Abstract
In Postcolonial Writers in the Global Literary Marketplace (2007), Sarah Brouillette expands on Graham Huggan’s exploration of the current entanglement between “the language of resistance” inherent to postcolonialism and “the language of commerce” intrinsic to postcoloniality (Huggan, 2001: 264). Connecting the successful marketing of postcolonial writing with the regime of postcoloniality, Brouillette argues that such a regime requires or projects a “biographical connection” (2007: 4) between text and author so that even postcolonial fiction can be thought of as offering a supposedly authentic or unmediated access to the cultural other. This article discusses Hanif Kureishi’s My Ear at His Heart: Reading My Father (2004), in which the British Asian author narrativizes his ambivalent relationship with his father and retraces the latter’s trajectory from India to the UK of the 1960s and 1970s. My aim is to show how this memoir is very much concerned with the relationship between postcolonialism and postcoloniality even as it foregrounds issues of genre, authorship, and (af)filiation. Highlighting the ambiguities and impossibilities inherent in any referential pact (see Lejeune, 1975), My Ear at His Heart not only complicates the demand for “biographical authenticity” that is seen by Brouillette to condition the niche marketing of postcolonial literatures, the memoir also alludes to the reception of Kureishi’s own work, which was framed by “autobiographical” readings of his early novels. Through an analysis of the ways in which My Ear at His Heart re-places issues of postcoloniality and genre at the heart of the father–son relationship, I wish to suggest that Kureishi still has “something to tell us” about the commodification of “minority” cultures, provided that postcolonial scholarship starts taking issues of form seriously.
Keywords
The publication of Graham Huggan’s The Postcolonial Exotic (2001) and Sarah Brouillette’s Postcolonial Writers in the Global Literary Marketplace (2007) certainly marks the advent of a phase during which it has become even more pressing for critics to problematize the taken-for-granted oppositional nature of postcolonial literatures. Commenting on the ways in which such literatures are enmeshed in “a global alterity industry” (2001: 259), Huggan famously argues that the “politics of value” of postcolonialism is now complicated by, and inseparable from, postcoloniality — which he defines as “a value-regulating mechanism within the global-late capitalist system of commodity exchange” (2001: 6). For Huggan, this is not to say that postcolonialism’s “emancipatory agenda” (2001: 6) and commitment to counter-discursive practices and modes of reading have become irrelevant in our late capitalist and globalized era; rather, the critic makes a plea for taking on board the fact that, today, “postcolonialism is bound up with postcoloniality” (2001: 6; emphasis in original) in ways that defy easy assumptions about their “conflicting regimes of value” (2001: 6).
In Postcolonial Writers in the Global Literary Marketplace (2007), Brouillette relies on Huggan’s definition of postcoloniality and takes further his exploration of the current entanglement between “the language of resistance” inherent to postcolonialism and “the language of commerce” intrinsic to postcoloniality (Huggan, 2001: 264). Brouillette argues that, as against “the supposed dominant orthodoxy of anti-authorialism in literary studies” (2007: 173), the successful marketing of postcolonial literatures depends on — indeed requires — “biographical authenticity” (2007: 147) so that postcolonial writers can act as valid interpreters of an authenticated location for an Anglo-American audience “schooled in cosmopolitanism” (2007: 172). Brouillette’s perception that the marketing of postcolonial writing depends on the assumed coincidence between literary material and the biographical self of its author raises fascinating questions when it comes to examining “postcolonial” biographies and autobiographies highlighting the ambiguities and impossibilities inherent in any “referential pact” (see Lejeune, 1975). Indeed, in these texts, the crossover between fact and fiction both mirrors and endlessly displaces the demand for “biographical authenticity” that is seen by Brouillette to condition the niche marketing of postcolonial literatures.
Such a crossover is at play in Hanif Kureishi’s “generically hybrid memoir” (Ranasinha, 2018: 4), My Ear at His Heart: Reading My Father, in which the celebrity author narrativizes his ambivalent relationship with his father and retraces the latter’s trajectory from peri-Independence India to the UK of the 1960s and 1970s. Even if Kureishi’s memoir has been relatively neglected by postcolonial literary critics, this article contends that My Ear at His Heart is very much concerned with the intersection of postcoloniality and postcolonialism, in ways that we have yet to learn how to read. In this semi-biographical, semi-autobiographical text, Kureishi relies on memory as well as on three unpublished novels by his father to reconstruct the latter’s life, thus “imagining around [others’] imagination” (Kureishi, 2004: 238), 1 as he phrases it, that is, embracing fiction — not only memory — as a valid starting point for his transgenerational “exploration” (33). It has been noted that “Kureishi, as a reader, approaches his father’s novels in a way that he would doubtless object to if his own fiction were raided for its autobiographical content” (Thomas, 2006: 189). Yet, I want to show that the dubious quest for “biographical authenticity” that underpins Kureishi’s “reading project” (12) is strategically kept in check by the metafictional moves of his writing project, which, in turn, allows him to unsettle, rather than play up to, the specific biographical requirements of postcoloniality. Mindful of the ways in which, in a contemporary context of global warfare and rampant Islamophobia, recent postcolonial scholarship has tended to return overwhelmingly to Kureishi’s early work, specifically The Black Album (1995), in an attempt to call into question his misrepresentations of British Muslims, this article argues that Kureishi still has “something to tell us” 2 about the commodification of “minority” cultures, provided that postcolonial scholarship starts taking issues of form seriously.
