What Happened?

by Hanif Kureishi

  It was sometimes said the country was awash with drugs, but try scoring when you needed something. In the late sixties mostly we smoked hash, took amphetamines and downers, and dropped LSD, often at school. Baudelaire, writing on drugs, reports an encounter with what he calls ‘the marvellous’, but notices an increase in anxiety and paranoia when taking hashish. He also tells us that one is no longer master of oneself. You lost control. This might be an inspiration in itself. You could see and feel things stoned that you couldn’t know straight. There might be enhanced communication. If you were less cautious and uptight, you might be able to speak and laugh more. If you lost your straight self, you might discover a better one. You might want to live differently. That became the promise. After all, people had been using substances to twist their minds around since the first day on earth: coffee, wine, tobacco, mescaline, mushrooms, a plant, or something else. Early religions used drugs to gain some kind of sublime knowledge, as a way of enlarging the frame through which to see out.

  We were less harried, harassed, measured and legally drugged than children are today, and the adults were more neglectful. The fact that drugs were illegal and disapproved of made them doubly exciting. Breaking the parents’ law, or indeed any law, was a big kick in itself: you could believe that by arguing with prohibition you were making the world a little wider.

  Post-war capitalism had started to work a treat for some people, and in the suburbs workers had started to become consumers. Capitalism gave us nice things we didn’t have before, and which most people in the world still didn’t have: new kitchens, better jeans, LPs, fashionable shops. Our neighbours boasted about their sofas, fridges and TVs. It was tough to keep up. But there was no doubt the bombed-out neighbourhood and miserable pre-war housing needed cheering up. My mother had washed our clothes by hand; getting a washing machine made a big difference.

  Writers like Baudelaire, de Nerval, Huxley and, later, Tom Wolfe and Hunter Thompson wrote about drug-taking among the artistic elite. Now, for the first time, drugs were generally available and, like pop, they had reached the suburbs. And the drugs we began to take in one another’s bedrooms, in the parks and later in the pubs represented instant pleasure, while everything in the suburbs was deferred. Consumerism was about patience, waiting, slow accumulation and gradual improvement. Capitalism no longer starved the workers, but it starved them of pleasure. We were supposed to work, not make love. We were made aware that happiness, if not pleasure, was always elsewhere.

  The West had been growing out of God. Religion was going but hadn’t quite gone, and was yet to be entirely replaced by consumerism. The threat of God’s disapproval was still used as a form of control. Yet as we drifted around in our tie-dyed granddad vests and ripped jeans, hiding from mods and skinheads, we knew that the game of traditional authority was up and that the laws we were brought up to respect weren’t sensible. Drugs were prohibited but worse things were allowed, if not encouraged: genocide, war, racism, inequality, violence. No one would kill their own children, but they were keen to kill other people’s. We didn’t believe the grown-ups, who were not grown-ups after all. The levelling of generations had begun.

  Also, as the 1970s progressed, capitalism – which required everyone to be anxious and hyper-alert – began to falter. The system was more anarchic, bumpy and unpredictable than politicians made out. It went up and down quickly, and you went with it. The very things that capitalism liked to promise – growth, wealth, increased consumption – couldn’t be delivered. Soon there would be unemployment, social devastation and ‘No future’, as punk recognised. And yet capitalism could never be abandoned. Since the end of socialism, it saw itself as the natural world. The only way forward was to find a place inside it which wasn’t impossible, hence the retreat into spiritualism, yoga, Zen and mindfulness. Or more drugs.

  But what could you do stoned that you couldn’t do straight? We were less anxious and concerned about the future. We laughed more and could entertain ludicrous and creative ideas. There were other claims, many of them risible. There would be a thousand epiphanies at once. William Burroughs, at the end of Junky, writes, ‘Kick is seeing things from a special angle. Kick is momentary freedom from the claims of the ageing, cautious, nagging, frightening flesh. Maybe I will find in yage what I was looking for in junk and weed and coke. Yage may be the final fix.’

  But ‘drugs’, when they first became generally available in the sixties, caused such outrage and consternation that we understood it wasn’t the undoubted damage they did which was the problem. The drawback wasn’t the possibility of ill-health or addiction but the instant pleasure which drugs provided. Or at least the pleasure others believed they provided. This was what R. D. Laing called ‘a mental Shangri-La’ – the longing for something ‘beyond’.

  In the 1990s and 2000s, drugs went respectable and mainstream. Ritalin, Prozac and other anti-depressants – substances which fixed adults and children up for work without the agony of self-investigation – became the royal road to efficiency. A subject’s life and the significance of symptoms were replaced by biology and the language of science; chemistry replaced an individual’s history and doctors were substituted for self-authority. We had become machines which dysfunctioned, not individuals with parents and a past that might be worth exploring in talk and art, wondering why, inexplicably, we were fatigued or exhausted. There were no illuminating questions or slowing down. The important thing was to function, to work, compete and succeed. Drugs, cures and ideas about what a self was had become an arm of capitalism.

