Hanif Kureishi

Speaker 10:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For rights reasons we've had to shorten the music. The programme was originally broadcast in nineteen ninety six, and the presenter was Sue Lawley.

Presenter0:28

My Castaway this week is a novelist and playwright. He was born in Bromley in Kent, the son of an Indian father and an English mother. School didn't interest him, but writing did, and at the age of nineteen he had his first play performed at the Royal Court. More plays followed, and by the age of twenty six he was a full-time professional writer. I haven't had a job since, he says. Unless of course you count writing My Beautiful Laundrette and the Buddha of Suburbia as doing a job. He enjoys being iconoclastic. Race and sex are dominant themes. But as one critic has said of him, there are few people better placed to write about contemporary Britain. He is Hanif Qureshi.

Presenter1:07

Your major successes, though, Hanif, have uh in the main been about your your past, not so much your present. Laundrette in the eighties, Buddha Wassette in the seventies. Do you think your

Presenter1:18

Too much part of the establishment these days to go on using your own life as material.

Hanif Kureishi1:23

Well, if you're a writer, you don't really have anything else. You can only use what you have around you.

Presenter1:30

But you've enjoyed being a rebel, being iconoclastic, as I say, haven't you? I I remember Newsweek writing, um Hanif Qureshi lives to offend. You know, you enjoyed it when the BBC switchboard was jammed when you said on Start the Week that the poll tax riots were terrific. You know I mean, that that's your style, isn't it? That's that's been the way it's been.

Hanif Kureishi1:49

When I started out I was surprised by the fact that you could say things and people would write them down, because it had never happened to me before, and after the laundrette, when people started to listen to me, I was amazed that that people would take what you said seriously, and I enjoyed playing with that.

Presenter2:04

So what are you going to write about now? Being middle aged, being a father, going to antenatal clinics? I mean, is that what it's going to be about from now on?

Hanif Kureishi2:12

I don't know. It has to surprise me, otherwise it wouldn't be interesting. I write really in order to keep myself alive, to interest myself, to find out what I think. And so when I start I don't know, and when I get to the end, um I'm always disappointed and then I start again.

Presenter2:27

Always disappointed. You don't like your own work.

Hanif Kureishi2:30

Well, one is disappointed because somehow one has never quite solved the problems one always wants to solve in writing really, and there are always more problems to solve, which is why you carry on.

Presenter2:40

Okay, let's start with some music on your desert island. Tell me about your first one.

Hanif Kureishi2:45

Well, I remember going to see A Hard Day's Night in the Bromley Odeon with my mum and the other boys and their mums and all the mothers stood up and put their hands over their ears and screamed and we being good boys sat in our chairs and I was so amazed by this phenomenon and what it was these boys, the Beatles, were doing and why they weren't working in banks which was what we were supposed to be doing. I suppose in a sense they sort of liberated us. They made you think that you could get away from the suburbs in some way. That you could get to London which was in those days swinging and lead a life which was quite different to the one that was expected of you and that would be rather like the one those boys were living.

Speaker 43:12

Do you

Hanif Kureishi3:22

I've chosen I Am the Walrus because when I heard the words Semmelina Pilchard climbing up the Eiffel Tower, I was so um shocked and amazed that anybody would say anything like this in a record that I could see that pop music was moving into all kinds of new areas, which would be terrifically exciting.

Speaker 43:41

Samaritan Bilcher Climbing up the Ivon Tower

Speaker 43:49

Paramentr Penguins singing Holy Christian should be singing with a kid in Echo Allen Poe.

Speaker 43:57

Around the Eggman

Speaker 43:59

Will be Eggman.

Speaker 44:02

And the war was

Presenter4:07

The Beatles and I am the Walrus. In a sense, honey, if you've fulfilled your father's dream, haven't you? Because he wanted to be a writer and never made it.

Hanif Kureishi4:15

My father spent his whole life working um in an embassy in London, but really he wanted to be a writer, and every morning when I would wake up before I would go and do my paper round, he would be downstairs hitting this huge typewriter.

