FATIMA BHUTTO: NUOVI RE DEL MONDO

Dal 7 aprile 2023 è in distribuzione nelle librerie italiane il saggio Nuovi re del mondo. Corrispondenze da Bollywood, dal Dizi e dal K-pop, di Fatima Bhutto, pubblicato da Minimum Fax. Fatima Bhutto, scrittrice pachistana, è imparentata con nomi noti della politica del suo Paese. Benazir Bhutto, ad esempio, è sua zia. 

Nel comunicato ufficiale si legge:

'Immaginari inediti si stanno affiancando a quello occidentale sulla scena globale. Un vasto movimento culturale pone una sfida importante ai grandi brand della cultura pop americana, da Hollywood a McDonald’s. Nuovi re del mondo è il racconto degli sviluppi recenti della cultura di massa: i film indiani di Bollywood, le soap opera turche (dizi) e la musica pop della Corea del Sud, nota come K-pop. Mixando con cura modernità e valori tradizionali, in contesti urbanizzati sempre più ampi, queste fabbriche dei sogni stanno creando un pop differente, in grado di superare i confini locali e diffondersi in luoghi e culture molto diversi.

Negli ultimi anni la band di maggiore successo al mondo, i BTS, è coreana, i blockbuster indiani hanno una popolarità che va oltre le frontiere nazionali, e le telenovele turche riscontrano un successo che unisce il Medioriente all’Italia, alla Spagna, all’America Latina. In un ampio reportage, l’autrice traccia il profilo di Shah Rukh Khan, per molti versi la star più popolare al mondo; va dietro le quinte di Magnificent Century, il più importante tra i dizi, seguito da oltre duecento milioni di persone in 43 paesi; e scopre come è iniziato il K-pop in Corea del Sud. Un’importante testimonianza dei tanti poli di una cultura pop che prende forma davanti ai nostri occhi'.

Nella prefazione al saggio si legge:

'Se le storie della produzione turca e di quella coreana sono tutto sommato recenti, con mercati interni di dimensioni limitate da superare con una studiata politica di esportazioni sostenuta attivamente dal governo, l’India ha una tradizione molto più articolata e un mercato interno decisamente più grande e autosufficiente. Fatima Bhutto dedica buona parte del suo Nuovi re del mondo a ricostruirne le fasi principali mettendole in relazione ai cambiamenti politici interni e, soprattutto, alla svolta neoliberista degli anni Novanta, incarnata cinematograficamente da alcuni eclatanti casi di divismo attoriale, e in particolar modo dalla figura complessa di Shah Rukh Khan, incontrata da Bhutto a Dubai alternando al suo profilo squarci di dialogo che rivelano la dimensione quotidiana del mito. Un mito che vive non solo nel vicino Medio Oriente ma in Paesi lontani che nulla hanno a che fare con l’India, come il Perù, che consuma il cinema di Bollywood fin dagli anni Cinquanta, dove Khan, tra gli altri, incarna un modello vincente per le popolazioni andine, strappate dalla loro terra e gettate nei meandri della capitale a condurre vite spesso miserabili'.

Video promozionale di New Kings of the World. Dispatches from Bollywood, Dizi, and K-pop (2019)

Aggiornamento del 3 luglio 2023 - Vi segnalo l'intervista concessa da Fatima Bhutto a Federico Chiara, pubblicata oggi da Vogue Italia:

'Cosa ti ha spinto a scrivere questo libro?

Volevo esplorare la politica della cultura, più specificamente il modo in cui la cultura viene usata come forma di potere. L’hard power è fatto di carri armati, pistole e guerra, il soft power è Elvis e la Coca-Cola e il rock and roll. Trasporta le idee in modo gentile ma non innocente.

Perché siamo sempre più attratti da culture pop non occidentali? E perché pensi che queste ultime stiano perdendo colpi?

Il processo di globalizzazione è cambiato tanto ma ha anche tradito molte promesse: è stato detto che avrebbe portato ricchezza e opportunità per tutti, che ci avrebbe collegato attraverso gli oceani e avrebbe trasformato in meglio le nostre esistenza. È successo, ma solo per alcuni. A milioni di persone è stata venduta la stessa promessa, col risultato che hanno lasciato le loro case nei villaggi per trasferirsi nelle grandi città aspettandosi di essere trattate come capitani d’industria, ma lì si sono trovate alienate, isolate, abbandonate. (...)

