In between watching the glory that has been the Olympics (can’t say I expected so much Sepia-related content, but hey, awesome) and signing up to be one of the very few (10,000+ish) people to receive my very own VP text from Barack Obama, I came across this great piece in the NYT Magazine about Hanif Kureishi, his career, and his latest novel, Something to Tell You.
The novel is, in brief, about a member of the rebellious British South Asian generation, Jamal, that came of the age during the 80’s, and how he and his now successful peers have to overcome their past conflicts, loves, secrets, and continuing personal challenges as middle-aged parents and professionals. It actually sounds familiar in theme to My Revolutions by Hari Kunzru (a very nice book), except with a South Asian focus, and from the British reviews that have been published, it seems as though it will be a good read. I’ll be looking forward to reading it and the review world seems to see it as an improvement over his previous few novels, which have not been critically well-received. South Asian blog reviews of this novel have already been written, and it is to come out in America on August 19th.
The article highlighted more than his new novel - in particular, it noted how Kureishi’s emergence on the scene during the late 1980’s and his writings, including the screenplay of “My Beautiful Laundrette” and the novel Buddha of Suburbia gave a voice to a generation of South Asians in Britain that felt unrepresented and typecast in British society at 
the time:
The novel and a subsequent BBC mini-series made Kureishi a hero to a generation of British Asians and other nonwhites, a kind of postcolonial Philip Roth who brought to the mainstream themes that were previously relegated as “ethnic” and added lots of sex and humor. “What, above all, made Kureishi a talismanic figure for young Asians was his voice,” the critic Sukhdev Sandhu wrote in The London Review of Books in 2000. “We had previously been mocked for our deference and timidity. Kureishi’s language was a revelation. It was neither meek nor subservient. It wasn’t fake posh. Instead, it was playful and casually knowing.”
Kureishi’s most important role was to knock down the stereotypical image of South Asian immigrants as the hard-working, polite and dutiful members of society who would make nor do no trouble. For a group of immigrants that had historically faced a great deal of discrimination in the U.K., there was finally someone who articulated their true lives and struggles. Perhaps most importantly, the writings were not staid nor politically correct - they showed life as it really was for immigrants and their children:
Sandhu (the critic) recalls how his father — who left India for England in 1965 and worked in a Nestlé factory, and was taunted by local schoolchildren and punks as he walked home with sacks of chapati flour — beat him up after Sandhu insisted that the family watch “My Beautiful Laundrette” on TV. With nudity, gay sex, Pakistani businessmen cheating on their wives and a drug smuggler disguised as a mullah with heroin sewn into his fake beard, the film wasn’t just a wake-up call to white Britain; it also flew in the face of the traditional immigrant narrative. “Why are you showing us such filth?” Sandhu’s father asked him. “My father was right to be appalled,” Sandhu wrote. “The film celebrated precisely those things — irony, youth, family instability, sexual desire — that he most feared.” It taught his father, Sandhu added, “that he could not control the future. And control — over their wives, their children, their finances — was what Asian immigrants like him coveted.”
Kureishi could break through in an 80’s English literary scene that is described as a “BBC, plummy-voiced, West London, educated thing that just wasn’t getting the whole place,” because, as the article describes, he wrote to everybody: the poor and the rich, the supermarket shoppers and the Granta crowd. He gave a whole generation a voice, and to his credit, he has worked hard to stay relevant as times have changed. Regardless of the occasionally variable quality of his recent novels, he is perhaps the British cultural figure most in tune with the trend of rising extremism among young Muslim youth in the U.K. My favorite piece of his, “My Son the Fanatic,” did an exceptional job of showing the generational disconnect between British South Asian immigrants and their children, and in “The Word and the Bomb,” his recent essay collection, which I have not read, but has reviewed well (unfortunately only published in the U.K. - let me know if you can find any essays to link), he is said to describe his ideas about this generation of radicals tempered and thoughtful manner that is rare among culture writers, which would not be a surprise given this strong piece that Amardeep wrote about a few years ago.
The article also has a lengthy discussion of Kureishi’s use and examination of sexual themes, which I won’t describe at length here, because the important idea is not the content but rather the trait it shows: Kureishi is able to provoke discussions about multiculturalism and the clash and togetherness of backgrounds because he does not sterilize his stories or idealize his fictions. He writes about the South Asian world as he really sees it, even if that might be a world riven with conflicted, struggling and rebellious characters. These writings have the effect of initially shocking, but it is a shock that provokes necessary cross-cultural exchanges.
This presents an interesting question: is there a writer that expresses the trends, attitudes, problems, and experiences of our generation of young American desis as Kureishi did for an earlier generation of young British South Asians (and arguably as he does for this British generation as well) ? Mohsin Hamid is one the current “it” South Asian writers, though I wasn’t a huge fan of The Reluctant Fundamentalist (Moth Smoke, though, was excellent). His stories do cover a wide breadth of the South Asian diaspora, extending from Pakistan to Britain and the U.S.A., but he doesn’t really speak to the experience of desis growing up or born in the States. The name Jhumpa Lahiri, of course, comes to mind, and she is without a doubt a very good writer, but she writes about the challenges of a very specific immigrant story, the highly successful and well-educated family with personal challenges to overcome.
What writers do you think are the “voice of our (South Asian-American) generation”? Personally, I think there are many skilled authors, but this generation’s narrative is possibly too diverse and splintered for one writer to express. There are immigrants in poverty and those who face serious challenges, and there are immigrants who have reached the very pinnacle of our society in a short time. We are most likely blessed not to have the overriding narrative that was present due to the overt stereotyping and discrimination that an older British generation faced and the dangerous fundamentalism that is sadly rising in a current one. There are narratives of success and struggle in America, and many skilled writers to express them: our young and diverse American diaspora requires and has a young and diverse set of talented writers. Despite this, there is something to be said for shocking the system and bringing out tough truths about a multicultural society, and when Hanif Kureishi’s courageous works are read in homes and schools (as they were in my high school), they break down assumptions and encourage uncomfortable, but necessary, discussions.