Hanif Kureishi4:27

and the whole house would kind of reverberate with this banging, this hammering, and he was determined to be a novelist.

Hanif Kureishi4:33

and he wrote many novels, and he would send them off to publishers and they would come back with desperate regularity. We then conceived the idea, because they depressed him so much, that we would anticipate the postman and hide them, and we would kind of put them in the garden and in the shed and so on, because it meant so much to him.

Hanif Kureishi4:51

He wanted to be a writer, and therefore he wanted me to be a writer too, and he thought that was the best job anybody could ever have.

Presenter4:57

So when it happened for you, how did he react?

Hanif Kureishi4:59

Um he was extremely pleased, and I would imagine desperately envious at the same time, because it was something that he he wanted for himself.

Presenter5:08

But what just staying with your childhood for a minute. What what kind of books were there in the house? What did he read? What were you brought up on? What were you taught to read?

Hanif Kureishi5:16

I was brought up really on two kinds of literature. American literature, which was sort of Kerouac, Salinger, Philip Roth, Bellow, and all those writers at that time who were writing about

Hanif Kureishi5:26

sex and pop music and running away from home and all that stuff and it was much more lively and brighter than British writing at that time because you you didn't feel like dancing to Iris Murdoch as it were and also to Russian literature, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Gogol, because they were so funny and they were so gloomy and they were so violent and they were comic at the same time. So those two streams I suppose of writing influenced me or affected me more more than any other.

Presenter5:52

But I mean you might in in the age that you were brought up in during the sixties and the seventies you might have escaped, you know, found escapism through television or through pop music, as you say. Uh it was your father, was it, who taught you to read, showed you that there was a way through a a sort of escapism through reading, through literature?

Hanif Kureishi6:10

At that time it was very difficult for me because South London was.

Hanif Kureishi6:16

Really violent, and many of my friends had become skinned.

Hanif Kureishi6:21

and Enoch Powell was making his speeches.

Hanif Kureishi6:24

Um and it was heavy on those streets, and my father was frightened, and and I was frightened.

Hanif Kureishi6:30

And I suppose the idea of being a writer.

Hanif Kureishi6:33

was a way of

Hanif Kureishi6:35

Getting out.

Hanif Kureishi6:36

South London to Another World.

Hanif Kureishi6:39

and also a way for me to try and understand why I was living in so much abuse and violence, and why I would come home every day covered in

Hanif Kureishi6:50

Spit.

Hanif Kureishi6:51

Um and when I I would feel as if I'd been beaten up.

Hanif Kureishi6:55

or why I couldn't go to certain people's houses.

Presenter6:57

Every day.

Hanif Kureishi6:58

Yeah, I was insulted racially every day of my life between the age of four and sixteen, and I suppose writing was a way in which I tried to

Hanif Kureishi7:06

Make sense of it or find a way through it.

Presenter7:09

What about your mother? Because she she was white, as I've said. She must have married your father. I mean, you were born in'fifty four' presumably she married him in the early fifties.

Presenter7:18

An unusual thing a brave thing, you might say, for her to have done at that time.

Hanif Kureishi7:23

Yes, I would say so, though she never talked about it very much. I think originally Indians in Britain were rather rare and exotic creatures. And then through the sixties and seventies, during the period of immigration, we became the focus of all kinds of other people's violence or preconceptions and so on. And I think she found it very difficult then, because she'd married into something that she had didn't expect and didn't understand.

Presenter7:45

So she hadn't anticipated the racism. She wasn't brave in that sense, but suddenly.

Hanif Kureishi7:49

Suddenly, she had to deal with it, and I think she dealt with it very well, and we seemed to get through it all right. And I think.

Presenter7:49

Suddenly she had to go.

Hanif Kureishi7:56

my sister and I or other people that have been through this kind of stuff, I think it gives you a terrific kind of education in seeing the world from another perspective, which has informed everything that I've done since.

Presenter8:08

Tell me about record number two.