Parli di migranti che affrontano spostamenti a breve e a lungo raggio, dunque.

La maggior parte delle migrazioni nel mondo di oggi non riguarda tanto le persone che abbandonano l’Africa o l’Asia per trasferirsi in Europa, ma chi si sposta all’interno dei propri Paesi, muovendosi dai villaggi alle città. E la cultura pop occidentale non descrive questa difficoltà, questa sofferenza che stanno vivendo centinaia di milioni di migranti. Ma gli spettacoli turchi sì, gli spettacoli nigeriani sì, Bollywood sì, parlano di quella solitudine e umiliazione e di quanto sia difficile vivere una vita dignitosa nel mondo moderno. I film o le serie occidentali parlano di supereroi, sesso, miliardari. Non parlano più di ciò che il mondo sta affrontando.

Bollywood ha un’industria dell’intrattenimento molto ben avviata: quali sono gli ingredienti del suo duraturo successo?

Quando nel 2019 ho scritto Nuovi re del mondo, Bollywood era un’industria diversa. Se dovessi riscriverlo oggi non la includerei, e ti spiego la ragione. Fino al 2010 Bollywood è stato uno specchio dell’India riflettendo, di volta in volta, l’ottimismo per l’indipendenza nei film degli anni 40-60, le lotte contro la corruzione e il potere negli anni 70, lo shock del neoliberismo negli anni 90. Oggi è ancora uno specchio dell’India, ma l’India è cambiata: al governo c’è un partito indù che ha una storia di violenza contro le minoranze - si pensi ai massacri del Gujarat contro i musulmani nei primi anni 2000 o alla violenza contro i cristiani in Assam oggi. I film mainstream ora riflettono questo: sono solo noiosa propaganda, non arte'.

HANIF KUREISHI RICOVERATO AL POLICLINICO GEMELLI DI ROMA

Lo scorso 26 dicembre lo scrittore britannico di origine pachistana Hanif Kureishi, in vacanza con la moglie Isabella D'Amico (nipote della sceneggiatrice Suso Cecchi D'Amico) a Roma, era stato ricoverato d'urgenza al Policlinico Gemelli. Qualche minuto fa Kureishi, tuttora in ospedale, ha condiviso un messaggio nel suo profilo Twitter, aggiornando i lettori circa le sue condizioni di salute:

'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. I had just seen Mo Salah score against Aston Villa, sipped half a beer, when I began to feel dizzy. I lent forward and put my head between my legs; I woke up a few minutes later in a pool of blood, my neck in a grotesquely twisted position, my wife on her knees beside me. I then experienced what can only be described 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. It occurred to me then that there was no coordination between what was left of my mind and what remained of my body. I had become divorced from myself. I believed I was dying. I believed I had three breaths left. It seemed like a miserable and ignoble way to die. Every evening before I go upstairs, put on the dishwasher, open the window and join my wife, I wonder how more opportunities there will be for these domestic felicities. From the floor my wife heard my frantic shouting. She saved my life and kept me calm. For a few days I was profoundly traumatised, altered and unrecognisable to myself. I am in the hospital. I cannot move move my arms and legs. 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. I have sensation and some movement in all my limbs, and I will begin physio and rehabilitation and soon as possible. I want to thank the doctors and nurses at the Gemelli hospital, Rome, for all their extraordinary kindness, competence and care. At the moment, it is unclear whether I will ever be able to walk again, or whether I’ll ever be able to hold a pen, if there is any assistance that I would be grateful for, it would be with regard to voice assisted hardware and software, which will allow me to watch, write - and begin work again, and continue some kind of half life. If you have any ideas about how you might help, please comment below and my son will be in touch. I want to thank all my readers for their love and support over the years. 

Love Hanif'.

Tutto lo staff di Cinema Hindi augura ad Hanif Kureishi un rapido, sostanziale miglioramento.

