A fall rendered British-Pakistani screenwriter, filmmaker, and novelist Hanif Kureishi “divorced” from his body. Last January, on X, he posted, “I then experienced what can only be described a scooped, semicircular object with talons attached scuttling towards me. Using what was left of my reason, I saw this was my hand, an uncanny object over which I had no agency.”
While most people would’ve given in to their fate, Kureishi summoned himself to make sense of his disability by writing on Substack, with the help of his partner Isabella and sons. Shattered: A Memoir is a compilation of those entries and dispatches, which have been “revised, expanded and edited” by his son, Carlo, for the present book form.
Not a ‘complete break’
The edited post from the introductory paragraph opens the book and paves the way to a meaningful reflection of life – “everything [Kureishi] was being robbed of, all the things [he] wanted to do.” A loss of control over one’s abilities naturally depresses one. Kureishi was no different. Structured on his movements from one hospital to another, both in Italy and in the UK, the book, which is almost completely in the form of diary entries from January 6, 2023, through December 26, 2003, highlights how “profoundly traumatised, altered and unrecognisable” Kureishi thought of himself in the beginning. However, he soon realised this wasn’t a “complete break”.
More than ever before, Kureishi was “determined to keep writing”.
Growing up in Kent when “parents were less police-like”, Kureishi credits discovering his father’s typing manual for his liberation. He writes, “His vigorous typing in his sexy shirtsleeves seemed impressive.” This impression influenced his decision to call himself a writer, though he hadn’t written a word before. But such is the charm of formative years that no demeaning racist slur, such as ‘Brownie’, ‘Paki’, or ‘Shit-face’, could stop him from becoming that word, writer.
It’s an identity that Kureishi gave himself, for while writing, he felt “something waking up inside” him. Over the years though, he feels that there’s more to it given the contemporary identity politics. In a hospital in London, he notes: “Paki, writer, cripple: who am I now? Questions around identity have been among the most important and confusing of our day.”
The past and the present are noticeably enmeshed in this book, and wonderfully so. Kureishi uses interjection as a literary device. He employs it to break his reminiscence often in his dispatches, making readers go back and forth in time. This fluidity at times infuses a distinctive humour to the narration. Sample this: “Excuse me, I’m being injected in my belly with something called Heparina, a blood thinner.”
These interruptions not only lighten the mood of what otherwise could’ve been an unbearable read, but they also are emblematic of a belief this artist held – and still holds – closer to himself all these years: collaboration. He writes, “In my experience, all artists are collaborationists. If you are not collaborating with a particular individual, you are collaborating with the history of the medium, and you’re also collaborating with the time, politics and culture within which you exist. There are no individuals.” It is this confluence of all factors that enabled Kureishi to materialise his art. But, if keenly observed, it is his sheer honesty, which rendered an authenticity to his creations. And helped him take notice of things, even in a place like a hospital.
Kureishi, who is openly bisexual, expresses his concerns for the “young queer and nonbinary staff members” whom he chatted with in hospitals in Rome. They are “afraid for the future of Italy, which has the misfortune of being governed by a fascist.” It’s interesting that this tussle between the state and personhood that Kureishi almost inadvertently captures in this book.
‘A dirty-bastard form’
However, mostly, he returns to the most crucial of instruments that failed him: his body. He writes, “I envy those who can scratch their own heads. I envy those who can tie their own shoelaces. I envy those who can pick up a cup of coffee.” But a body is leveraged in more than one way. It’s not limited to be used for everyday transactions. It also elevates one’s experience as a human being, which is why Kureishi’s recollections are often about libido and sexuality.
After the fall, he begins to note how privileged he was when he was able-bodied. He starts to envy “able-bodied sexual beings”. There’s a mention of “shrivelled-cock talk”, which makes him want to “finish the Amsterdam orgy story”. Then, there’s mention of losing “one’s sexuality overnight, in a sudden blow”, which he confesses “is like losing a sense”.
It bears examination, the form of writing here. More than confessionalism, it should be thought of as offering respect to a narrative form – the art of writing about oneself in the most uninhibited and freewheeling manner, unafraid of judgment or trials of others. Had Kureishi not paid heed to this aspect, he wouldn’t have noted this: “I’ve had some great cocaine nights with my children, and I know friends who take MDMA with their kids, though this isn’t something I would do, out of the fear of revealing too much. My boys did, though, introduce me to magic mushrooms.”
It takes courage to be at once vulnerable and feel empowered by the strength of your character. Perhaps this is what the great Joan Didion attempted to note in her 1961 essay for Vogue: “Self-Respect: Its Sources, Its Powers”. It’s also essential to invoke the artists who render you courage. From the Booker-winner, who “stood up to the most violent form of Islamofascism”, Salman Rushdie to James Baldwin, and from Marcel Proust to Anton Chekov, and from Vladimir Nabokov to George Eliot, several of them are mentioned in this memoir for a variety of reasons. But it seems the formidable Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud had had a profound impact on Kureishi, for Kureishi returns to sex often. He notes how Eliot’s masterpiece Middlemarch is “not usually celebrated for its eroticism” or what “a shame it is, and also an absurdity, that there has not been more explicit sexuality in great literature”.
This Freudian influence is perhaps the reason why his adjective for literature – “a dirty-bastard form” – is also amusing. Kureishi’s poetics may be that of every day, but hidden beneath its layers is knowledge of oneself. And those around oneself. For example, he clinically observes the labour his partner Isabella puts into his care work. He bears witness to the precarious, low-paying jobs nurses in Rome had to do. He feels his world “shrunk and expanded”. He is aware of the “boredom and distress” being in the hospital causes him. But despite all of this, he was determined to make “something of his”. And he did. While somewhere midway, he notes that he is unable to “locate an idea” of himself, he very much becomes a writer once again after having slapped the identity of a “patient”. Besides being a disabled person in this ableist world, he rescued himself from becoming a refugee in his own life. The faculty of thought kept his spirits high besides the jokes and comforting company of his family.
Kureishi’s fundamental aim for this book was to entertain his readers, and that effort is visible. While a few may feel overwhelmed by the capacious note-taking of the day-to-day activities and frequent meanderings, reading Shattered would still be an unforgettable ride for many.
Shattered: A Memoir, Hanif Kureishi, Hamish Hamilton.