Framing Kureishi: From the “hybridity” consensus to the “scepticism” consensus
Arguably, one of the main reasons why My Ear at His Heart has garnered little interest from postcolonial critics is because postcolonial scholarship has systematically privileged the novel form over life writing. 3 Also, the relative critical neglect of Kureishi’s 2004 memoir might owe to the fact that it lends itself to a less transparent political reading than his first two novels, The Buddha of Suburbia (1990) and The Black Album (1995). Even though Huggan’s influential The Postcolonial Exotic was published in 2001 and consequently could not have discussed Kureishi’s 2004 memoir, Huggan’s reading of Kureishi’s 1980s and 1990s work nonetheless appears to anticipate a trend in postcolonial scholarship that focuses overwhelmingly on Kureishi’s “self-consciously post-colonial” texts (Stein, 2004: 115) — in particular his first two novels. In the chapter in which Huggan reads Kureishi’s work alongside Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (1988) and V. S. Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival (1987), he does not include then-published texts that are part of what Susie Thomas later called Kureishi’s “middle works” (2005: 133) — namely the short story collections Love in a Blue Time (1997) and Midnight All Day (1999a), the novella Intimacy (1998) as well as the play Sleep with Me (1999b). Its selective character notwithstanding, Huggan’s reading of Kureishi’s work is compelling, because the critic takes Kureishi as a fine instance of a writer who has resorted to strategic forms of “theatricality” in order to self-reflexively shift the focus of analysis to the oppressive power relations underpinning the commodification of cultural marginality and otherness. 4 Moreover, what Huggan makes clear — and what Brouillette (2007) further develops, though she takes her predecessor’s main argument with a pinch of salt — is that the phenomenon of the “postcolonial exotic” is no stranger to contemporary writers whose work is advertised under the banner of the “postcolonial” and/or that of “minority” literatures. These writers, in turn, do respond in kind — notably by parodying mainstream expectations of minority subjectivity and “stag[ing] marginality” in their texts (Huggan, 2001: 83–104). Because the “postcolonial exotic” names “both a mode of consumption and an analysis of consumption” (2001: 264; emphasis in original), Huggan perceives it to be partly agential. Still, to return to Kureishi, this is not to say that Huggan’s discussion of Kureishi’s politics of theatricality leaves the British Asian author off the hook. Indeed, the critic ultimately remarks that Kureishi’s subversive moves never cease to be kept in check by a tendency to reinscribe cultural hierarchies, with the result that the process of “staging marginalities” remains mired in an acknowledgement of relative powerlessness. Small wonder, then, that Huggan perceives “sexual narcissism” in Kureishi’s early work as an “ultimately self-defeating outlet for an intense frustration with the lack of social change in late twentieth-century, ‘multicultural’ Britain” (2001: 103; emphasis in original).