Aggiornamento del 31 gennaio 2023 - Hanif sta pubblicando numerosi messaggi dedicati al nostro Paese. Ne riporto solo alcuni:

* 8 gennaio: 'So now, in this somewhat desolate Roman hospital, in a suburb of Rome, I am writing these words to try and reach you, and I am at the same time trying to connect with Isabella, to make a new relationship out of an old one. You’d think I’d have enough on my plate'.

* 9 gennaio: 'Not understanding Italian is frustrating, but I try to ask very simple and straightforward questions like, “When did you know you wanted to be a nurse or a doctor?” or “When was the moment you realised you fell in love?”.'

* 10 gennaio: 'This morning three very beautiful Italian physiotherapists came to my room. They (...) thrust me into a wheelchair. I was turned around and for the first time I was able to see the other side of my room. I saw the Italian sky through the window, some trees and a cloud and few birds. For the first time I believed that things might begin to improve. My heart is like a singing bird. The physios left and another came in. A very gentle man, handsome, who also works for Roma Football Club. (...) He caressed my fingers and my feet, he opened my hands and pulsated them gently. I began to feel that I had a whole body and not just a patchwork of random pieces thrown together as if by Mary Shelley’s imagination. (...) 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. (...) The women too of course, with their long black hair and magnificent eyes. (...) I’ve enjoyed being in this hospital. Everyone here has treated me with respect and courtesy'. 

* 11 gennaio: 'The second most important event in my early writing life was in 1982. I was working at the Arts Centre, Riverside Studios in Hammersmith. One evening the guest of honour was Italo Calvino, who was introduced by Salman Rushdie, who I met for the first time that evening'.

* 13 gennaio: 'When the male nurse got to me I was delighted to see, for the first time, an array of hot Italian pastries and cheeses and some freshly squeezed orange juice. (...) I will also be able to meet others whose bodies are busted in different ways. My Italian is not so good but I hope to be able to bring some of those accounts to you, my new audience, if the patients agree'.

* 17 gennaio: 'This is when I decide I want to become an Italian citizen. I want an Italian passport. I decide to apply for one tomorrow. How could anyone not want to live in Italy?'.

* 31 gennaio: 'Here in the hospital, I have seen a lot of Italian women - nurses, doctors, patients and visitors. Every day I see many nurses, but because they are wearing masks, I can only study their eyes, hair and eyebrows. I have to confess, I have acquired a knowledge of the Italian eyebrow which is extensive and detailed. (...) I should stress here that the Italian male also attends to his eyebrows with calculated care. This is not something I have noticed in the British male. We are more primitive, except in British soap operas, where the male eyebrow seems to be given particular attention. Italian women take good care of themselves. Everything about them is neat and planned, and the women who are not in work uniform - the visitors - dress brilliantly and vividly, both to express themselves, and to show others who they think they are. They wear a lot of clashing colours, which is very stylish, and confident'.

Aggiornamento del 19 giugno 2023 - Hanif scrive: 'I will be returning to London after six months of hospitalization in Rome at the Santa Lucia IRCCS. I have been treated with professionalism and kindness by all the personnel of the Neurorehabilitation Unit 1. I am grateful to Italy’s national healthcare system for providing free cure and rehabilitation for me and for all other patients'.

HANIF KUREISHI: EVERY 10 YEARS YOU BECOME SOMEONE ELSE

[Archivio]

Vi segnalo un corposo articolo del 2014 dedicato ad Hanif Kureishi, scrittore britannico di origine pachistana da parte di padre. Di seguito riporto un lungo estratto. Hanif Kureishi interview: 'Every 10 years you become someone else', Robert McCrum, The Guardian, 19 gennaio 2014:

'To the New York Times, he's "a kind of post-colonial Philip Roth"; for the Times, he is one of "50 greatest British writers since 1945". (...) He has just sold his manuscripts to the British Library. Unlike some, he hasn't left for America and still lives in Shepherd's Bush, west London, where he continues to write fiction and screenplays. (...) Not many contemporary writers pull off that double, especially after 30 years. But that's the thing about Kureishi: he has always performed in many dimensions (short stories, essays, screenplays), projecting a mischievous air of jeopardy and transgression. (...) From a career of thinking and talking about himself, the public Kureishi has morphed into someone he can happily discuss as a kind of alter ego. In the past, he has said that he gives "at least one interview a week. Over a period of time you work up an account of yourself and one day you find you even believe it. Finally, it has become the story of your life." Exactly so. 

