Sohum Pal
What Happened?, by Hanif Kureishi, Faber & Faber, 320 pp., $21
In the space of two or three days in October, I sat down and inhaled Hanif Kureishi’s collection of essays and short stories, What Happened?. Kureishi is a British Asian novelist and screenwriter: he came to fame after writing My Beautiful Laundrette, a 1985 film about a queer romance between a British Asian launderette manager and a white punk. Kureishi’s collection is fast-paced and readable—traits shared by most of Kureishi’s oeuvre, largely made up of short fiction and screenplays dealing with relationships. In What Happened?, as before, Kureishi attentively hews the psychic interiors of his characters. The collection’s assemblage, however—the subtle, marvelous stories are interspersed with essays whose thematic concerns feel like metacommentary on the fiction—encourage a linear analysis: a story whose protagonist may be an Islamist militant follows an essay disavowing Islamist violence. Such juxtapositions force unproductive comparisons between fiction and nonfiction: for all that such a vigorous authorial hand achieves in clarity, Kureishi’s structural choices often discourage associative and errant reasoning, leaving the collection predictable at times.
But at its best—generally in the collection’s fiction—the didacticism fades away, leaving a certain sparkle in its moral ambiguities and resultant dilemmas, particularly those that emerge when two people relate to each other, in love and elsewhere. When one story from the collection, “He Said She Said,” appeared in the New Yorker in July, an accompanying interview located the story’s central concern as that of the constantly unfolding #MeToo movement: “How does your relationship with a person change when you have to think about him differently?” What keeps this fiction interesting is precisely that Kureishi is not in the business of writing morality plays: the revelation of a man or woman’s monstrosity does not lead ineluctably to the deliverance of justice. More often, it leads to moral quagmire. On first glance, the failure of Kureishi’s characters to cut monsters out of their lives may seem a product of sentimentality. But rather than being symptomatic of sentimental thinking, Kureishi argues, this failure is a product of social inertia: circles of friends are reluctant to exile abusers and instead apologize for them. In Kureishi’s fiction, as in life, this reluctance is not just the result of emotional attachments someone might have to an abuser. It’s also due to the attachments and the networks that give people a sense of social stability—even in the face of behavior that threatens the physical and emotional security of their loved ones or themselves. That is, this unresponsiveness to abuse is not only sentimental, but also structural.
This is why Sushila and Len, the protagonists of “He Said She Said,” go to a birthday party for serial abuser Mateo, why Sushila doesn’t bring up Mateo’s advances, except to say “a party wasn’t the time or place.” Len attempts to dissociate from Mateo (and his orbit of abuse), but that attempt backfires: Len is left feeling that “if there was an opportunity [for love, for connection, for intimacy] to be missed, he’d miss it for sure,” believing “the world was stupid, and there was no way around that…[but] however far he went, he’d have to come back to this.” Is Kureishi expressing confusion at human irrationality and sentimentality? I don’t think so. Instead, it seems Kureishi is demanding that readers reckon with their own shame-inducing personal and structural complicities.
Yet if Kureishi’s recognition of the nuance and contradictions woven into the fabric of human relationships feels incisive and timely, his attempts to extend that same recognition to his reflections on race feel outdated. In the first essay, “Birdy Num Num,” Kureishi reflects on South Asian caricature, thinking through the lens of Peter Sellers, a white man playing South Asian characters, in The Millionairess (1960) and The Party (1968). Kureishi argues for the qualified value of these depictions: he claims that Sellers offers an alternative to the aggressive macho stereotypes of men of color that circulated at that time. But I was left wondering why, precisely, Kureishi felt impelled to rehabilitate clearly racist and caricatural performances by a white actor, to treat racism as morally complex and subject it to a morally complicating analysis. On further reflection, I decided that such rehabilitation might feel necessary, if one supposed that racist speech was nothing more than disagreement with the idea that racialized people deserve respect. But as critical race scholars like Richard Delgado and Mari Matsuda have written, racist speech is not mere disagreement—it is often assaultive, hurtful, and creates real injuries at psychic and social registers. But Kureishi does not seem to agree, clinging instead to a relatively extreme endorsement of free-speech.
Yet even as Kureishi strives for nuance (as above, sometimes unnecessarily), he becomes weighed down by binaristic thinking elsewhere. Some of his most vitally useful ideas emerge from within binary paradigms: he writes, “If you’ve been humiliated and excluded, you could…join Isis, taking revenge on everyone who has suppressed and humiliated you. Or you could…perplex the paradigm with your indecipherability and live in the gaps.” In siding with perplexity as a binary alternative to militancy, Kureishi fails to make space for the possibility that the militant is just as unknowable and morally complex as those who “live in the gaps.” Further, Kureishi seems to dismiss the originary relationships of (neo)colonial history and white supremacy to contemporary resurgences of Islamist militancy, instead glossing the causes of militant Islamism as humiliation and exclusion. Kureishi’s moral equivocations, which work so well when thinking about relationships, fail to make the same impact in Kureishi’s thinking about race and religion, and instead come across as fallacious binarism.