Hanif Kureishi8:10

Well Miles Davis, I remember I had a girlfriend who lived in Chiselhurst, which was rather posh for us. Uh I went round to her house and she was terrifically um modern, um and she put on this very strange jazz record and uh and I thought of jazz as being sort of old white men with pop bellies. I heard this very um groovy sound which was a sort of mixture of rock and um

Hanif Kureishi8:31

And jazz, I suppose. And I fell in love with Miles Davis, and have listened to one of his records every day of my life ever since.

Presenter9:37

Miles Davis in a silent way. You were the only Asian boy at your school, you say, Hanif. But it wasn't simply a case, was it, of of you

Presenter9:46

being the abused. You were also part of those boys. Because you were British, you were Bromley born and bred. That must have been confusing.

Hanif Kureishi9:54

Well, I had two families. I had my father's family and all my uncles and cousins who lived in Karachi but would spend a lot of time in London.

Hanif Kureishi10:03

and who spoke most of the time in Punjabi or or in Udu. I spent most of my childhood amongst people uh whose language I didn't understand. And the rest of the time I was with, I suppose, lower middle class or working class kids from the estates near where I lived. So this uh combination of kind of hooliganism and uh

Hanif Kureishi10:25

Upper-class, um, liberal Indianness kind of went off in my head in a rather combustible way, I suppose, yes. But it was those

Presenter10:32

Those boys who were your friends were the boys who became the skin heads, and presumably they expected you

Presenter10:39

up to a certain point to to go out with them, being hooligans.

Hanif Kureishi10:43

Yeah, I was living in the midst of something quite difficult which was to do with boys who would go out looking for Pakistanis to beat up, who would go out pucky bashing and they would say to me, Are you coming with us tonight? you know. And I sometimes they thought of me in that way when it's convenient for them and other times they didn't. And they would make an exception in my case. But of course it was very complicated because the sort of people who they were beating up were men like my father. So yes, i it was it was very difficult uh and frightening.

Presenter11:09

But you you've written since that that that you started to deny your Pakistani self. You said, I was ashamed, it was a curse, I wanted to be rid of it.

Hanif Kureishi11:19

I didn't like being the focus of so much violence, particularly from authority, I suppose, because in those days the teachers were pretty violent, and I had a teacher who would only call me Pakistani Pete, for instance, and you felt

Hanif Kureishi11:36

completely humiliated by all this.

Presenter11:39

But what about the kind of stuff that was on the television at the time? I mean, then would Alf Garnett would have been sounding off, wouldn't he? I mean, we're always told that the argument was that he was so extreme that that it was laughable and that that

Presenter11:52

Uh you know, it was making the point really that his views were repellent. Is that how it came across to you?

Hanif Kureishi11:57

I remember sitting with my family through things like that, and you did feel extremely victimized, mostly because there weren't any other images to counterbalance that kind of stuff. And I suppose one of the things that I try to do is to show other notions of what Asian people might or might not be like.

Presenter12:15

So you took to writing. How easily did it come?

Hanif Kureishi12:18

I was extremely determined and I've always been very determined and disciplined and kind of ambitious in a sense because I knew that that was the only way out for me, otherwise I was going to be sitting in that semi-detached, working in a bank for the rest of my life and I was very determined and I thought I'm getting out of here. And I would write in the morning before I went to school, and I would write in the afternoon when I got home, and I would sort of rest during the day when I was at school in order to get my creative energies back.

Presenter12:42

So you didn't pay any attention to schoolwork, but you were actually working very hard at home.

Hanif Kureishi12:46

Yes, I hated the boredom of being at school really. But I loved the fact that I suppose our method of communication amongst one another was pop music and we would spend all day exchanging records and talking to each other about what the Beatles were doing or what the Rolling Stones had been saying and so on. And that was when you learned about culture really. You learned that culture was something that w w was a form of exchange between people. And falling in love with pop music was for me like falling in love with culture.

Presenter13:13

Record number three.