You might say that he's been playing a double game since the day he was born in Bromley to an English mother and a Pakistani father on 5 December 1954. As a "child of empire", the young Kureishi grew up in two worlds, western and eastern. Originally from India and later Pakistan, his father's family are what he calls "upper-middle-class". He continues: "My grandfather, an army doctor, was a colonel in the Indian army. Big family. Servants. Tennis court. Cricket. Everything. My father went to the Cathedral school that Salman Rushdie went to. Later, in Pakistan, my family were close to the Bhuttos. My uncle Omar was a newspaper columnist and the manager of the Pakistan cricket team."

After partition in 1947, the Kureishi family went to Pakistan to create a new society, the Islamic state called Pakistan, seeing themselves like American pioneers. "Basically," he says now, "I am a sort of English kid, but I was always linked to the empire. Not only am I the child of a mixed marriage, but I always had that history."

His father, Rafiushan (Shanu), had taken the boat to England to study law. When the money ran out, Shanu landed a desk job at the Pakistani embassy, met his future wife, Audrey (Buss), on a double date and ended up in south London with two children, Hanif and Yasmin, eking out a life of permanent disappointment, writing novels on the kitchen table, but getting turned down. "He had wanted to be a writer and an artist," says his son, introducing a characteristic note of frosty candour into the conversation, "and he hadn't achieved that."

Although his father's fate must have been a dreadful warning, Kureishi looked to literature for self-enlightenment and self-advancement. The first prerequisite for any artist, Kureishi had something to say, and a burning need to say it, reinforced by 50s Bromley. "It was rough down there," he remembers. "The racism of the 50s and 60s that we, unlike France and Germany, have grown out of, was overt. You were made aware of your difference all the time. So you began to think, 'Where does this come from? What does it mean?'"

Kureishi was confused, but singular. He was another kind of pioneer, the first of many "writers of colour" to have been born here. "I was born in Bromley and grew up in the suburbs," he says. "V.S. Naipaul and Salman Rushdie were born elsewhere. By the age of 14, I'm a Pakistani kid who likes Jimi Hendrix, takes drugs and wants sex. How do you make a book out of this?" He goes on, slightly professorial. "You have to invent a style and a world. It was a new kind of English realism." In the past, Kureishi has admitted "denying my Pakistani self", so this is a new tune. Challenged about this, he retreats to the conundrum of his identity: "I just didn't know what to do with it or what use it could be to me. My dad said, 'You should change your name. You could pass.'"

At home, in Bromley, the family hinterland had no relevance or meaning. Here, he was just "a Paki". (...) "We realised that we were just Pakis and niggers. There were a lot of skinheads. My dad was persecuted as he came home from work and he thought it was all too difficult. But I liked my name. I couldn't change it to Pete Brown. So what I had to do," he continues, "was uncover who I really was. You saw that a lot in the 70s: blacks, gays, women. It all came out of (...) the idea that ordinary people have their own history."

But this was not easy. Kureishi's grandfather and uncles were far from ordinary. "They were here all the time," he remembers. "My grandfather, the colonel, was terrifying. A hard-living, hard-drinking gambler. Womanising. Around him it was like The Godfather. They drank and they gossiped. The women would come and go." A version of the young Kureishi's life eventually found its way into both My Beautiful Laundrette and The Buddha of Suburbia. Another rendering of his grandfather recurs in the character of Mamoon Azam, the tyrannical old writer in The Last Word. At the same time, playing that double game, it also becomes a version of Kureishi's literary self.

Books were essential to his assimilation. It was through his life as a writer that he began to discover who he was and to reconcile the warring parts of himself. The doubleness persisted. He would be suburban and metropolitan. Arrogant and shy. An entertainer and a spectator. A bad boy and a good son. A professor and a hooligan. Provocative and complicit. Hankering after the academy, yet living on the street. Juxtaposing high art and popular culture. Quoting Beckett and Kafka, but celebrating (...) reggae and pop music.