When returning to the now-classic The Postcolonial Exotic from a contemporary perspective, one cannot help thinking that, paradoxically, both too much and too little has been made of Huggan’s ambivalent response to Kureishi’s 1980s and 1990s work. Too much has been made of it because Huggan’s 2001 suggestion that his interpretation goes against the grain of “increasingly conventionalised readings of Kureishi’s […] work as positing [a] joyous hybrid alternativ[e] to a bleakly neo-imperialist realpolitik” (2001: 104; emphasis in original) ironically throws into sharp relief the fact that, today, Huggan’s scepticism about Kureishi’s oeuvre is very much the norm in the field of postcolonial literary studies. Recent postcolonial scholarship indeed regularly associates the celebrity writer of mixed Pakistani and British descent with the limits of secular liberalist discourse (see Ahmed, 2015; Ranasinha, 2007; Gunning, 2010), as if the “hybridity” consensus among critics in the 1990s had by the early twenty-first century given way to a “scepticism” consensus. But it can also be said that too little has been made of Huggan’s emphasis on the “doubleness” of the postcolonial exotic in relation to Kureishi’s work — that is, its interlocked conservative and subversive aspects. In today’s context of growing Islamophobia and global warfare, a number of postcolonial critics in fact limit themselves to discussing early texts in which Kureishi’s embrace of intellectual liberalism reveals itself to be an inadequate response to the conundrums of multiculturalism, which somewhat resurrects the “burden of representation” (Mercer, 1994: 235) that Kureishi unambiguously tried to shed around the middle of the 1990s. The recent critical overemphasis on The Black Album (1995), a novel in which Kureishi can be seen to “invent a polarity between radical orthodox Islam and detached liberal individualism” (Ranasinha, 2007: 241), indeed suggests that the writer has gone back to being thrust into the role of an ever-failing spokesperson for minority communities. The paradox is that, even if much more could be said about the indirect ways in which Kureishi’s mid-career and recent works address whiteness (see Stein, 2004: 130–35) or issues of postcolonialism and postcoloniality, the discussion is usually sidelined by matters relating to the author’s misrepresentations of British Muslim identity in his early work. It is certainly a sign of the times that, in South Asian Writers in Twentieth-Century Britain (2007), Ruvani Ranasinha limits herself to a return to Kureishi’s 1980s screenplays and 1990s novels whereas five years earlier (Ranasinha, 2002), she discussed his literary output more evenly and problematized the writer’s role as a “cultural translator” between minority and majority communities in Britain.
Likewise, although Kureishi’s oeuvre has grown exponentially between the late 1990s and 2010, Dave Gunning discusses issues of race in the writer’s work exclusively via The Black Album in his 2010 monograph and reduces to a single line his analysis of “My Son the Fanatic” (in Love in a Blue Time, 1997) — a short story in which the figure of the “fanatic” son finally gets associated, too, with that of the “liberal” father. 5 Even if Rehana Ahmed (2015) also returns to The Black Album, she does better justice to the richness of Kureishi’s corpus in her recent monograph, where she discusses selected short stories included in the collections Love in a Blue Time (1997) and The Body (2002), as well as aspects of Intimacy (1998), My Ear at His Heart (2004), and Something to Tell You (2008). Yet, justified as it might be, Ahmed’s resolve to shift the focus to the exclusionary aspects of secular liberalist discourse as well as draw connections between the stereotyping of British Muslims in the media and their representations in literature not only downplays the literary aspects of Kureishi’s work but also rests on the implicit premise that minority authors should give a representative account of “their” community. So, Ranasinha (2007) certainly has a point when she revives the argument she made in her 2002 monograph on Kureishi, namely that “cultural translators” who live in the West cannot avoid “complicity with dominant structures” (2007: 228); all the more so when, like Kureishi, these “translators” are of mixed English parentage and are born and raised in Britain. Relying on Gayatri Spivak’s comment about the always-already biased viewpoint of the “postcolonial informant” (Spivak, 1999: 360), Ranasinha borrows Spivak’s words to venture that the “worst” thing that “cultural translators” can do is “play the native informant uncontaminated by disavowed involvement with the machinery of the production of knowledge” (Spivak, qtd. in Ranasinha, 2007: 228).
Writing (and reading) back, autobiographically
For anyone who is even remotely familiar with the controversies surrounding the reception of Kureishi’s work and/or the recent revival of his “burden of representation”, Kureishi’s “reading project” (12) in My Ear at His Heart sounds like a provocation. In the opening of this “free-form” (16) text — which is nonetheless advertised as a memoir on its dustjacket — Kureishi is given An Indian Adolescence by his agent, an unpublished novel by his late father which turns up 11 years after the latter’s death. Musing on the intersection between life and literature, on the ways in which part of children’s education boils down to “their induction into an ongoing story” or “family legend” which is also a “family transaction” (9), Kureishi sets out the premise of his book: he will read his father’s novel autobiographically, in an attempt “to locate his [father’s] ‘self’ in [the latter’s] imaginings” (18). Interestingly for my purposes, Kureishi’s “reading project” is reminiscent of Brouillette, as the writer can here be seen to take up a readerly position which is very much observant of the problematic “biographical impulse” at play in postcoloniality (let us remember that, as defined by Brouillette, the regime of postcoloniality requires or projects a “biographical connection” (2007: 4) between text and author so that even postcolonial fiction can be thought of as offering a supposedly authentic or unmediated access to the cultural other). But the premise of My Ear at His Heart also brings to mind the intense controversy surrounding the reception of Intimacy (1998). A novella dealing with infidelity, sexual desire, and the breakup of his marriage told from the perspective of a middle-aged man, the text was insistently read as a memoir by critics (see Thomas, 2005: 139–45; Moore-Gilbert, 2001: 171–79), who felt justified in doing this because the book’s plot appeared to replicate Kureishi’s own breakup with his first partner. This was despite Kureishi’s protest that Intimacy was “constructed as a confession” and should be read as “a move in a literary game” (Yousaf, 2002: 25). Apparently oblivious of the fact that the “accepted critical truisms about the author’s death” (Brouillette, 2007: 176) would not apply to texts by “minority” writers, Kureishi still invoked the tenets of anti-authorialism at the time: “It is a text, not me. I am not the text” (Yousaf, 2002: 25).