Hanif Kureishi13:15

Well, if you're on a desert island and you were feeling lonely and depressed and you heard this record by the Sex Pistols Anarchy in the UK, which is such a terrible sort of screeching noise and a sort of howl and comes from s these sort of dirty little Dickensian street kids, it would remind you about what was so horrible about living in England and what was so wonderful about it too, which is a kind of defiance that this record represents.

Speaker 413:38

Now dogs, what eh?

Speaker 413:42

Anarchy for the UK It's coming sometime and maybe I give a run time Stop a traffic line Your future dream is a sharpened state design

Speaker 413:58

I wanna be

Presenter14:05

Sex Pistols and Anarchy in the UK. You were a student at London University. You got out of Bromley by day and you sold ice creams and programmes at the Royal Court Theatre by night, but you got started as a writer. Can you describe that moment when, at the age of nineteen, you saw your first play performed on the stage there?

Hanif Kureishi14:23

Well, I wrote a play and I sent it to the Royal Court, which was really the only theatre I'd ever heard of, though I'd never seen a play there. And I went in there one afternoon and the man said, Oh, we're going to give you a job here, and we're going to do your play, and we're going to give you a job selling ice creams, and you can sell programmes and you can read scripts.

Hanif Kureishi14:37

And then he took me into the auditorium.

Hanif Kureishi14:39

And Samuel Beckett was standing on the stage with Billy Whitelaw, and he said, In the afternoons you come in here and you sit down there and you look at this man rehearsing this play. And then I went home after this and I thought, This is the life, this is what I want um and I was away.

Presenter14:53

You spent the next ten years, I think, writing plays, didn't you? And you wrote The King and Me about a girl's obsession with Elvis, and you wrote Borderline and Outskirts Tomorrow Today, and so on. But you've you've written since that my beautiful laundrette was, and I quote, a synthesis and extension of the plays which preceded it. Can you explain that?

Hanif Kureishi15:10

The plays I wrote was were were an attempt in some way f for me to try and find uh what it was that I was about. Did I want to be a serious writer? Did I be want to be a comic writer? Did I want to write about race? And how could I do that? Also at the same time issues like politics and sexuality, race, leftism and so on were discussed in the theatre in a way they probably weren't being discussed on television or in the novel.

Presenter15:34

But it seemed to me that the way you went about writing about these things was was not in that heavy handed, didactic way, but you decided to treat those very serious subjects that you've mentioned with humour. That's the style you developed.

Hanif Kureishi15:46

Yes, I realized that I liked laughing and that the world was an amusing place and that I wanted to be in some sense a comic writer. And I was on the so-called sort of Maoist hard left at the time. The theatre was supposed to be some kind of debate um about society. And so I did try and write plays that were like that. But at the same time I kept finding things funny and that kind of combination seemed to me to be

Hanif Kureishi16:12

the way forward and kinda manifests itself finally in in my beautiful laundrette.

Presenter16:16

But tell me a bit about making the film laundrette, because it it did it starred a laundrette, beautiful laundrette called Powders, and I can see it now, all these sort of soft blue lights and the leather seats and the canned music. Did you actually build this laundrette to film in?

Hanif Kureishi16:30

Well, I had there was a great friend of my family who um saw that I was only writing.

Hanif Kureishi16:35

And so he used to come round to my house and take me down to his laundrettes, and he would show me these wretched places and say,'Look, you know, it was the beginning of Thatcherism' and he would say,'A boy like you could do really well out of a laundrette, and you should come and work with me and run them.

Hanif Kureishi16:49

And being smart, I didn't run laundrettes, but I went home and I wrote a story about a bloke running a laundrette, which was how it started.

Presenter16:56

When you were filming it, did you create it? Did people try to come in and bring their washing in, for example?

Hanif Kureishi17:01

No, people in the in in the neighbourhood were really pleased actually that a launderette was opening in their district and they did actually, yeah, come down with their with their washing actually and I could see that we you could provide a decent facility for the neighbourhood by doing that.