Late-70s Britain was on the turn, but the big story, the making of a multicultural society - "the empire strikes back" - was still in progress. Kureishi was just one of several young emerging talents ("Commonwealth writers") who were beginning to find a voice within English society. Then Salman Rushdie and Midnight's Children burst on to the scene in 1980. Kureishi remains competitive with Rushdie. "I wasn't influenced by Midnight's Children," he insists when I bring this up. Really? "No. It came too late. There was no 'magic realism' - no magic only realism - in Bromley. I was influenced by P.G. Wodehouse and Philip Roth." He moves the conversation away from Rushdie, to stress his own credentials. "I like to think I'm a comic writer, in the English comic tradition." (...) But then, to reinforce his sober literary self-image, he adds: "I would not want just to be funny. It would be really tiresome to have to do that all the time. I like writing the sad bits. There are no sad bits in Wodehouse."

Kureishi's quest for meaning somehow had to make sense of many sad bits, some awkward bits, and the kinds of bits that are foreign to the pages of Wodehouse: politics, pop culture, sex, drugs and race. "How do you make a story out of that?" he challenges. Kureishi's path to a mature coherence was tortuous, a bigger struggle than he wants to let on. "Of course, any writer has to invent a style that contains them," he remarks, "and find a new way of putting together these things about yourself that are puzzling." Literature, as so often in the past, became the outsider's salvation. (...) "Being a writer seemed the way to go." As a teenager, already writing novels and plays, he got taken up by the flamboyant publisher Anthony Blond. At first, he wrote pornography under the name of Antonia French. His work has always revelled in characters either searching for, or fleeing from, sexual fulfilment.

Moving towards the mainstream, he wrote plays for the Hampstead theatre and the Soho Poly. By the time he was 18, he was working at the Royal Court - "I'd got out of Bromley quite early" - and meeting a brilliant new theatrical generation. (...) "We were very politicised," he says. "We called ourselves black at the Royal Court. Even the women called themselves black." Then, discovering he did not like working in the theatre, because he really wanted to be a novelist, he says he "got stuck. I wasn't going to make a living. It was all going off a bit". Finally - eureka! - Channel 4 asked him to write a film, his lucky break.

The script of My Beautiful Laundrette reached the director Stephen Frears, whom Kureishi describes as "my best mate", adding that "Frears found a style for My Beautiful Laundrette, which was seriously overwritten, which made it comic and theatrical". Kureishi's vision of gay skinheads and Thatcherite Pakistani businessmen and their women was a revelation. My Beautiful Laundrette was nominated for an Oscar and won the New York Critics' best screenplay award.

1985 was Kureishi's year, the moment when the disjointed fragments of life and art fell into place. At last, he had found a way to be funny, edgy, true and original. He had found his place. He was just 31. Reflecting on this moment, Kureishi now speaks in a rather grandiose way that he has probably used often in writing classes (he's a professor of creative writing at Kingston University) and in interviews with foreign journalists. "In the early 1980s," he remarks with that peculiar detachment, as if describing someone other than himself, "it was Midnight's Children and My Beautiful Laundrette that changed things. You really felt that British writing had found a new voice and a new way. It had to. It couldn't go on... there had to be something new."

Inspired by the success of My Beautiful Laundrette and motivated to give the British Pakistanis of his generation a distinctive articulation, Kureishi focused his imagination on fiction. "I had always wanted to be a novelist," he says, speaking with quiet passion of the part played by The Buddha of Suburbia in the making of multicultural Britain. "If Britain is a cultural force in Europe - which I think it is - then that's because of multiculturalism and diversity," he says. "I'm proud to have seen that happen. Somehow, Bromley in the 50s and 60s did not boil over. It has been an extraordinary revolution when you think how class-ridden and deferential it used to be. Britain became a multicultural society by mistake. No one ever thought, 'How do we make a multicultural society?'"