Undoubtedly, Intimacy (1998) was illustrative of a new phase during which Kureishi was quite vocal about his refusal to submit to the requirement that minority authors limit themselves to dealing with issues reserved for them, such as race and ethnicity. 6 In an interview, he claimed: “I want to be free to not only be an Asian writer, but a writer who is also Asian” (qtd. in Ranasinha, 2002: 103). As Rehana Ahmed (2015) suggests, this blunt refusal would nonetheless take the form of tangential references to race in some of his later work. For instance, in Intimacy, Kureishi’s new “elliptical” (Ahmed, 2015: 95) treatment of race intersects with a tantalizing invitation to read the novella autobiographically, with the result that postcoloniality comes to be associated with generic issues. Indeed, the confessional style of the book nudges readers into constructing a “referential pact” between text and author — increasingly so when, halfway through the novella, Jay, the hitherto non-racialized first-person protagonist, eventually reveals that part of his close family is based in Lahore (see Kureishi, 1998: 60). As Ahmed remarks, this belated and apparently offhand revelation “highlight[s] and challenge[s] the assumptions that we make as readers of cultural difference” (2015: 29). Put differently, the disclosure causes readers to backtrack and simultaneously project and resist a “biographical connection” between Jay and Kureishi — a connection which is then revealed to be an embarrassing symptom of postcoloniality.
To return to My Ear at His Heart, it is perhaps clear by now that Kureishi’s gesture of reading his father’s novel autobiographically is overdetermined, as if he were somehow replicating the violence to which he had been subjected as a “race author” whose craft and authorship gets regularly downplayed (or plainly ignored) by critics. Seen in that context, Kureishi’s admission that “it annoys me, as it might any novelist, to have my own work reduced to autobiography, as if you’ve just written down what happened” (18) works both ways; it is both a comment on the reception of his own work and a guilty disclaimer intended to better sugarcoat the transfer of power whereby he is now in the position of having full interpretative control over work by another minority or postcolonial writer — namely his father. Issues of marketability (or should I say postcoloniality?) come early in My Ear at His Heart. In Chapter 2, Kureishi reminisces that his father insisted, both to him and his agent, that An Indian Adolescence was a novel, not a memoir. Kureishi remembers his father saying: “I am sticking to my guns over this” (19) in reply to his agent, who had ventured at the time that the book would be more easily published if it were called a memoir. Revealingly, Kureishi gives voice to his father’s nearly militant objection, but he does not let him have the last word on the matter. A small photograph of Kureishi’s father as a young boy (labelled “My father as a child”) is indeed placed immediately after this passage (19). Andreas Athanasiades remarks that in My Ear at His Heart Kureishi includes traditional autobiographical material — such as pictures of himself, his sons, and his father — but “he never contextualizes them, leaving their interpretation to the reader” (2016: 31). Still, for Lee-Von Kim, it is clear that this first non-textual element contests, rather than supports, Kureishi’s father’s claim that his manuscript is a novel. More precisely, Kim perceives “the inclusion of this photograph, at this precise point in the narrative, as Kureishi marshalling ‘evidence’ for his assessment of his [father’s book] as memoir rather than novel” (2015: 412).
In the first chapters of My Ear at His Heart, the suggestion that there is an imaginary arm-wrestle between father and son over the generic anatomy of An Indian Adolescence — one that highlights and displaces Kureishi’s own “sticking to his guns” with critics over the reception of his oeuvre — is emphasized by the many dubious rationalizations that the writer-as-reader now resorts to in order to lend legitimacy to his “reading project”. Noticing that his father’s novel is written in the third person, but “switch[es] occasionally, by ‘mistake’, into the first”, Kureishi feels somehow justified in reading his father’s stories as “personal truths” (18). “Perhaps”, he ventures, “father needed [his book] to be a novel because it contained so much truth. In order to speak, he required the disguise of character and imposed narrative” (19). An additional piece of “evidence” for reading An Indian Adolescence as a referential “self-portrait” (20) is that Shani, the protagonist in his father’s book, has a name that closely resembles Shannoo, his father’s nickname in real life (see 21). What follows is that the fictional Colonel Murad, Shani’s father, is taken to be a representation of Colonel Kureishi (Kureishi’s paternal grandfather), just like the fictional Bibi, Shani’s mother, quickly becomes associated with Kureishi’s paternal grandmother. Kureishi-as-reader finds it less easy to determine who Mahmood (Shani’s brother) might be in real life, but he finally links him up to Omar, his flamboyant and carefree paternal uncle who is based in Karachi at the time of writing (34). Ironically, Kureishi persists in reading his father’s novel autobiographically even as he discloses a major discrepancy between art and life: whereas in real life, his father had 11 siblings, in An Indian Adolescence, the protagonist has only one brother. Asserting his readerly authority even further, Kureishi hypothesizes that, possibly, “father cleared out the rest of the family in order to concentrate on one particular brother, on one representative tension, and that is why he called [his book] a novel” (23).