  Pleasure, the devil’s elixir, a magic substance more valuable than gold, is always a source of anxiety, which is why pleasure is usually located in other people or groups, where it can be thought about, enjoyed and condemned. The danger of drugs was not the fact they made for disorientation, if not madness and addiction, but that they provided too much unearned illicit, or even evil, enjoyment. Drugs were an idiot’s euphoria. The story was: if you liked it, or couldn’t make money from it, it couldn’t possibly be good for you.

  Of course, after so long, we now know that neither legal nor illegal drugs are it either. For a time they seemed to promise freedom from the cycle of work and consumption. But rather than representing a point outside – a place of rest, spiritual enlightenment or insight – they became the very thing we thought they might replace. Soon we would see they created as much dissatisfaction as any other cheap fetishised object.

  All ideologies are concerned with constraining pleasure. But the capitalist system didn’t just do that. It was smart enough to encourage pleasure and even happiness, seeing how lucrative they could be. It was miraculous the way capitalism swept everything inside itself. Those who were stoned but original made capitalism dynamic because the system stood on those who defied it. The druggiest music made the most money for the record companies and, soon, even depression became monetised. It became the rule: everything which once outraged would soon be domesticated, if not ordinary, and not only in music, the visual arts and literature.

  The druggies, from Baudelaire to Kerouac, had learned that the route to paradise wasn’t simple. Though Baudelaire talks of stoned bliss, of calm, of a place where all philosophical questions can be answered, and of a liberating vulgarity, he makes it clear what hard work it is having a good time all the time.

  Figures like Baudelaire and Kerouac were artists first, and stoners after. The demand for pleasure can become infernal, and another form of authority. And while drugs might make you poetic – filling the gaps in reality – they can render you useless, if not impotent.

  No one believes in drugs any more. At least in art there is movement and thought. Working at something intransigent, one can make and re-make oneself, combining intelligence with intuition. Drugs, when they are effective, abolish ambivalence. But being an artist can never be straightforward. You must cede control and give way to chaos. In art, as in any other form of love, there will be strong feelings of attraction and of abhorrence. Artists may
love what they do but they also hate it. Work can become a tyranny and treadmill. It is boring; the material resists; the audience might be uninterested. It can never be an uncomplicated or straightforward pleasure.

  Not only can few artists make a realistic assessment of their own work, their state of mind cannot be expected to be serene. There can be no art without anxiety, self-disgust, fear of failure and of success. It is hard and dull labour, and can feel forced. Notice how it is almost impossible to convince an artist how good their work is. But that is the price of the ticket. At least one is going somewhere.

  London: Open City

  In 1957, film and theatre director Lindsay Anderson wrote a short polemic for the essay collection Declaration on the ‘ordeal’ of ‘coming back to Britain’. He bemoaned ‘brown sauce bottles’, ‘chips with everything’ and the ‘nursery’ atmosphere. He implied that on the ‘Continent’, as it was known then, everything was better. The food, the weather, the philosophers, and certainly the sex.

  I was younger than Anderson and suburban rather than provincial, but his analysis hit home. Throughout the sixties, we wanted Britain to be less foggy, class-bound and monocultural, with the pubs open in the afternoon. After the collapse of Empire and loss of imperial power, we imagined a less isolated England, a Europeanised, cosmopolitan country, with more of the world in it. That world would bring the excitement of the new.

  And it did. It happened. London, driven by culture and finance, became an energetic, successful, multicultural, multiracial super-city, superseding the best of Paris, Berlin and Milan.

  By chance I have lived in west London all my adult life, and was keen to bring up my three sons in this mean, ever-changing city of immigrants and strangers, where the boys could go out and not know who they’d meet or what they’d see. I hoped they’d never feel as stifled as I did in suburbia, with its ‘Sunday death’ every day. And although the city and the action have moved away to east London, I still haven’t recovered from the excitement of being here.

  Throughout the 1980s, when I was writing hard, intent on making a career and living from my pen, there were parts of London that I loved to walk around in the afternoon and evening. Soho, Chelsea, Notting Hill: places to hang out and observe the scene, and see who you ran into, because there was always the possibility of some dark excitement, when the night would develop.

  Once, these districts had the recipe: a blend of seediness if not squalor, romance and sex; art, violence and, most importantly, social mixing. These districts got better and better, until they became worse. That was when the rich took over, and we learned that there’s nothing like money to erase the charm from anything good.

  A city which has lost its loucheness has lost almost everything, and we were proud to say, ‘They’ll never gentrify the Bush.’ For a long time they didn’t. Shepherd’s Bush’s disarray and ugliness were surely ingrained and ineradicable. But even this area, made famous by Steptoe and Son and the Who’s Quadrophenia – and where Dickens opened a house for ‘fallen’ women – is starting, in the part that drifts towards Hammersmith, to resemble a minor futuristic Manhattan, with gyms, blank towers, and blank, discouraged workers.

  And yet: one unforgettable night not long ago, further north, on the Green, we paid £12 to go into the Shepherd’s Bush Empire to watch Prince play for three hours, one hour of which was in the dark, as he sang alone at the piano. Recently we saw Bloc Party tearing apart the Bush Hall. And luckily, around the corner, parts of the Goldhawk Road, and a good deal of the Uxbridge Road – a wide street, one of the longest in London – have stuck to the magic recipe.

