On the day after Christmas, the British novelist and playwright Hanif Kureishi was visiting Rome when he immediately blacked out in his residence and wakened immobilized. “I then experienced what can only be described [as] a scooped, semi-circular object with talons attached scuttling towards me,” he tweeted 11 days later from his hospital mattress. “Using what was left of my reason, I saw this was my hand, an uncanny object over which I had no agency.” He had suffered a grievous spinal harm that paralyzed his legs and arms. His spouse started transcribing his phrases. Later, his son took over. These dispatches, wherever from 5 to twenty tweets a day, given a title and later compiled as a Substack entry, have change into a global phenomenon, written up in newspapers across the globe. Well-wishers—largely strangers—reply, thanking him, encouraging him, commiserating, providing recommendation.
We’ve learn communiqués from the sickbed earlier than, however Kureishi, finest identified for his post-colonial, sexually multifarious, comedian, and deeply cool screenplays (My Beautiful Laundrette, Sammy and Rosie Get Laid) and novels (The Buddha of Suburbia), in addition to his bad-boy persona, brings a brand new urgency to the train. Several issues clarify the immediacy. One, the medium he’s utilizing, Twitter, is designed to make each utterance really feel like a name for an ambulance. Two, he really is coping with a life-or-death state of affairs: Either he recovers or he doesn’t, and his tweets appear to have one thing to do with the end result. Three, disaster has given Kureishi a brand new subject and a brand new voice, richer than ever in its humanity.
We’re watching a bravura efficiency that’s no efficiency in any respect. An immobilized, growing older author is processing in actual time a traumatic current whereas gathering up his previous within the face of God is aware of what future. The level is to piece collectively one thing—a memoir, a journal, a lifeline—jaunty sufficient to sound like him, to claim that he, who’s himself, continues to be there, a author, not a vegetable, in a position to talk and pursue his vocation. Affirmation of self, connection to readers, survival: His bulletins categorical essentially the most primal functions of literature. As he tells his followers:
Every day after I dictate these ideas, I open what’s left of my damaged physique with the intention to attempt to attain you, to cease myself from dying inside.
You are protecting me alive.
I hope it doesn’t sound callous to say that Kureishi is being revitalized by catastrophe. I don’t assume he’d thoughts. His son and collaborator, Carlo Kureishi, implied as a lot in an interview this week with Times Radio. His father, he says, is writing “more than he’s written in years now. He’s writing almost a thousand words a day, which is incredible, considering his condition. And he’s really got a subject now … which is always what a writer needs.” Or, as Kureishi places it, mendacity “completely inert and silent in a drab room, without much distraction, is certainly good for creativity. Deprived of newspapers and music, you will find yourself becoming very imaginative.”
Broken up into flowing, haiku-esque tweets, his posts sound spontaneous, however Kureishi plots them fastidiously. Carlo describes his father asking him, “What are we doing next?” and “In three months time, what do we want to produce?” and speaking about his philosophy of writing: “How do you make it interesting; how do you tell that story?”
So I don’t assume I’m fallacious to understand intentionality and kind. In the primary thread, from January 6, he brings us on top of things: “I cannot scratch my nose, make a phone call or feed myself. As you can imagine, this is both humiliating, degrading and a burden for others. I’ve had an operation on my spine and have shown minor improvements in the last few days.” The subsequent entry, January 7, “Enema,” begins his evaluation of his life as a author. One day, his father purchased a brand new typewriter, and Kureishi realized to sort by blindfolding himself with a tie; later, he copied out passages from Crime and Punishment. This led him to his calling. An interruption: “Excuse me for a moment, I must have an enema now.” On January 8, in “Dead Fingers Talking, Talking,” he describes his former writing routine and its accompanying materials objects, bottles of different-colored ink and “good thick paper” on which his characters take form. Another interruption: “Excuse me, I’m being injected in my belly with something called a ‘Heparina.’”
By January 11, in “The Door Opens,” Kureishi is cheerfully gossiping concerning the imperious theater agent Peggy Ramsay (she found the playwright Joe Orton and is featured in Orton’s biopic Prick Up Your Ears), whom he met whereas nonetheless on the way in which up. Kureishi gave her a manuscript of his to learn; she obtained strawberry jam on it and instructed him contemptuously that it “looked a little short”; later, she developed dementia, and when her workplace burned down, she blamed it on him. He needs to get throughout what life is like for writers, “living creatures in the world” who battle like everybody else.
But additionally: Let us not neglect the place we’re. He labored out that tweet whereas his head was caught all night time between his mattress and the wall and he couldn’t pull it out. You make what you may of what you’re given. As he says elsewhere, “This is how I write these days; I fling a net over more or less random thoughts, draw it in and hope some kind of pattern emerges.”
Kureishi’s prospects don’t at all times appear bleak. Physiotherapists hoist him right into a wheelchair and immediately, he sees the sky for the primary time in weeks: “some trees and a cloud and few birds. For the first time I believed that things might begin to improve.” He seems to be making progress: “I work in the gym with the physio”—the bodily therapist—“for an hour or so and I feel different parts of my body starting to respond. This has been the best day so far.”
Deprived of his physique, he takes pleasure in his physiotherapists’: “I have become a big admirer of Italian men. I find them very handsome. Their skin is smooth and it glows. Their sharp dark body hair is inspiring. They are neither macho nor mummy’s boys.” He is curious concerning the individuals who work within the hospital, their lives, their opinions. “I’ve had many intimate conversations with young queer and non-binary staff members,” Kureishi wrote. “They are afraid for the future of Italy, which as you know has the misfortune of being governed by a fascist.”
His predominant goal, although, is to whistle previous the graveyard. The enema prompts the reminiscence of an examination he had a number of years earlier beneath the auspices of the National Health Service: A nurse inserted a finger into his “back side” and requested how lengthy it took him to put in writing Midnight’s Children—the nice breakthrough novel of Britain’s different South Asian literary celeb, Salman Rushdie. “I replied, ‘If I had indeed written Midnight’s Children, don’t you think I would have gone private?’”
But allow us to not neglect the place we’re. You could make paralysis humorous, nevertheless it’s not. His sign-offs are fond however determined, and wryly repeat the phrase “in these shitty times,” as in, “Stay with me friends, don’t let me go. In these shitty times, your loving cripple, Hanif.” He will be pissy. He doesn’t at all times get alongside together with his spouse, who sits with him all day lengthy. “She was looking tired and thin, as of course she would do in the circumstance of this terrible strain,” he writes. “Then she turned to me and asked, ‘Would you have ever done this for me?’ I couldn’t answer. I don’t know.”
Kureishi’s prognosis is unsure. His household want to deliver him residence to England, however shifting him is difficult. In the meantime, he clings to identification, existence, hope, and, above all, wit. As he says in one other sign-off: “More tomorrow, more optimism, more jokes.”