The same binarism dogs Kureishi as he wades into discussing Islam and Islamophobia— the “new racism, located around religion.” Here, too, Kureishi recognizes the binarism of his decision making, writing, “Dad said Jewish children were part of Britain: they were westernised without forgetting their heritage. Why couldn’t we as a migrant community do that? Why were we going the other way? What, I wondered, was the ‘other way’ my father referred to?...What was this ‘return’ and where had this new political and moral fervency come from?” Kureishi rightly criticizes liberal non-Muslim intellectuals for their patronizing stance that Muslims must be protected from offensive works like Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, but he himself adheres to a naïve free speech absolutism, maintaining that “[n]otions of criticism, free-ranging thought and questioning are universal values which benefit the relatively powerless in particular.”
At times, Kureishi does seem committed to something greater than naïve liberalism—he rightly criticizes “the part of multiculturalism which is essentialist,” that fixes immigrant groups as static Others, and demands recognition that “questions about power, gender, class and sexuality can never be defined once and for all, but are conditional and must be open to experimentation.” But Kureishi’s commitment to questioning becomes absolute, making a morally vacuous equivocation between consensus and tyranny—“Tyrants seek to heal conflict by pretending that everything is already decided,” Kureishi writes, dismissing the possibility of settling any question. Out of hand, Kureishi refuses consensus, always seeking to trouble concurrence: this is a kind of subtle, nearly-elegant devil’s advocacy. But this position also amounts to paranoid suspicion about clarity. It’s not hard to guess, here, how Kureishi’s words might circulate and justify increasing levels of Islamophobia under the aegis of free speech, but it can feel surprising and disappointing that Kureishi fails to recognize how discursive acts of violence and physical acts of hate-motivated violence are ultimately co-producing, how protecting one can set the stage for the other.
Amidst these essays drawn together by theme, there are heaps of miscellany—homages to David Bowie and former Faber and Faber chairman Matthew Evans, a few essays on popular culture, some stories that read suspiciously like autofiction. On occasion, these miscellaneous writings gesture towards compelling plotlines and incisive ideas, but they end shortly thereafter, leaving the point unwritten and at best implicit, without giving enough guidance for even the most careful readers to write it themselves.
As a category, Kureishi’s essays remain wed to a vacuous intellectualism, a failure to allow empathy and morality into the realm of ideas: Kureishi’s essays lack the emotional responsiveness that gives his fiction its particular delightful form. As a result, Kureishi is much more trenchant when he is thinking on the smaller scale of a fictional individual or two than when he attempts to deliver macro-level social commentaries. This may be why stories like “Love is Always an Innovation” can deliver such small delights as “Eros shoved her beyond, and sex is not justice, she’d decided. Desire and disgust were ever-loving twins: she wanted to be violent and loathsome”—as with the best fiction, Kureishi’s conveys critique by way of character development.
Indeed, there is a way in which Kureishi is at his best when thinking about relationships. These need not be relationships between two people. Kureishi’s thinking on writing itself (while admittedly in the overdone genre of writers writing about writing) manages to be more emotionally forceful than much of his other essayistic work:
Even as we speak we also wonder, according to the tough logic of the superego, if we are more monstrous than we can bear. We believe that if we were good, we wouldn’t have aggressive or violent thoughts, forgetting that monstrousness is useful in art, which, to be effective, has to be pushed to an extreme, making the audience tremble. Art emerges from what Nietzsche called ‘inner anarchy’, and never from so-called decency.
Kureishi clearly recognizes the uses of emotion in writing, and the necessity of both intellectual and emotional intimacy with the ideas one is writing about. But for Kureishi, there is a particular quality to this intimacy—a sort of universalizing expectation that, for example, monstrosity is a prerequisite to writing, that the goal is always to make audiences tremble. If you don’t identify with this monstrosity, Kureishi seems to suggest, you have not earned the privilege of his intimate, dangerous whisperings. Here, as elsewhere, Kureishi’s commitment to perplexity becomes overemphatic, a demand to understand violence as socially and culturally complex—in Kureishi’s paradigm, violence can always be dealt with through diverting the violent urge in writing or another form of art. Violence is never just violence, irrational and hateful through and through, but instead an irrational outgrowth of rational misunderstanding or friction. But this notion—that (extreme) violence and (extreme) aggression are necessary components of art—reeks of a masculinist impulse, an inability to imagine artmaking except as the sublimation of destructive urges. An inability to imagine the world as anything but what it is. That barren intellectual imaginary might be the grave and unifying disappointment of Kureishi’s collection.
“To be an artist is partly to re-make yourself as you undo the myths that have misled you,” Kureishi writes. This constant dialectic—to reconstruct oneself, to recognize one’s misapprehensions, and to try again—is at the heart of Kureishi’s collection. In delighting and agonizing over Kureishi’s collection, I couldn’t help but feel that Kureishi does not really write to please or appease readers, or would at least never admit to himself that he does. Rather, Kureishi is an idealist, wed to the unimpeachable value of disagreement and nuance. This is frustrating at least as often as it is compelling, but What Happened? has no desire to “tell us what to think, for it is not a guide to thought. It is another thing altogether: a guide to the necessity” and value of emphatic moral and intellectual disagreement as critical exercise.
Sohum Pal is a senior majoring in History at Yale. He often naps in the American Studies reading room.