As I grew older, my need for that form of youthfully libidinous work ebbed and my access to a greater variety of writers, working from a range of worlds, not always Western, answered new questions in my heart.
Illustration/Uday Mohite
The day after Christmas, the writer Hanif Kureishi had a fall and he now lies, mostly paralysed, in an Italian hospital. Remarkably, within a few days of surgery, he has been tweeting a kind of diary (via his son) on his Twitter account.
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I encountered the work of Hanif Kureishi in my late teens, some years after reading Rushdie and Indian writers in English. If the latter excited me, Kureishi galvanised me. The wit, vigour, sexual edge, the hyperkinetic contemporaneity of My Beautiful Laundrette and The Buddha of Suburbia, were like a soundtrack for my own young quests and restlessness. Over the years though, I lost interest in many of the writers who had first sharpened my appetites. I grew impatient and even bored of their masculine insularity. As I grew older, my need for that form of youthfully libidinous work ebbed and my access to a greater variety of writers, working from a range of worlds, not always Western, answered new questions in my heart.
So Kureishi’s hospital bed tweets are the first things I might have read by him after (what else) his novella Intimacy. I avoided it at first. My cowardice about death and suffering, my loathing of inspiration porn and my fear that I will be unmoved, thereby proving I am a bad person, at first kept me from reading. But when I finally did so, I was quite astonished.
The tweets are spare, elegant, painful, and often funny. “Since I became a vegetable I have never been so busy.” “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.” “People love to be kind and help one another. They also resent their dependence on each other and the fact they can’t do everything for themselves… It makes everybody mad, it changes everything. There is guilt, rage and resentment.” “Since I lost my body, to look at, to smell and contemplate the bodies of others in such detail has become an aesthetic pleasure for me.” And eventually, the sign-offs “You are keeping me alive. Stay with me, don’t let me go. In these shitty times, your loving cripple/writer, Hanif.”
Often when they say art saves our souls, there’s a tinge of the religious, as if there is salvation involved. But maybe this is a more literal statement, maybe art saves up our souls, like a fixed deposit. These Twitter threads are mini personal essays: the quest for self-awareness as control and agency in the face of dependence and the portent of its impending meanings. The infinite curiosity about the self that makes some writers see themselves from outside and inside simultaneously; as characters in an unfolding story. How voracious is human desire, that keeps us alive, and prevents the possibility of “dying from inside”. How the quest for pleasure— in words, in self-expression—surges to reveal our wish to be loved for our ability, while being able to speak of disability. That contradictory way artists have of giving all of themselves while also subsuming all into themselves, which perhaps makes art so urgent, and wonderful and imperfect. Kureishi tweets that “literature is a vulgar, bastard form—you can put anything in it”. Or you can put it in anything, as the tweets show us.
Paromita Vohra is an award-winning Mumbai-based filmmaker, writer and curator working with fiction and non-fiction. Reach her at paromita.vohra@mid-day.com
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