Like father, like son: Muddying the generic waters
Leaving aside for the moment the question as to why Kureishi-as-reader reads sibling rivalry into his father’s novel at the same time as Kureishi-as-writer increasingly weaves accounts of his father’s ambivalence against him into the narrative, it is worth mentioning at this stage that My Ear at His Heart also registers textual traces of resistance to the interpretative violence at play in Kureishi’s “reading project”. Ironically, even while Kureishi patronizes his father — who is also significantly called “dad” in lowercase (see 7, 20, 28, and so on) — because, as previously noted, he uses the third person in his writing while “switching occasionally, ‘by mistake’, into the first” (18), the first-person narrator of My Ear at His Heart is not immune to similar lapses either. As I will show below, not only does Kureishi regularly collapse some auto/biographical referents and characters taken from his father’s book, he also does so in ways that self-reflexively allude to this unorthodox move. In Chapter 2, as Kureishi-as-writer recounts his reading of a passage in An Indian Adolescence in which the protagonist meets a girl who is supposedly “more beautiful than Rita Hayworth and Hedy Lamarr put together” (28), his conflation of “my father” and “Shani” in the same sentence problematically abolishes the distinction between reality and fiction: “My father gets an erection, informing him that he seems to have fallen in love. Back at the new house, my father’s servant […] tells Shani that he knows the girl’s maid” (28; emphasis added). Likewise, in the next chapter, as Kureishi narrates a passage of his father’s book in which Shani is made to contemplate his future, he revealingly uses “Shani”, “dad”, and “my father” interchangeably: “Sitting at his desk, Shani ponders what he will do with his life. Mahmood is planning to study for the Bar in London. But Colonel Murad wants my father to attend the Military Academy, which dad isn’t keen to do” (61; emphasis added).
By muddling up a character (Shani) with an auto/biographical referent (dad; my father) Kureishi-as-writer leaves a rookie interpretative mistake in the text, as if the experienced writer was thereby signalling the inexperience and unreliability of his “reading self” — the same one who can be seen to position his reading under the aegis of postcoloniality’s biographical impulse. While this refusal to clean up, so to speak, after his reading self certainly highlights an inner conflict between Kureishi-as-reader and Kureishi-as-writer, it also gestures towards the generic undecidability of My Ear at His Heart (is it a referential text or is it fiction?), which thus comes to share points of commonality with An Indian Adolescence (is it a novel or a memoir?). In other words, a form of generic or textual intimacy is thereby established between father and son — between the failed novelist and the celebrity writer — and this is one that significantly does not extend to other members of the Kureishi family, least of all Kureishi’s uncle Omar, the one with “the gift of gab” (86). 7 Indeed in those passages in which Omar and his assumed fictional counterpart Mahmood run the risk of being muddled up, Kureishi-as-writer now takes great pains to call attention to a possible slippage into fiction by referring to a third “slash-entity” — namely “Mahmood/Omar” (40, 42, and so forth) or alternatively “Omar/Mahmood (43, 86, etc.). In other words, in sharp contrast to what happens with Kureishi’s “generically-hybrid” representations of his father, Kureishi makes it clear that, when it comes to his uncle Omar, genres will not be mixed.
In the previous paragraphs, I have shown that the “biographical connection” intrinsic to Kureishi’s dubious “reading project” — and to postcoloniality at large — was, at times, thrown into crisis by Kureishi-as-writer, who, in so doing, was not only exposing the interpretative fallacies of his reading self, but also claiming a form of textual or generic intimacy with his father beyond the latter’s failure to ever get any of his books published. In what follows, I will suggest that the relationship between issues of postcoloniality, genre, authorship, and (af)filiation gains new momentum from Chapter 3 onwards, as Kureishi decides to turn to his paternal uncle Omar (or more precisely to Omar’s writings) in order to fill in the gaps of his own “exploration” (33). Significantly, just like Kureishi and his father, Omar is a writer; unlike them, however, he is the author of “straight” referential texts, namely two (or is it three?) volumes of autobiography.
