What Happened?

by Hanif Kureishi

  Novels and other forms of story-telling might present, analyse and satirise tyrants, but they don’t themselves tyrannise over us. Novels, if they’re doing it right, show us people as they are in their complexity, not as they should be. They can create disorder, using language to free us from the bondage of a particular way of seeing, increasing our autonomy. Disobedience, as every child knows, is a form of freedom, and absolute certainty is a form of madness. Mockery is authority’s nightmare, and the return of religion, of the tyrant and strong man, should inspire us to better doubts and more questions, naivety and enquiry. Tyrants seek to heal conflicts by pretending that everything is already decided. They need to be reminded 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. This is radicalism, which bears no resemblance to the phoney conservative ‘radicalism’ we’ve been subjected to.

  Notions of criticism, free-ranging thought and questioning are universal values which benefit the relatively powerless in particular. If, for a moment, we gave way on any of these, we’d leave ourselves without a culture, and with no hope.

  Fanatics, Fundamentalists and Fascists

  In the early 1990s, after the shock of the 1989 fatwa against Salman Rushdie, I began to do some research among those who condemned him, and learned that a strange thing was happening among young British Muslim men and women. I first wrote about this strange thing in my novel The Black Album, which concerns a young man who comes to London from the provinces to study and finds himself caught between the sex-and-ecstasy stimulated hedonism of the late eighties and the nascent fundamentalist movement. At the end of the novel the Asian kids – as they were called then – burn The Satanic Verses and attack a bookshop.

  I followed this up with a story called ‘My Son the Fanatic’, which was published in the New Yorker. Set in Halifax, this story became a film made by the BBC and was released in 1997. Once more it was centred around a strange thing I had noticed: that these young Muslims wanted less sex, more obedience, world-wide revolutionary change and their own state based on religious principles.

  I can’t say it seemed crazy that young people were turning to utopianism and revolution. After all, many of my generation had been Maoists, Marxists, communists, militant feminists, supporters of black power and Trots of various kinds. Some of these former ‘revolutionaries’ now owned several properties and were retiring with good pensions after a lifetime of service to journalism, academia or the arts.

  However, the return to a new submission, this time to Allah, along with belief, sincerity and puritanical sacrifice, was shocking because I was aware that immigrants like my father had come to Britain not to foment political change or make Britain more like anywhere else. After the horrors of Partition and starvation in India, they wanted safety, security and education for their children. The mother country might be the seat of Satan, with an absurd idea of itself as racially superior, but it was more tolerant than most other places, retaining, so the older generation believed, a patrician, Orwellian decency and a spreading liberalism which would benefit the new migrants and their children.

  Yet it didn’t; the humiliation and infantilisation of colonialism and racism remained. The whites, to misquote Enoch Powell, had always had the whiphand over the coloureds. There was still a deep bitterness and resentment in the community. And so, in ‘My Son the Fanatic’, the young man begins to throw out his pop paraphernalia and what he considers other trivial possessions. He leaves his white fiancée and rejects the fanatics of neo-liberalism and the Thatcherite worship of the market, which promised somehow to elevate extreme selfishness to a liberatory creed. Accusing his father of being ‘too Western’, the son becomes devout and imports an extreme preacher from Pakistan to instruct other local kids who feel the same way.

  It was becoming clear that some young Muslims had had it with their parents’ compliant and sycophantic attitude towards their white masters. They no longer wanted to be failed whites. The father’s path was a lost highway. Now they had discovered an ideology which provided purpose. The old religion could be used for new things.

  We know now that the fatwa was a foolish if not fatal misstep for Muslims. It was where this community, formally known as ‘Asian’, began to advertise itself as censoring, small-minded, regressive and ashamed of its more intelligent, critical and creative members. But it worked as a challenge to the West, and it was just the start.

  Since I wrote those fictions in the mid-1990s – and after the attacks on the World Trade Center, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, along with reprisal bombings in Europe and other horrors – the Western world has lurched to the right, partly by constructing Islam as an alien Other. Now, after Trump, Orbán and Salvini, Muslims, like Jews or Negroes in other contexts, will be punished, stigmatised, harassed and surveilled. We are all afraid – and with good reason.

  Muslims didn’t help themselves. But at least they, unlike many in the West, recognised that war and violence would always go both ways. How could it be strange that there would be bombings in the West while there were bombings in the East?

  Now Muslims have also become the victims of a confining caricature which has helped build the new Right. Race and religion will take a central place in the creation of a new Europe, and the Right will use Islam and Muslims to create totalitarianism. Not that minorities haven’t been exploited before in this way. It should be noted, nonetheless, how much the two sides resemble one another. The contemporary view of Muslims is the mirror image of the current far-right ideology overtaking the West: sexist, homophobic, insular, monocultural, combative.

