

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Hanif Kureishi's fiction is a conglomeration of influences; youth culture, the British Asian experience, sexuality and experimentation, politics and resistance. The Buddha of Suburbia and The Black Album, in including these influences, make a political aesthetic of their interaction. The ironies of adolescence explored in The Buddha of Suburbia depend on the ability of the reader to see wry and sly humour in the meeting of unstable cultural entities; but more significantly Kureishi's version of British Asian identity insists on critiquing the reification of that identity, and implies a necessary and layered complexity in the politics of identity in general. For this reason, Kureishi's novels make him an extraordinarily perceptive commentator on the complexities of post-coloniality and immigrant experiences, a perception that he has applied to the status of Asian identity in the widest contexts of post-1960s Britain.

The Buddha of Suburbia, Kureishi's first novel, opens with an uncovering of the "Indianness" and Englishness of the adolescent Karim. Karim asserts his right to describe himself as an "Englishman," but this soon becomes qualified ("a funny sort of Englishman") and then shifts to a discussion of "the odd mixture of continents and blood, of here and there, of belonging and not belonging, that makes me so restless and easily bored." Already established then is the assumption that the novel will examine this movement from cultural fixity to flux and that the ability to recognize the constituent parts of the result of these changes is a vital outcome in itself. The Buddha of Suburbia begins from a similar position to that described autobiographically by Kureishi in "The Rainbow Sign" (published with the script of My Beautiful Laundrette in 1986): "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." The Buddha has a narrative starting point in which Karim and his father Haroon are archetypally "like everyone else"Haroon is the perfect civil servant, Karim behaves like the typical adolescent. Yet the novel is spurred by the events that begin to transform both characters, as Haroon adopts a comically (but never entirely ridiculed) Buddhist personality while Karim develops along the unpredictable cultural and sexual trajectories of teenage life.

The Buddha of Suburbia opens up these moments of stasis. Its narrative progresses almost without the participation of its main characters; their lives are affected by perceptions of their identity constructed by those around them, and Kureishi continually emphasizes the importance of particular versions of being Indian/Muslim that resurface. The Buddha, for example, is scathing in its satire of the apparently well-intentioned liberal/left in Britain and its over-indulgence in the "East" as a site of mysticism and spirituality. Indeed most of the humor associated with Haroon in the novel depends on the discrepancy between his Islamic roots and his newfound Buddhism. Edward Said's notion that the West constructs a monolithic East for its own purposes is neatly played out through Haroon, yet with an irony at the expense of the "West" that is in some ways lacking in Said. Thus a fixed "Indian" cultural identity, desired and projected by those liberal spiritualists who come to Haroon's meditations, is never allowed to settle; it is undermined by their own inability to see Haroon's "inauthenticity" because of their preconceptions.

While liberal Western mysticism is under scrutiny in The Buddha of Suburbia, Kureishi uses his second novel to examine a more serious "usage" of marginalized racial groups in the metropolis. The Black Album is set during the Rushdie affair (when a fatwa was imposed by Iran's spiritual leader upon Salman Rushdie, author of The Satanic Verses ) and takes the brave step (considering Kureishi's credentials during the Rushdie affair as someone outspoken in his defense of Rushdie) of attempting to enter the thought processes involved in the anger caused by The Satanic Verses. Shahid, the novel's central character, is placed between the familiar poles of an essentialist Asian identity (in this case anti-Rushdie fundamentalism) and Western liberalism. But The Black Album (and this is part of its comparative seriousness) produces other options within these polarities. The apparently insupportable monolithic ideology of cultural essentialism represented by Chad and Riaz is given an attraction through its ability to produce a sense of cultural cohesion, community, and comfort. From the liberal Western pole splinters Brownlow, who is used as an example of the Western leftist tendency to over-prioritize the marginality of marginal groupsthis becomes a drama playing out a guilt that is apparently purged if reversed. The Black Album is then more complex than The Buddha of Suburbia in the delineation of race in British society; it is also a more serious and intense piece of writing, dealing with the same issues in a more threatening, highly charged context. Kureishi's fiction has thus moved along the trajectories of the experience of post-colonial immigration in Britain with an intelligence and irony, while developing a more complex attitude to political issues and continually using narrative and writing stylistics to place that experience in its political and (popular) cultural context.