  A babel, if not menagerie, of Polish, Somali, Syrian, Afghani, Arab cultures – and a sufficient mix of dereliction and danger: my youngest son says you don’t even notice the fights – it is a uniquely mixed part of London, where people use the street as their office. A Thai restaurant, Lebanese bakery, hijab shop, Polish deli, mosque and the beautiful Bush Hall Dining Rooms sit side by side. Sometimes I wonder if I’m the only English speaker in this city. You could be in the Third World. This is nowhere and everywhere, and an exceptional experiment.

  Bustle, noise and new people every day: this district is what a city should be. A frenzy of communities and of individuals, if not eccentrics; a place that thrives on change, and where you can be who you want to be. Freedom counts for a lot in these turbulent days. Mind you don’t lose your faith in other people.

  Where Is Everybody?

  One early evening in Rome, a few months ago, my Italian girlfriend and I decided to go out for supper. We would drive to Trastevere, stroll around until we were tired, and then find somewhere to eat. We did this on a delightful evening. For me there was nothing wrong in the world when we sat down at last on the terrace of a promising place and ordered wine. The streets were crowded, the views were beautiful, you could see a gargoyle or madonna on every wall, and despite my complaints about the monotony of Italian menus, I was keen to eat.

  While we waited I thought: don’t look at your phone, look at the world. Look at the people, and mark what you see. And this is what I did, until I became aware of an odd feeling. I found myself asking a question, which became persistent. Where was everyone? I mean, really: where were they?

  Everywhere I looked I saw only white faces: tourists, passers-by, waiters, diners. At one point a poor Bengali approached me with a rose, and I wanted to ask him what he was doing and how he managed to make out in all this beauty and whiteness. But he was busy begging and smiling, and soon disappeared. When I looked out again at the street I saw that what I had noticed was not inaccurate. Everyone was the same colour: white.

  For a moment I entertained an odd thought about this uncanny event or emptiness. What if the city had been subject to a bizarre sci-fi occurrence, as in a movie, and all the people of colour had been teleported to another time or galaxy? Maybe they would be back soon, mingling with the whites, and the world would return to normal – a mixture of races and peoples, mingling together.

  But perhaps they wouldn’t be returned. In fact, I knew it was the case that they wouldn’t be back, because they were never there in the first place. And I knew I should have long become used to this odd thing where you feel like the stand-out person. I grew up, after all, in a white Kent suburb and went to a white school. The books I read were by white people; all the politicians were white, and so was everyone who appeared on television. Later, at university and working in the theatre, it was the same.

  As the lovely evening passed, an exception came to mind. I remembered reading, as a teenager, a beautiful essay by James Baldwin, ‘Equal in Paris’, published in 1955 in Notes of a Native Son. At the time, the piece scared me like a nightmare, because in it he describes being arrested and flung in jail for eight days after being given a bed-sheet by a friend, who had stolen it from a seedy Left Bank hotel. Baldwin knew that in Paris a man of colour would always be regarded with suspicion, and he writes of how ‘ancient glories’ can create paranoia in the original population, whose culture has stultified, making them vain and inward-looking, thinking only of how to maintain their position.

  Since then, leaving London for Paris, Milan, Stavanger or wherever it might be has always made me nervous, not only because one is anonymous, but because people have ideas about people of colour that they don’t have about whites, and those ideas can get you into trouble, as any Muslim who has passed through an airport can tell you. Whites don’t understand how nervous we can get; they can’t see the reason for the paranoia, which they consider to be an exaggeration. But the first thing you notice about someone is whether they are a man or a woman, and what colour they are, and about that you will have a mythology which is rarely in the favour of the person of colour. So the question for us is: who are we in an increasingly dangerous Europe today? And what will become of us?

  I love Rome better than any other city because it is the most melancholic of all the great European cities, sad and almost tragic in its dereliction and neglect. I think of hun
ched old women in black, and elderly intellectuals in jackets and ties, out of time and place, talking only to themselves, like characters from a Chekhov play.

  Graffiti’d, falling apart and seemingly uncared for, the city reminds me of anarchic and free London in the 1970s, or a place where there has been a great party where the beautiful people have gone home and no one has the heart to clear up. I love the romanticism of Rome but I pity the young in their hopelessness. I would never want my children to try and survive there, even as I wonder why the part of west London, where I live is increasingly becoming Italian, and there are more and more Italian voices on the street. What are people leaving for that they can’t get at home?

  Dereliction may be beautiful for a visitor, but not everything old is cute. And the despair which accompanies decay makes people cruel and blame others for their misfortunes. It is not only the foreigner who is not integrated, but the local person who increasingly feels he has no place or future.

  The recent great Italian television shows, Gomorrah and Suburra, of which I am a great fan, are campy, fantastical tales for a foreign market. But we know that fiction has the face of truth. And the stultifying, incestuous, xenophobic atmosphere of these shows – with their characters who destroy their own communities, and eventually themselves, because there is no light or air, and the people are sick of one another – could be a lesson in what we need to develop.