  The form of political Islam I wrote about – emerging in the West in the 1990s – is exhausted as a future. Clearly it led nowhere except to nihilism. It was shameful that the formerly colonised could barely wait to re-colonise themselves within a prison of religion and ideological darkness which, in the long run, made them subject to a double dumbing down and oppression: of censorship and intellectual stagnation. The submission they so desired – to be God’s instrument – is a static, slave-like ideal which freezes everyone.

  Fortunately there is a fresh generation of young Muslims who can create a new radicalism, which is neither religious nor populist. They can rise against the power of a rigid, prescriptive Islam, and make a new identity in the face of the new fascism and the seductions of hate. This means the young must first take on their elders and a calcified ideology.

  There’s nothing that suits the white ruling class more than benighted, uneducated lovers of God. If multiculturalism has become a diversion, monoculturalism is worse. What really scares contemporary power is not Islamism but solidarity: the idea that the marginalised could forge an alliance with the other disaffected young of the West to combat the obscene resurgence of racist enjoyment which is so stimulating our politicians at the moment.

  The formerly excluded and deterritorialised could become an organised class of enlightened, educated young people prepared to join with others across Europe to struggle for freedom, equality and social change. This fight for a new identity not based on hatred and exclusivity, and supported by shared secular ideals, is essential and necessary. A new radicalism would give us something to look forward to in this fateful era of mob rule.

  Nowhere

  Call me Ezra. Call me Michael or Thomas. Call me Abu, Dedan, Ahmed. Call me Er, Asha, Trash or Shit. Call me whatever or no one or nothing. You already have more than enough names for me.

  In this place my identity and even my nature changes from day to day. It is an effort for me to remember who I am. Like a child rehearsing his alphabet, when I wake up I have to reacquaint myself with my history. That is because I am not recognised. I have no reflection here. Except in her eyes. When Haaji sees me I come to life, if life is the accurate word, which it probably isn’t.

  Wearing my only shirt, in the small shabby hotel room which we are forced to leave, I jerk about on my toes waiting for her. I see tha
t I am very thin now: near-death has something to be said for it. It is a very odd thing, living every day in fear. At least you get to practise renunciation, but I am, I have to say, a reluctant ascetic. At home I never went to bed with less than five pillows.

  My few pathetic possessions, along with my sacred books – Hegel, Dostoevsky, Kafka, Kierkegaard – are in canvas bags. I hope they send a limousine because I am not sure how much further I can walk. Something tragic has happened to my nervous system which makes me twitchy. My head is too heavy and my body scarcely obedient. I’d have been better off as a cat.

  She was lucky to find a job as a maid here. For two weeks she has been hiding me in her tiny room. We took turns to sleep on the plank of a bed until I made an unavoidable mistake. I had a terrible dream, screamed, and was discovered. Here, even your nightmares can betray you. In future – and I also use this word with a laugh – I will sleep with tape over my mouth.

  She and I must get out again. Who knows where. They suggested I am some kind of security risk, or terrorist, and that it would be no trouble to them to report me to the police, who will interrogate me again. She begged them not to bother since I have no religion and, I have to admit, no acknowledged beliefs. I am only a harmless bookworm as soft in the head as ice cream. No terrorist ever found inspiration in Kafka. And I’m far too lazy to start killing people. I don’t give a damn for invasions or wars; I expect nothing less of humanity. But all this, what has happened, is an inconvenience too far.

  In my city far away I ran a coffee shop.

  She is angry. She has had enough. And she is all I have. I like to believe she would never abandon me. She must know I will not survive. This strange life is too much for me and my mind is a madhouse. In two minutes everything could become different. I will know from her face.

  Haaji is ten years younger than I am and not as dark. As soon as she arrived she stopped covering her modern hair. She is not regarded with the suspicion us men are. She could pass as a ‘normal’ person. I’d never touched a body so white.

  For a few weeks I became her savant. She had never met anyone like me, and my view of the world became hers. She risked her life to protect me, though I am not sure if she will continue to do so. We will see what I am for her.

  My little city in my country was destroyed. I fled and travelled here to the land where the Enlightenment originated, to the democracy where I became a nigger overnight. I woke up to find I’d turned into someone else.

  The foreigner has been suspect from the beginning of time. But let us not forget: we are all potential foreigners. One day you too could be turned over from the white side of life to the black. It takes a moment. Others will notice you do not belong; you will disgust them; they will fear you.

  My close pal from the coffee shop, One-Arm, was organised. I’m aware this is unusual in a poet. We escaped our country together and the first few weeks were chaotic and rough. But he had connections here. He guided me.

  With him, when I arrived, I got a job, as did many others, working for Bain, the man who secures empty houses and apartments in the great city. And so, after the terrible journey, things began to look up for me. I was even excited to see Europe again, the buildings, libraries and landscapes, though last time, when I was a student, I had with me a tourist guide, a camera and a cheerful curiosity. This new perspective – think of a man viewing the world from inside a litter bin – is, let us say, less exotic. It is more informative to be at the mercy of others.