Presenter17:12

But undoubtedly my beautiful laundrette was an incredible success. You were nominated for an Oscar for the screenplay. It grossed fifteen million, I think, at the box office. You were made, really. Did it transform your life?

Hanif Kureishi17:24

We were innocent then. I remember going to Edinburgh with Daniel Day Lewis and some of the other actors from the film, and suddenly you realized that the first time in your life that you were at the centre of something, and you'd done something that was a hit.

Presenter17:34

And you were met by stretched limbos and heaven knows what, I presume.

Hanif Kureishi17:38

Yes, I went in a limousine and I thought I want everyone from Bromley to see me getting out of this limousine at the Oscars when I got out, you know, and I thought this is why I've come from Bromley and I want this every day and it was just fantastic. And you suddenly realized that people liked what you did.

Hanif Kureishi17:52

It completely changed my life. I had money. People wanted to meet you. You could do whatever you wanted. And it was terrible and distressing and sort of awful because it was so difficult to deal with. And it was wonderful too because you realized that suddenly then that being a writer was for real and that you had done what you had always wanted to do.

Presenter18:12

Tell me about record number four.

Hanif Kureishi18:14

Well, I've always liked

Hanif Kureishi18:15

Dylan, like most people did, and I suppose in the sixties he was the central kind of pop figure for all of us. And this record is very harsh and very cruel, and I had a girlfriend who would always play it when I walked into the room, and I wondered why, and then I listened to the lyrics very carefully, and then I understood something.

Speaker 418:30

I was a master thief

Speaker 418:33

Perhaps I'd rob them And now I know you're dissatisfied With your position and your place

Speaker 418:48

Don't you understand it's not my

Presenter18:52

By blue.

Presenter18:54

Bob Dylan and Positively Fourth Street. Pop music is obviously important to you, Hanifan. Your latest novel, The Black Album.

Presenter19:01

It's named after a Occult Prince album.

Presenter19:04

It's said to be a novel with a soundtrack, but it it's also um about um a writer and a fatwa. It's about Muslim fundamentalism.

Presenter19:13

Salmon Rushdie is a friend of yours, isn't he?

Hanif Kureishi19:15

Yeah, that's right.

Presenter19:16

How how great an influence has he been on you?

Hanif Kureishi19:19

He's always been the great example to people like me and I was very affected in 1989 by the fatwa because it made me think about why all these people wanted to kill this bloke for writing a book they didn't like. So I started going to the colleges and to different parts of London and to the mosques and so on and talking to young Asian kids about Rushdie and some of them had very extreme political and social views which shocked me being a good Liberal boy very much and some of that research and that work went into what became the Black Album which is a book about a book.

Presenter19:50

But did it shed any light on why such people should want somebody who'd written a book to be dead?

Hanif Kureishi19:57

I think it came out of a a sense of a terrible sense of of disillusionment which I think has probably set in, you know. We came to England in the fifties and sixties with such hope and most of my father's generation came here to make money and to do well and to start a new life. By the end of the eighties you could see through the children that the dream had kind of begun to run out. Many of these kids whose fathers had come here to work were unemployed. They were in bad housing. They felt discriminated against. They felt that what they wanted to do in life

Hanif Kureishi20:27

maybe wouldn't happen. And you could see that uh that an extreme religion would be rather comforting because it would give you a whole view of the world. It would uh unite you with other people.

Hanif Kureishi20:37

and Rushdie in his book became a kind of focus for that anger.

Presenter20:41

So you began to understand where it all comes from. It doesn't make it any more acceptable, does it?

Hanif Kureishi20:46

No, I hate all of that stuff and it's alien to everything that I think and feel, but I tried to to write a book which was as sympathetic as possible. And I liked a lot of the kids. I could see that they the things they believed were awful, but in some sense that sometimes you can separate what people believe from what they are.

Presenter21:02

But you don't in the end take sides in the novel, do you? You don't you you air the arguments, but you don't conclude anything. Why not, when you feel so strongly that it's so wrong?