The Buddha of Suburbia, coming so soon after My Beautiful Laundrette, put Kureishi in a unique position. He was both a popular bestseller and critically acclaimed. He had made those links between Bombay and Bromley, reconciling the one to the other. Within British culture, he was both an icon of multiculturalism and its gadfly, especially to the rising generation of new Britons. Zadie Smith remembers her first reading of The Buddha of Suburbia, aged 15: "There was one copy going round our school like contraband. I read it in one sitting in the playground and missed all my classes. I'd never read a book about anyone remotely like me before."

The public phase of Kureishi's quest for meaning and identity was over. Indeed, it would be Zadie Smith in White Teeth who would make the significant creative advance on to the new ground broken by The Buddha of Suburbia. Kureishi was personally rich ("a little overwhelmed at the number of cheques that turned up at my council flat"), but the well of his imagination was depleted. Or, to put it another way, he had possibly expended so much creative energy in achieving the literary synthesis so dazzlingly displayed in Laundrette and The Buddha of Suburbia that there was no more fuel in his tank. Creatively, he had made a unique statement, based on a profound interrogation of himself. Like many literary pioneers, he could break out of the matrix of his imagination only with the greatest difficulty.

As the 80s became the 90s, Kureishi reached an impasse. His perfect pitch became discordant and uncertain. His second novel, The Black Album (1995), a satirical look at fundamentalism after the fatwa, was less successful. Kureishi found he could no longer hunt with the hounds and run with the hare as he'd liked. "My sense of myself changed," he says. The two events that compromised his role as an enfant terrible who was also a spokesman both occurred in the private arena, with his family.

First, he became the father of twin boys; then his father died. "I found I was shoved into the next zone," he says. "I'd been this kid with long hair, hanging around in London, taking drugs and having sex with girls. Suddenly, I was getting up at seven in the morning and taking my kids to the park. My life switched. I'd become an adult. These kids were looking to me as a father and I was responsible. I could no longer write books from the point of view of a 17-year-old."

It says a lot about Kureishi's investment in that teenage self that it was not until his 40s that the boyish Hanif could make the transition into adulthood. At this point, apropos his new life as a father, he says something that possibly holds the key to the inner man. "That's what's great about being a writer," he remarks, out of the blue. "Every 10 years you become somebody else."

But the somebody else he became during the 90s and into the millennium was not a writer at home in the world. Kureishi was still in search of his identity and role. His muse was still the imp of the perverse. He had exploited that in public. Now, much more controversially, he would attempt it in private. In The Buddha of Suburbia, of course, he had mined his family hinterland. Now, he would get up close and personal. (...) After the publication of The Buddha of Suburbia, his sister, Yasmin, had accused him, in the Guardian, of selling the family "down the line" with his portrait of their parents and grandparents. "My father," she says, "felt that Hanif robbed him of his dignity." Father and son did not speak for many months. Today, in Shepherd's Bush, he makes a point of telling me that he "spoke to my mum this morning".

That was as nothing compared with the furore about Intimacy, a novella about a man leaving his wife and two sons, a self-lacerating fiction that some felt to be too shockingly close to home (Kureishi had just left his partner, Tracey Scoffield, and their twin sons). He won't talk about this damaging episode now beyond wryly acknowledging that it "put me in trouble with the chicks".

It was after this crisis that he embarked on a programme of psychotherapy with the analyst and writer Adam Phillips, a twice-weekly relationship he treasures. Inevitably, he must make light of it: "You start to feel better after about 10 years," he says. Therapy has absorbed much of Kureishi's psychic energy. In a recent essay, he describes how far his fiction has come from his Bromley days: "I'm interested in the area where philosophy, literature and psychoanalysis cross over - the mind in the world."

The more Kureishi turned inward, the feebler the creative dividends. His 2008 novel, Something to Tell You, was described by the New York Times as "a sprawling romp". From another point of view, it was notably unedited and artistically unfocused, a casual anthology of trademark themes: kinky sex, metropolitan drugginess and suburban decadence braided with snippets of philosophy and psychotherapy.

His new novel, however, The Last Word, returns him to his personal hinterland. Mamoon Azam is an eminent novelist who has authorised an ambitious younger writer, Harry Johnson, to undertake his biography, in the hope that it will rescue his career and reputation. The idea that the end of a life is as interesting as its beginning is a fruitful one, with echoes of the relationship between V.S. Naipaul and his biographer Patrick French. But, at heart, it's really a commentary on the complicated inner turmoil of Kureishi's own career.