Intimacy, Kureishi's 1999 novel (at a time when his short story and screenplay writing continue to be prolific), moves away from cultural-identity politics and brings out a strand that has always been part of his writingthe loneliness, cruelty and disconnectedness of human relations. The narrator, Jay, is on the point of leaving his partner and their two children and, at times viciously and egotistically, he assesses his soon-to-be past relationship. Jay's self-justification hovers always between alienating and challenging the reader, as Kureishi dares to deploy a central character whose apparently objectionable sense of himself and disregard for others seems to be posited as necessary and universal. Intimacy 's title is its key; deeply ironic at the expense of the text, the novel takes the reader to the boundaries of his own moral judgement and then asks if he can be sure of the ground he stands on. In this it shares with Kureishi's earlier two novels a belief that writing and reading should not be processes of comfort.

Colin Graham

Kureishi, Hanif

views updated May 11 2018

KUREISHI, Hanif



Writer. Nationality: British. Born: London, 5 December 1954; son of Rafiushan Kureishi and Audrey Buss. Education: Degree in Philosophy from King's College, London. Family: Former partner, Tracey Scoffield; children: twin sons, born 1994. Career: First play, Soaking the Heat, at Royal Court Theatre Upstairs, 1976; several plays produced in London during 1970s and 1980s; Writer in Residence at Royal Court Theatre, 1982; first screenplay, My Beautiful Laundrette nominated for Oscar for Best Writing and BAFTA Best Screenplay Award; The Buddha of Suburbia produced as BBC-TV mini-series, 1993; British Independent Film Awards nomination for My Son the Fanatic; continues to work in theatre, writing short stories and novels. Awards: George Divine Drama Award, for Outskirts (play); Whitbread Award, for The Buddha of Suburbia (novel); National Society of Film Critics Award for Best Screenplay and New York Film Critics Circle Awards Award, for Best Screenplay, for My Beautiful Laundrette, 1986. Agent: Stephen Durbridge, The Agency, 24, Pottery Lane, Holland Park, London W11 4LZ, England.


Films as Writer:

1985

My Beautiful Laundrette (Frears —originally for TV) (+ sc)

1987

Sammy and Rosie Get Laid (Frears) (+ sc)

1991

London Kills Me (+ d, sc)

1998

My Son the Fanatic (Prasad) (+ sc)

1999

Mauvaise passe (The Escort; The Wrong Blonde) (Blanc)

2000

Intimacy



Publications:


By KUREISHI: books—

The Buddha of Suburbia, London, 1990.

The Black Album, London, 1995.

The Faber Book of Pop, edited with John Savage, London, 1995.

Intimacy, London, 1998.

Love in a Blue Time (short story collection), London, 1997.

Midnight All Day (short story collection), London, 1999.

By KUREISHI: articles—

"Hanif Kureishi on London," Interview in Critical Quarterly, Fall 1999.

On KUREISHI: books—

Kaleta, Kenneth, C., Hanif Kureishi: Postcolonial Storyteller, Austin, Texas, 1997.

On KUREISHI: articles—

Mody, Anjali, "Hanif's Story: Too Intimate for Words," in The Indian Express (Bombay), 11 May 1998.

Dawson, Tom, Review of My Son the Fanatic, in Total Film (London), June 1998.

Richards, Terry, Review of My Son the Fanatic, in Film Review (London), June 1998.


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A controversial novelist, playwright, and screenwriter, Hanif Kureishi is an outspoken commentator on multiculturalism in the United Kingdom. His fictional works explore in graphic terms the experiences of British Asians, and his work as a screenwriter and a novelist has been praised on both sides of the Atlantic, suggesting that the views of ethnic differences expressed in films such as My Beautiful Laundrette and Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, are recognisable beyond their London setting. Kureishi is known for his left-wing politics, sharp humour, and uncompromising views on literary production.

