Hanif Kureishi was born in Bromley, Kent, in 1954, the son of a "Subcontinental" father (read: Pakistani) and an English mother. Growing up in the suburbs, he watched his father's obsessive efforts to write his way out of discrimination and obscurity...
[more]Hanif Kureishi was born in Bromley, Kent, in 1954, the son of a "Subcontinental" father (read: Pakistani) and an English mother. Growing up in the suburbs, he watched his father's obsessive efforts to write his way out of discrimination and obscurity -- efforts that went unrecognized outside the family, as six novels in a row were rejected by publishers. As the elder Kureishi lay dying, he was to experience an unexpected form of bitterness, the resentment of his son's blossoming fame as a writer.
Fittingly, the younger Kureishi writes stories, novels, and plays that mine the subjects of race and identity in English culture. Early plays such as "The King and Me" (1979), "Outskirts" (1981), "Borderline" (1981), and "Birds of Passage" (1983) discuss the colonization and the marginalization of people from the "Subcontinent" in Britain's former empire. However, his works have nothing to do with suburban tedium and entrapment. He writes comedically of London, of overcrowded apartments and overheated arguments, of characters who can't keep track of their sex lives, of bohemian parties, and of the raucous clashing of cultures in Thatcher-era England.
Kureishi's first screenplay, "My Beautiful Laundrette" (1985), continues along a similar vein by compiling a cast of characters marginalized by their class, race, and sexual identity. In particular, the interaction between the Asian Omar and Johnny, a white outsider who blends punk and queer identities, sends sparks of cultural disruption and sexual friction flying.
Subsequent Kureishi literary works, and the films based on them, have stayed close to the volcanic fissures that run through British culture. "Sammy and Rosie Get Laid" (1987) and "The Buddha of Suburbia" (1993) depict Asian characters caught between the old world of comfortable but restrictive traditions and a new world that offers both liberation and racism. Sometimes Kureishi turns the tables on Western "liberation": in "My Son the Fanatic" (1998) a Pakistani cab driver, who makes ends meet by chauffeuring prostitutes, is frowned on by his zealously religious son.
To encounter Kureishi is to meet a creativity he himself characterizes as "an unruly force, a kind of colonial mob or animal instinct that must be suppressed." Kureishi will not, in fact, be suppressed; he is a vent through which molten cultural energy is expressed.
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