Presenter21:12

You know, you are so close to Salman.

Hanif Kureishi21:14

I suppose because I like books which are debates, and you wouldn't want to read something in a sense that the author had sort of made up their mind in advance, because then there wouldn't be anywhere to go.

Presenter21:24

But if the book was a if you like a gesture of allegiance to Salman, you can still air all the the arguments, but but make some value judgment at the end. Why didn't you?

Hanif Kureishi21:35

Well, there might or there might be or there or there might not be value judgments in that book. I mean, a book is like a person. It f moves freely in the world and you can make up your mind about it as you wish, and it's for you to decide.

Presenter21:46

Next piece of music.

Hanif Kureishi21:48

Next piece is a record by Massive Attack called Unfinished Sympathy, a massive attack a Bristol group and one of the reasons it seems to me for living in England is the fact that the young people who live here continue to make music which is always interesting and alive and this this record is a combination I suppose of all kinds of strange Indian, Afro-Caribbean and English elements mixed up together which make for a fantastic combination of new music.

Speaker 422:17

Curiousness of your tangible peaks

Speaker 422:21

Stop my mind and learn it

Speaker 422:25

Let it hide.

Speaker 422:28

Had pain

Speaker 422:30

We have a deal with darling eye.

Speaker 422:34

The books that I can't open

Speaker 422:38

And now I've got to know much more.

Presenter22:44

Massive attack and unfinished sympathy.

Presenter22:47

You eventually went to Pakistan, Hanif Qureshi, in the early eighties. You went to Karachi to visit your relatives. That was the first you'd have been nearly thirty. It was the first time you've been to Asia. Do was it exciting? How did it strike you?

Hanif Kureishi23:00

Well, I wanted to find my roots, as it were. And so I went off to stay with my family in Karachi for the first time. And this was during the period of so-called Islamization in Pakistan, which was also known as the Great Leap Backwards, which is when I first became interested in all this stuff. And I remember feeling very much at home because of my family and everything I was learning about them. And also feeling completely alien. there as well. And one of my uncles rather kindly turned around and said to me, the thing about you is, he says, you'll always be a Paki and we are Pakistanis. They belong there and I didn't. And I think being in Pakistan made me think about what I liked about being in England and how English I felt. And I was kind of swinging around Karachi, feeling like a sort of Englishman abroad actually.

Presenter23:49

So you you learned that you were truly British, did you?

Hanif Kureishi23:52

I learnt that I was British in a sense and not Pakistani in another sense, and I learnt that in a sense you couldn't be at home anywhere. And then I thought, well, why do you have to be at home anywhere? And then I realized that all that was a myth and that you could be free.

Presenter24:06

But when you came back to this country, how was it then? I mean, presumably it was a kind of culture shock in reverse.

Hanif Kureishi24:12

Yes, it was a terrible culture shop because all that Thatcherite stuff was was was starting to happen too, which I found which was terribly ruthless and seemed very cruel to me. But I by then I had written my Beautiful Laundrette, which sort of which was my sort of ticket into the future. And so things started to change rather quickly at that time.

Presenter24:29

What's your view, though, of Britain today? Are we less racist than we were in your view?

Hanif Kureishi24:35

I do think that Britain is a deeply r racist society and I do think there's a lot of discrimination and prejudice against all kinds of people from different backgrounds and different cultures and I think the relation between races or the relation between cultures is probably the central issue of our time, certainly in the United States and probably in Europe too. And it's something that we need to do a good deal more thinking about.

Presenter24:55

But it's not something that you suffer any more because you move in these liberated tolerant circles, presumably.

Hanif Kureishi25:02

Yes, I I've kind of got out of all that in a sense because I make my own work. It's an enormous privilege, you know. I get up in the morning and I think what am I going to do today that will entertain me, that will make me feel alive, which is writing. But there aren't many people who are able to do that and their circumstances are much more difficult than mine, which is privileged.

Presenter25:21

What's the future, then, for your little boys? How old are they, your twins?