Kureishi had his first play produced professionally in 1976, but it is as a screenwriter and more recently a novelist that he has reached his widest audience. The plots of Kureishi's films tend to revolve around the problems encountered when immigrant families find that their culture is at odds with the traditions and moral structures of their adopted country. His first screenplay, My Beautiful Laundrette, for which he received an Oscar nomination, and which became something of a cult movie in the gay community in Britain in the late 1980s, tells the story of two young men, one working-class white, one Pakistani, as they try to run a laundrette. While the relationship between the two seems at first not to be affected by the differences in their backgrounds, their expectations of the venture could not be more different. While Johnny sees the laundrette as a way of salvaging his life and regaining some self-respect, Omar finds himself attracted to Johnny, rebelling against his father's demands that he marry an upper-class Pakistani girl, and looking on the business as his ticket to wealth and respectability.

Directed by Stephen Frears, My Beautiful Laundrette was a remarkable start to Kureishi's movie career, and his second collaboration with the director, Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, is no less impressive. Also featuring a domineering and conservative father figure, the second film's most inventive twist is having the father return from India lamenting the loss of the British culture he used to know. It has become a hallmark of Kureishi's work to overturn conventional views of immigrant families, in this case showing the reactionary father to be more "British" than the British themselves.

After winning the Whitbread prize for his first novel, The Buddha of Suburbia, Kureishi returned to filmmaking with London Kills Me, his directorial debut. Set among the low-lifes and drug addicts on the streets of London, the film predates Trainspotting by five years, but is far less rewarding either as a voyeuristic spectacle, or as an insight into the lives of the characters. Unlike Trainspotting, which offers up heroin addiction as an Existential choice of some magnitude, here the horrors of the streets are more easily escaped, and therefore seem more trivial.

While London Kills Me seemed rather an aimless movie, Kureishi's adaptation of his novel The Buddha of Suburbia as a four-part TV mini-series was a welcome return to form. It was also a return to the themes of his earlier work for the big screen, being the story of the decline into drugs and delinquency of the son of a respectable Pakistani family in London. My Son the Fanatic, directed by Udayan Prasad failed to make such an impact on critics and award committees as Kureishi's early films. Tending towards the sentimental in its portrayal of Parvez, a hard-working taxi driver who gradually transforms into a friendly pimp, My Son the Fanatic lacks the intensity and pace of My Beautiful Laundrette and Samie and Rosie. Yet it is an engrossing movie, reversing the stereotype to cast the older members of a British Asian family as liberal and open to new ideas, while the younger generation embrace religious fundamentalism.

Kureishi's films and writing projects have often placed him in conflict with his family and with the British Asian community whose problems his work explores. Yet his stories have gone some way towards making that community more visible in the British media. Many of the inversions of stereotypes that made My Beautiful Laundrette so unusual in the 1980s, have become staples of British Asian humour in the year 2000, to the point that a hit British TV comedy show Goodness Gracious Me bases its sketches on the kinds of racial inversions that seemed shocking in 1985. Kureishi's latest outing as a screenwriter, Mauvaise passe, teams him up with director Michel Blanc, and French star Daniel Auteuil.

—Chris Routledge

Kureishi, Hanif

views updated May 21 2018

KUREISHI, Hanif

KUREISHI, Hanif. British, b. 1954. Genres: Novels, Plays/Screenplays. Career: Royal Court Theatre, London, resident writer, 1981, 1985-86. Publications: PLAYS: Borderline, 1981; Birds of Passage, 1983; Outskirts, The King and Me, Tomorrow-Today!, 1983; Mother Courage (adapted from Brecht), 1984; Sleep with Me, 1999. SCREENPLAYS: My Beautiful Laundrette, 1986; Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, 1988; London Kills Me, 1989; Buddha of Suburbia, 1993; My Son the Fanatic, 1998. NOVELS: The Buddha of Suburbia, 1990; The Black Album, 1995; Intimacy, 1998; Gabriel's Gift, 2001. OTHER: (ed. with J. Savage) The Faber Book of Pop, 1995; Love in a Blue Time (stories), 1997; Midnight All Day (stories), 2000. Address: c/o Stephen Durbridge, The Agency, 24 Pottery Lane, Holland Park, London W11 4LZ, England.