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What is more, similarly to his nephew Hanif, Omar is a writer “with his name on numerous published books” (218). By contrast, Kureishi’s father, who is “a failure in that respect” (218), remains stuck all his life in a “low-status job with a small income” (96–97) at the Pakistan High Commission in London, working on his novels during his free time in suburban Bromley and eventually having his life “partly formed by his rejection at the hands of various publishers” (101). Perhaps unsurprisingly in such a context, Kureishi’s father reacted ambivalently to his son’s success as an emergent writer. Grafting his own memories onto the account of his combined reading of his father’s fiction and Omar’s autobiographical writings, Kureishi remembers that his father was “puffed-up with pride” (150) when his 14-year-old son was “shown off” (150) at literary parties that were thrown by “the upper-class editor” (149) Jeremy Trafford. But Kureishi’s father was also “in rage” (168) the first time one of his son’s plays was performed at the Royal Court Theatre in London, giving him “contemptuous V-signs from his seat” (168). “I should have guessed”, Kureishi muses, “that whatever happened the production would be too little or too much for him” (168). Kureishi’s father’s ambivalence towards his son does not even subside as the former is transported to the hospital for what would be the very last time. Kureishi’s father, “stimulated” as he is by the recent success of The Buddha of Suburbia, a novel he “like[s]” (200), is “still full of questions and projects and talk” as he lies on his hospital bed moments before his death, even while he also maintains that his son’s first published novel is “not as good as his [own] stuff” (200). But what is interesting is that My Ear at His Heart significantly moves beyond Kureishi’s account of his father’s rivalry with his son by giving it a transgenerational twist. In a passage describing family gatherings during which the father and his “numerous brothers” would “talk about politics and literature” and then “swap books” (8), Kureishi remembers that the “intellectual tension between [the Kureishi brothers] was high, almost murderous, as though they were wrestling” (8; emphasis added). Connecting the dots between past and present, between his memories of his father’s ambivalence towards him and the sibling rivalry he reads into An Indian Adolescence, Kureishi comes to realize that his own role in his “father’s history and fantasy” (35) was in fact quite similar to the one his father had always identified with: Reading father’s book I am becoming aware that, partly, I was being made to feel as he had felt. He might want me to be successful […] but he was afraid of me becoming too powerful or rivalrous. He didn’t, for instance, want me to turn into his brother who was more talented, and moreover, something of a boaster and a show-off, a man who could bear being enviable. If I was to be a brother to dad, I had to be the weak, the little one, the role he had thrust on him. (52)
To return to my suggestion that the relationship between issues of postcoloniality, genre, authorship, and (af)filiation gains new momentum as Kureishi introduces a third player — namely Omar — into My Ear at His Heart, it is significant that Omar’s autobiographical writings cover the same period as Kureishi’s father’s fiction, yet give a very different account of pre-Partition India. A few pages into Omar’s Once Upon a Time, Kureishi already realizes that the British Raj — which, in Omar’s words, was “founded on the certainty of a racial and moral superiority over the natives” — is in fact the “central character of his [uncle’s] account”. The “political link” (37) which is crucial to Omar’s memoir also expresses itself through cricket because, in Kureishi’s interpretation of it, “cricket is political; it is where the British can be beaten at their own game” (40). Needless to say, Omar’s emphasis on politics causes his book to stand in stark contrast to An Indian Adolescence which, although it depicts demonstrations against the Raj in a pre-Partition context of communal tensions, foregrounds its protagonist’s profound feeling of inadequacy in relation to both his father and his elder brother Mahmood. Returning to Mark Stein’s remark that Kureishi’s first two novels are “self-consciously post-colonial” (2004: 115), it becomes all the more apparent that Kureishi’s combined reading of Omar’s autobiography and his father’s novel allows him to comment on both the genesis and the interpretative impasses at play in the reception of his own work. For, in many ways, Omar incarnates the illusion of a perfect match between postcoloniality and postcolonialism: not only is he successful and bankable — he is even the author of books that are “bestsellers” in Pakistan (33) — but his writings are also transparently political, even “self-consciously post-colonial”, to borrow Stein’s formulation again. As Kureishi makes it clear, for Omar, “emotional strife is focused around colonialism and cricket. It is the British, not the fathers or the brothers, who have the power he wants to escape. It is into ‘the British’ that [Omar] puts the bad things” (46–47). Perhaps unsurprisingly in such a context, Omar is linked — literally and “literarily” so — to the first phase of Kureishi’s career, a brief period during which the British Asian writer was also embodying the illusion of a flawless idyll between politically-oriented reading practices and the literary/cultural market — that is, in Ranasinha’s words, a period during which Kureishi was “happy to assume the position [of cultural translator] without unpacking its implications” (2007: 