  After we arrived in the new city, as we waited to see how things were going to go for us in the West, we began to work for Bain, the king of miles of wedding-cake mansions and magazine apartments. We swarm of new nomads, walking in history whether we like it or not, are the new slaves. We wanted jobs rather than to sit it out in transit centres for years.

  Bain could do anything he liked to us. We were compelled to obey and even admire him, which he seemed to enjoy. We shadow people have no tourist guides or even meaning. Strike us if you want to. Take advantage. No one complains.

  We were inside the most beautiful houses and apartments in the world, places I’d never seen except on television, and certainly never set foot in before. We could enjoy these properties, empty of life and people, more than their owners did. Those bankers, money launderers, princes and dirty politicians, living in Beijing, Dubai, Moscow or New York, might have forgotten about them altogether.

  I can tell you: emptiness doesn’t come cheap. I’d never seen so much light in a building before.

  Things that were not dirty, that had never been used, had to be maintained. That was our job: cleaning the clean. Working all day every day, we cared for deserted swimming pools, plump new beds, steam rooms, saunas. Acres of wooden floors and yards of blinds, walls, garages and gardens had to be attended to. The repainting was continuous. People get less attention, but they are worth less.

  Our team went from house to house. Sometimes the places were close together, in the same block. Other times we were driven around in a van. People like me, we so-called talkers and intellectuals, those of us who live by abstract things like ideas, words and beauty, are of not much use in the world. I wondered how long I could last in this job. However, in one remarkable house I was assigned to the garden, clearing leaves, pruning, digging.

  It was in this house, under an elegant staircase, almost resembling the one in my favourite movie – and Hitchcock’s best – Notorious, that I discovered a small room with sloping walls containing an old armchair. I guessed the billionaire owner had not only never used this space or seen the armchair; he didn’t know it existed. What would he care that when I sat in it, and rigged up a light, I was comfortable at his expense? Perhaps he was kind and would have been happy for me. Why not?

  Just two months before this, when the shelling started in our city and we finally recognised the truth – that our lives as we’d known them were finished for ever – we had to clear out. I gathered clothes and as much money as I could get hold of. Then I stood and stared into nothingness: even while my companions waited for me, something kept me back.

  My books. You might find this odd, but they were my main concern even then. There’s nothing like displacement to give you time to read. Kafka, Beckett, Hegel, Nietzsche, Montaigne. My father had passed them on to me. They were my mind and treasure, my single resource.

  When it was time to flee, and everything was falling down, I rushed to the back of my store, which also functioned as a library and bookshop, pulling down whatever I could carry, filling my hold-all, other bags and my pockets.

  In the new city Haaji and I found ourselves working in the same house. Bain mostly employed women but he needed men for some work. At first I barely noticed her. She seemed quiet and humble, with her head bowed, wisely keeping out of trouble. None of us spoke much. This assembly of ghosts was in shock. Our mouths were shut.

  When I saw her looking at me, I wondered whether she had seen me talking to myself.

  Late one evening, when we had finished work, there was a rap on my cupboard door. I was inside reading. At this noise in my secret place I was terrified. Was I about to be punished and dismissed?

  Hearing her soft but urgent voice – ‘Asha, Asha, it’s Haaji’ – I opened the door. She stepped past me and sat on a stool, opposite my chair. Her intrusion seemed brave. I was puzzled. I waited for her to speak.

  ‘What’s in that book?’ she said at last. She pointed. ‘And in that one? And that one?’

  ‘What do you think? Why do you ask?’

  She was able to admit that she wanted to talk to me, this small girl in her white work coat and white shoes. Two scared people sitting together in a cupboard. She asked me to say something about what I was reading. Would I explain it? I could tell she was clever and even educated, but only up to a certain level. Perhaps she’d had problems at school or with her family. She was thin and frail, yet with some determination to her.

  This took place over many nights. I saw that I had to clarify and simpli
fy my thoughts. There’s only so much most people would want to know about Hegel. But she was fascinated to hear about the master–slave relationship, the interdependence of the owner and the servant, leader and follower, creditor and debtor. How they are bound together. The eternal impossible reflection.

  I was surprised; I became enthusiastic. I wanted her to know what I saw in this stuff, why I said it was more important than money. More important than most things people valued.

  ‘You’re so kind, you can be my teacher,’ she said.

  I enjoyed that. It was invigorating to be of use again at last. What did we need? Better words. Fresher ideas for her circumstances. The new vocabulary gave her an enhanced angle. She could see more clearly from the adjusted position. What you think you’re doing under the official description you’re not doing under another. Like sinning, for instance. Suddenly it can appear under love.

  What a discovery. Modesty has its limits. Let me say that at this time, with her, I found myself liking myself very much. I had a function. She made me into a person.

  Like me, like all of us here, she was afraid and running from something. But unlike me, she was running towards something. A new life; hope; the future. It was good to see.