Hanif Kureishi25:24

My my two boys, Sashin and Carlo, are are two and a half, and and I hope they're gonna grow up in a much more mixed and tolerant world uh than the one that I did.

Presenter25:33

Record number six.

Hanif Kureishi25:35

When I was at school.

Hanif Kureishi25:36

David Bowie, who had been at school uh ten years before me, was our hero, and uh there was a picture of him in the hall, which we would sort of genuflect before. And uh when the BBC made the series of The Bull of Suburbia,

Hanif Kureishi25:51

Bowie did the music, and Roger Michel, the director, and I went to Switzerland and worked with him, and it was a great sort of honor and privilege to be working with this man who I'd worshipped for so long. And he wrote a record called The Barusa Berbia.

Speaker 426:05

Things were always in place

Speaker 426:11

Some white is still with time

Speaker 426:16

White until we're blessed on the side.

Presenter26:34

David Bowie and Buddha of Suburbia.

Presenter26:36

The novel which you published in nineteen ninety and it won the Whitbread Prize and

Presenter26:41

became a B B C four parter. Very much the story we've been talking about, really. Your story, your life, Indian father, white mother, suburbia, racism, sex, escape to London, experimental theatre, it was all there, really. Why did it take you so long uh to get to the novel form?

Hanif Kureishi26:57

Well, I started off wanting to write novels, and then I wrote plays, and then I wrote films, and then finally, after my beautiful Laundrette and Sammy and Rosie get laid, then I had some money, so then I could take two years to write this book. I remember sitting on a balcony in Madras, in India, where my father was born, in fact, thinking

Hanif Kureishi27:14

There's all this material about the seventies which I haven't used before. And then I suddenly thought, Oh, well but there's a whole book here. It's not just a film. There's tons of stuff ready to go. And obviously enough time had passed, but it I could still remember it all, I wasn't that far away from it. And it sort of came to me complete. And writing that book was terrific fun, you know, I just had to sort of

Hanif Kureishi27:34

Um, it just flowed out of me, it was all there.

Presenter27:37

More satisfying than writing for the theatre.

Hanif Kureishi27:40

It's it's satisfying in a different way, you know. I like doing films and I like doing plays because you get to work with other people and those collaborations produce combinations of work that you couldn't do on your own.

Presenter27:50

But for the writing itself.

Hanif Kureishi27:52

I suppose writing a novel really is about the language. It's about the words that you use. And there isn't anybody else there to interpret them. It's just you and the reader in this kind of particular kind of distinct privacy. You, as it were, feel that you're going right into somebody else's mind if they want you to. And so writing writing that novel was a great pleasure to me.

Presenter28:10

You've also taught writing in your time, although you've confessed that it's a bit of a racket mainly for the benefit of the teacher. Does that mean what does it mean? It means you can't teach writing'cause it comes from somewhere that you can't define.

Hanif Kureishi28:23

I thought well I've been very helped and encouraged by other people, but it is a bit of a racket, yeah, I can see that, because you can't give other people talent and you can't give other people discipline, and in the end those are the two things that make people into writers or any kind of artists, you know, which is a kind of determination. Lots of people have talent actually and lots of people have good ideas, but the ability to sit at a desk with the door closed for hours and hours on end is quite a difficult one, which I think maybe perhaps being stranded on a desert island would be very good for people who wanted to be artists.

Presenter28:54

Record number seven.

Hanif Kureishi28:55

This is a record by a a kind of new y young black Bristol guy called Tricky, and the music he's making seems to me to be very original and strange and dark and just right for our time.

Speaker 429:09

I stare firm for a soil Liquoraka force Lady Jesus Me so cheesy Trust me dropped me stitzy Hands round the corner where I shelter Isn't this schism But living out of starter If you believe or deceive Common sense as shiny you see Let me take you down the corridors of my life And when you wear

Presenter29:36

Tricky, and hell is round the corner. So to a desert island, Hanif, what will you miss most, people apart?