222). Indeed, as Kureishi reveals in My Ear at His Heart, his uncle facilitated his career by presenting him at age 14 to Anthony Blond — who is emphatically described in the text as “[Jean] Genet’s British publisher” (149). Also, Omar indirectly initiated the writing of My Beautiful Laundrette (1986/1985) by inviting his nephew in the early 1980s to his home in Karachi, a space perhaps perceived by Kureishi as a safe haven from his father’s ambivalence towards him at that time, as his father “had passionately complicated feelings about Pakistan” after his departure from the subcontinent and consequently “never went [there], not even for a holiday” (59). Significantly, it is at Omar’s place that the aspiring writer would bring his screenplay into existence by combining “scenes which were taking place across the courtyard from [his] room, transpos[ing] [them] to Britain, and mix[ing] [them] in with elements from [his] past” (86). Last but not least, Omar is of course the name of the protagonist in My Beautiful Laundrette. 9 It was a screenplay whose film adaptation by Stephen Frears (1985) made Kureishi famous overnight — thus causing him to experience success and occupy what could be called an “Omar-like role”, which, Kureishi remarks elsewhere, was “shocking” for both [his father and himself]” (Kumar, 2001: 121). Significantly, however, Kureishi’s identification with his uncle — and, by extension, with the mandate of embodying an impeccable idyll between postcolonialism and postcoloniality — appears to be consigned to the domain of the monologic imagination (and to that of the generically-hermetic, to refer back to my previous discussion about Kureishi’s generically-hybrid representations of his father). Sympathetic as he is to Omar’s political approach, Kureishi nonetheless highlights the dialogic character of his father’s novel, which throws into sharp relief the monologic nature of Omar’s autobiography. Indeed, for Kureishi, Once Upon a Time “contains no other voices, either other parts of [Omar] or other speaking characters, which would be the case in a novel. As my father seemed to be insisting”, he adds, “the novel, being a conflictual form, is a natural outlet for drama, for internal dispute and multiple viewpoints” (38). By associating the novel (and by extension, his father) with the promise of a multidirectional perspective, Kureishi further suggests that Omar’s embrace of autobiography might also be linked to a form of short-sightedness. As he reflects on the aptly-titled Once Upon a Time, the writer indeed comments that Omar uncritically — and even unrealistically — relays his own father’s self-fitting belief that the Kureishi family was a “unit: there was no sibling rivalry” (38). And Kureishi wonders: “How could there not be? What is [Omar] afraid of seeing here? There are always two brothers — Romulus and Remus, Cain and Abel — and one of them murders the other” (43). As Kureishi unearths a second novel by his father, The Redundant Man, Omar is further linked to the constraints of the monologic imagination — which also intersects with the rush to construct a prefabricated biographical connection between text and writer. Ignoring the generic anatomy of his brother’s novel (and implicitly validating his nephew’s dubious project of reading his father’s fiction autobiographically), Omar laconically comments on The Redundant Man by saying to Kureishi: “It’s about him” (115).
Staging readerly incompetence
To return to matters of dialogic imagination, in his reading of My Ear at His Heart, Frédéric Regard suggests that Kureishi’s book valorizes the “erring disposition of the artist” (2011: 155) and emblematizes “an ethics of dialogue and interaction, which accepts the possibility of error and misinterpretation” (2011: 151). Still, because Regard never differentiates between the works written by the father — and consequently never distinguishes between Kureishi’s reading experiences — the critic ends up reinscribing a father–son opposition that My Ear at His Heart very much complicates, both at the thematic and structural levels. Also, Regard tries perhaps a bit too hard to read Kureishi’s 2004 text as “a response to Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism” (2011: 153) through which the writer would cast himself, in opposition to his father, as the one who is able to “accommodate otherness into writing” (2011: 159). One of the main implications of such a reading is that it ends up oversimplifying “the lessons in listening for surprises”, as Doris Sommer (1999: xi) has stated in a different context, which Kureishi’s book eventually generates. A key “lesson” of My Ear at His Heart is that the monologic imagination — or, as seen from the other end of the telescope, the potential for “accommodat[ing] otherness into writing” (Regard, 2011: 159) — can never be unambiguously affixed to the father or the son (and by extension, to the text or the reader/critic); rather it comes to be finally located in between them. Indeed, as I will suggest in the conclusion of this article, such a “lesson” is very much associated with the ways in which the horizon of expectations linked to the assumed “biographical connection” between text and postcolonial writer can be redirected in order to “accommodate otherness” into reading. Significantly in such a context, while the violence of interpretation at play in Kureishi’s “reading project” was problematized only implicitly when it came to An Indian Adolescence, his reading of The Redundant Man now gives him ample occasion to lash out against his father, in ways that override the notion of a necessary distance between reader and writer and consequently annihilate the very category of otherness.