As usual, the epigrammatic Kureishi has a good line in good lines. There are sharp asides about England, (a "wilderness of monkeys"), and art ("anything good has to be a little pornographic"), with references to Orwell, Johnny Rotten and Wodehouse. Mamoon is an engaging monster, drawn from Kureishi's grandfather, but also an idealisation of Kureishi's alter ego, an internationally respected literary man. The closing lines of the novel tell us all we need to know about Kureishi's current self-image: "He'd been a writer, a maker of worlds, a teller of important truths. This was a way of changing things, of living well, and creating freedom".'

MOHSIN HAMID: L'ULTIMO UOMO BIANCO (THE LAST WHITE MAN)

Un paio di settimane fa è stato distribuito nelle librerie The Last White Man, l'ultimo romanzo di Mohsin Hamid. Vi segnalo l'articolo ‘I write more with my ears than my eyes,’ says Mohsin Hamid, di Nandini Nair, pubblicato da Open il 19 agosto 2022:

'Over the years, Mohsin Hamid has mastered the art of the big little novel. In the slimmest of novels, the 51-year-old grapples with the heaviest of subjects. His themes have spanned the large issues of the 21st century - terrorism and immigration, racism and homelands. The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007), which clocks in at less than 200 pages, is even today one of the most astute 9/11 novels. Exit West (2017), at less than 250 pages, reminds us that we are all migrants. His most recent novel The Last White Man (...) sticks to the slim-novel brief at 192 pages, and reminds us that race is a construct and a dangerous one. To Hamid’s credit, his novels are not vehicles for issues, even as he uses fiction to shine a light on today’s faultlines. He is a smart storyteller who never allows topicality to eclipse the narrative. Readers and critics have lauded his works, The Reluctant Fundamentalist sold one million copies, and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2007 as was Exit West, a decade later.

The Last White Man opens with a Kafkaesque premise; “One morning Anders, a white man, woke up to find he had turned a deep and undeniable brown.” At first, he thinks there is an interloper in the room, only to realise that the interloper is him. When he looks at his reflection in the mirror, “He wanted to kill the coloured man who confronted him here in his home, to extinguish the life animating this other’s body, to leave nothing standing but himself...” With time, others in the unnamed city too begin to change colour. Some reconcile to the new reality. Others resort to violence and arson. And a few recoil and turn against themselves as well. The novel’s opening gambit propels it forward. As a reader, one gets invested in the lives of Anders and his at-first-friend and then loving-partner Oona. What is to become of them, as the occasional flareup and then the riots engulf the town? What would happen if one’s skin colour changed, what would happen if everyone’s skin colour changed?

The novel often feels like a Black Mirror episode with menace lurking in the quotidian. Peril is ever present, always threatening to whisper boo around the corner. This doomy air is dispelled only by the growing relationship between Anders (a gym trainer) and Oona (a yoga instructor). In Hamid’s novels - whether Exit West or The Last White Man - the couple coheres even as the world unravels around them. Just as in How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia (2013), Hamid reminds us that in the final reckoning the only thing that matters is the knowledge that “you have loved,” similarly his other novels raise companionship above all else.

Recently, speaking on a Zoom call, from the US, the Pakistani-British writer says that after completing Exit West he had initially thought of writing a book on “technology and our relationship with it,” but that soon morphed into something else, something that was, perhaps, bigger. The idea that was “calling out to him” had to do with technology and categorisations. He explains, “Technology encourages us to sort things and sort people in particular, liking something, unliking something, following somebody, unfollowing somebody. And I’m interested in the idea of messing with that, trying to disrupt that. And so this notion of a world where it becomes impossible to sort people by their racial category, was calling out to me more than a novel about our relationship with technology, in general.” Hamid started work on The Last White Man with the title already fixed in his mind.