Hanif Kureishi29:42

Well, I do like other people actually and I as I got older one of the great pleasures of my life really is being with other people. But I'm used to being on my own, which is what I what I do most of the day, so I think I could deal with that.

Presenter29:55

But you'll get bored.

Hanif Kureishi29:56

I would get bored because I like distraction, um and when I'm writing actually I do listen to music all day, so I I get through a lot.

Presenter30:03

This kind of music or pop music.

Hanif Kureishi30:04

Mostly pop music, and usually rather loud and people come in and they can't believe that I'm listening to this terrible noise and can concentrate. In fact the silence makes me nervous, so I think uh having these records on a desert island uh will do me good.

Presenter30:16

And would you want to write on a desert island if there was not going to be anybody there to read it?

Hanif Kureishi30:21

Well I would I think miss that connection because you start off writing for nobody or you don't know whether there's anybody else um out there and then when you start you realize that people do do take some interest in what you do and you do need them as it were to to make your work come alive. So yeah, I would miss that but I could uh put it in a bottle and chuck it into the sea.

Presenter30:41

You're now on kind of syllabuses and things, and students presumably write to you with deep analyses of what you've written. What do you make of those?

Hanif Kureishi30:49

Yes, I go to some trouble to make my my work light and accessible, and I can see that they go to some trouble to make my work indigestible, so I do find that rather confusing.

Presenter30:59

What you don't understand their criticism.

Hanif Kureishi31:01

I often can't make get through the through the language, no.

Presenter31:05

If you could uh let me ask you an extra desertiling question here. If you could take one of your own pieces of writing with you. I wonder which one you choose.

Presenter31:13

Which one are you most at peace with, I suppose?

Hanif Kureishi31:17

Oh god, it's very hard to say because there are bits in all of the things that you do that you are proud of and you thought you think, oh that's that w that works, that does what it's supposed to do. And there are other bits that obviously don't work at all, but only you know that, you know, and and maybe for other people they wouldn't notice that at all. So I would have to take different bits stuck together as it were.

Presenter31:39

Tell me about your last record.

Hanif Kureishi31:41

Well, English pop music seems to continually renew itself and there's always something f fresh uh uh uh happening. And Oasis seem to me to have all the right combinations for English pop, which is w that they write very good pop songs. They're suitably defiant. And this is a terrifically lively record called It's Good to be Free.

Speaker 432:01

There is no time.

Speaker 432:07

Little bitch, you have been so happy.

Speaker 432:12

All I wanna do is live by the scene

Speaker 432:17

That little bands make this song out of me.

Speaker 432:21

Let's go!

Presenter32:29

Oasis and it's good to be free. If you could only take one of those eight records, honey, which one would it be?

Hanif Kureishi32:34

Well I think Miles Davis along with Bicasso and Stravinsky is probably one of the great artists of the century and what he's done in music, the range of his music from the beginning right through to the end is such an extraordinary and uni unique achievement I'll have to take In a Silent Way by Miles Davis.

Presenter32:52

And what about your book?

Hanif Kureishi32:54

I thought I would take something by um Sigmund Freud, because he seems to me to be the sort of presiding genius of our

Hanif Kureishi33:02

violent and dangerous century, and his work in the area of the unconscious is such a brilliant uh discovery that illuminates our time like nothing else. And also because his work is full of stories. Those case studies are are like short stories or little novels.

Presenter33:17

And your luxury.

Hanif Kureishi33:19

Well, I like relaxing when I get home and I thought I would take some marijuana seeds which I would grow on my island um and and water uh regularly, though not I'm not a keen gardener and I think in this particular environment they would probably grow very well. And then after a time I would cultivate them and smoke them. And presumably as I would be in charge of the law on the island um I wouldn't be I wouldn't uh have to arrest myself for doing this, as I might have to in London.

Presenter33:43

Haneath Qureshi, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your Desert Island discs.

Hanif Kureishi33:47

Thank you very much.

Speaker 133:56

You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Islandists Archive. For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co.uk/radio four.