In Kureishi’s understanding of it, The Redundant Man — by contrast to An Indian Adolescence, which “is written from the point of view of a child in conflict with his parents” — is “partly about a father in conflict with his children” (117). The novel is set in early 1980s Britain, in a period when “when unemployment was high” (117) and Thatcher did not hesitate to declare that immigrants were “swamping” the country. It focuses on Yusef, a 50-year-old Pakistani man who is made redundant but becomes — “rather too quickly to be believable” (123), Kureishi notes — a successful cornershop businessman. The Redundant Man is far from being a success story, though, as it deals with a man utterly alienated from his children — whom he perceives to be “too British” (132) — and his wife, who is very religious and insistently tries to “return her husband to Islam” (133). Kureishi is highly critical of the novel’s plot, of the “repetitive and sadistic” (118) nature of some scenes between Yusef and his boss and of the ways in which his father does not even “[bother] to fill out Yusef’s story” (136). As such, he notes that, unlike An Indian Adolescence, The Redundant Man is not a “book for others” (117). Indeed, according to Kureishi, the novel expresses a “desperation without any outside referent” (117). Still anxious to read his father into Yusef, Kureishi notes that, “if Yusef is a self-portrait, it is a cruel and insensitive one, like someone bullying themselves” (132). At one point, the younger writer attempts to explain the “uncontrolled” (117) feel of his father’s novel by returning to his own unrelenting experience of racism as a boy in the Britain of the 1980s — “the kind which [makes] you lose faith in the rationality and justice of the British political system” (129). Nonetheless, in the same way as his father does not seem to be able to give coherence to Yusef’s feelings of failure and uselessness in his fiction, Kureishi eventually discards the hypothesis that racism might be the main explanation for the chaotic nature of his father’s story world, for racism was experienced by his father at a less impressionable age than his own British-born generation. Unable as Kureishi is to find any interpretative key to The Redundant Man, any more than he is able to use his autobiographical reading of the novel to fulfil his “quest […] for the reasons his father lived the semi-broken life he did” (35), the writer likens his reading experience to that of “watching a parent have a breakdown” (136). But what is specifically interesting for my purpose is that Kureishi’s experience of “witnessing parental breakdown by reading”, so to speak, also ends up taking the dubious auto/biographical premise of My Ear at His Heart to breaking point. Rereading his father’s novel, Kureishi suddenly comes to believe he is a character in his father’s story — namely the son: “Here I am, according to dad, or rather, Yusef: ‘I looked in disgust at his unshaven face, his grubby black sweater, greasy jeans and crushed white shirt’. The son he has created is ‘a brown cockney bum’” (136). What is striking in this passage is that the tension between Kureishi’s identification and (dis)identification with “the brown cockney bum” reintroduces the blurring between reality and fiction (“according to dad, or rather Yusef”), which, again, invites Kureishi to read his father’s novel autobiographically. Yet, it is only in the last chapter of My Ear at His Heart that the father truly reasserts his position as a novelist while paradoxically validating and undermining his son’s interpretative competence. As Kureishi excavates a third manuscript in his mother’s house — reluctantly so, as he thinks his project is over and done with — he comes to understand that every novel by his father is a variation on the same theme: that of having been the outcome of a marriage gone sour and brutal at the time of his conception, so much so that his own mother attempted to abort him. What follows is that all the characters in The Redundant Man, including the son, are retrospectively revealed to be derived from his paternal grandparents, since Kureishi now realizes that his father “pass[ed] his own children onto his parents for the purpose of the story” (227). The final irony of My Ear at His Heart is that the revelation of Kureishi’s readerly limitations here coincides with the discovery of his father’s subjectivity, which reintroduces the notion of a necessary distance between father and son — and by extension, between text and reader. Finally recasting his father as “an unwanted child — a shade therefore, belonging nowhere forever, destined always to be incurably lonely” (227) — Kureishi suggests that the “biographical connection” between text and reader is but a fiction of referentiality that fills out our inability to get to the heart of postcolonial lives. My Ear at His Heart thus stages a form of readerly incompetence that travels back to us and makes us question the autobiographical presuppositions we might bring to the act of interpreting texts by “minority” or “postcolonial” authors.
