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Hanif Kureishi: Tweeting against Time

By Cosmo Adair.

Spare a thought for Carlo Kureishi. After his father Hanif Kureishi’s collapse in Rome on Boxing Day, Carlo has transcribed his father’s thoughts, daily, and published them on Twitter. To write on behalf of an incapacitated father was enough to drive John Milton’s daughters furious—but even they didn’t have to transcribe a fragmented memoir, a meditations-type-thing, with stories involving cunnilingus, sex and drugs. And I know that if I had to hear my father’s lyrical reminiscences about someone he’d shagged, then I’d have slipped something into his food a long, long time ago. So we must thank Carlo Kureishi each day, what he transcribes might feel uncomfortable, but I believe that these reflections are also going to become a definitive work of contemporary literature; and one of the reasons for that is that it’s being dictated by Hanif Kureishi with the knowledge that it could well be the last thing he ever writes. 

On the 6th of January, 2023, Kureishi tweeted, “Dear followers, I should like you to know that on Boxing Day, in Rome, after taking a comfortable walk to the Piazza del Popolo, followed by a stroll through the Villa Borghese, and then back to the apartment, I had a fall.” 

From this moment onwards, his Twitter threads began to weave themselves into literary history. His description, in this first thread, of the moment he regained consciousness is horrifying: “I then experienced what can only be described as a scooped, semi-circular 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.” His delayed recognition of his hand expertly conveys his alienation and dissociation from his own body. 

Since then, he has drifted through time, down a now-characteristic stream of free-associations—one marked by a quick authenticity, and by the illusion of spontaneity (each entry is carefully planned, Carlo has said)—and discusses themes as varied as the consistency of Uniqlo trousers, Manchester United, Italian eyebrows, TV soaps, photographs of authors, fountain pens, and the sartorial style of Graham Greene. One entry is even entitled ON CUNNILINGUS, ENVY, AND OTHER MATTERS, and opens, “It doesn’t follow that just because one is severely injured, one doesn’t think about sex. Indeed, one might think about sex more.” From which I deduce that paralysis has not diminished Kureishi’s libido. 

His threads abound with pithy observations: on Hollywood screenwriters, “some are employed just to write the endings of the movies. Others are better at the beginning.. I wonder who writes the middle”; on Italy, “Italy is one of the great gay civilisations of Europe. The Vatican is gay as is the fashion industry. The entire aesthetic of the renaissance is based on polyamorous sexuality.” And then there are the stories: how he learned to type, “I started to blindfold myself with my school tie and soon found I could write the right words in the right order without even looking”; or on the hospital, “In the gym today a man tried to sell me a horse. He showed me a picture of the horse. I can confirm the horse is very pretty. I had to explain to him that my garden in London is not big enough for a horse.”

Kureishi, with only a handful of words, has constructed a voice which is impersonal enough as to be universal, and personal enough to feel real and de profundis. His self-reflections and analyses are the more profound for it. Each time the voice speaks up from its hospital ward in Rome, one can see how Kureishi has shored these fragments up against his ruin: not only that, but through these tweets he is asserting his identity, his presence, how he is still a writer and is hanging on to life as well as he possibly can.  Equally, it is hard not to dwell on what this could mean for the future of Literature. After years of bland, mundane, and downright poorly written, short stories and poems being splattered over Social Media with a tedious importunity, finally there appears to be something noticeably literary appearing on Twitter. More than that, something literary written by one of the previous generation’s greatest talents. And so, whilst Twitter has been the home of political commentary for sometime now, could it possibly be becoming a new home of Literature? After years of bold and prophetic pronouncements that Social Media is bringing about a new age of Literature, finally we have some proof.

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