The evolving relationship between Anders and Oona centres the novel, while their relationship with their parents bolsters it. Oona’s mother (who has recently lost her son to an overdose) is a conspiracy theorist who spends hours watching television and believing that a plot to end her “kind” is near. Oona tries to extract her mother from these theories, but barely succeeds. Anders’ father is dying, he was once a strong robust man, who is now only a man in pain. Even as Oona and Anders try to feed their own relationship they must also tend to their parents and witness the travesties of old age.

Speaking about the relationship between the characters and their parents, Hamid says, “I suppose the novel is a eulogy. It’s a novel about loss, and it’s a novel about people who lose things, lose people they love and also who lose something that they’re attached to, which is this sort of racial identity. Anders is grappling with the loss of his father, alongside the loss of his whiteness.”

Hamid’s novels walk this tightrope between loss and hope. The loss is that of a world changing beyond recognition, a loss of identity and self. And hope is always born from the camaraderie of the couple, whether it is Nadia and Saeed of Exit West or Oona and Anders of The Last White Man. Hamid says, “life is a kind of calamity,” and elaborates that living is about reconciling with the fact that while there is “beauty and poignancy” we will all grow old and die. “We’re here as impermanent beings - is one of the fundamental tasks of being a human being,” he says.

This has, of course, been the eternal conundrum of human life, but perhaps, in recent times, the rate of change has accelerated. In order to deal with these changes, Hamid feels we tend to look back at a past with great nostalgia, whether it is the “Golden Age of Islam or some imagined golden age that Hindutva is rooted in, or Britain before migrants arrived. Or America in the 1950s”. Our spiritual traditions - whether it is Hinduism or Sufiism or Islam - try to show us ways to deal with the drama and impermanence of life. He says, “In my novels, what I often try to do is to explore those ideas, against this dramatic backdrop, which in the novels is even more dramatic than just the fact that we’re all getting older. I want to see what are the ways to transcend this and to move beyond it.” He has always been fascinated by the literature and poetry of the Sufi tradition, where love “is the way to transcend the terror of being a temporary being.” He says, “So, each of these novels is in its own way a love story. And in Exit West it’s a love story very much about letting go and letting go of each other. And in The Last White Man, it’s maybe three love stories. The love of Anders and Oona, who actually come to see each other more clearly as the novel progresses. But also the love of Anders for his father and Oona for her mother, both of which are also playing out against the backdrop of all this change.”

In The Last White Man, Oona’s mother is revolted by the darkening of people, and Anders’ father is uneasy with it. But it is this change that brings Oona and Anders closer together. While the world spins senselessly, they find solace in each other. With Anders and with time, Oona finds that she can “shed her skin as a snake sheds its skin, not violently, not even coldly, but rather to abandon the confinement of the past, and unfettered, again, to grow.” Optimism is essential for Hamid’s enterprise. It is his way to push back against a nostalgic politics that harps on the past. He says, “All around us we see environmental degradation. We see rising inequality. We see rising intolerance. That does predispose us towards a kind of nostalgic politics, to people who say, ‘Oh, the way it used to be 50 years ago or 500 years ago or 1,000 years ago was better,’ and we should use that as our inspiration of where we need to go. That’s very dangerous because usually the past wasn’t really all that good. We need to resist this profound nostalgic political impulse. You can’t really resist it unless you find something else to attach your imagination to, and I think unless there’s some sort of optimism about where we might go, it’s very difficult to attach our imaginations to things. What my novels often try to do is to win through to a kind of optimism, not a naive optimism that everything will be fine, but an optimism that if we imagine differently, different things could happen. So, an optimism of action, not an optimism of just passivity. That is very important to me.”

Hamid is perhaps better suited to write of homelands and borders than most, as he has spent chunks of his life in the US, the UK and Pakistan. A graduate of Princeton University and Harvard Law School, he wrote his early novels while working as a management consultant. Back at Princeton University Hamid was in Toni Morrison’s class. One of the possessions he holds most dear is an early draft of Moth Smoke, edited in her “beautiful handwriting in fountain pen”. He worked in London in the early noughties and moved back to Lahore with his family in 2009.

Living across the globe, Hamid has written from different vantage points. Moth Smoke published in 2000, is set mainly in Lahore, and was written largely when he was in the US in his 20s. He spent his 30s in London, writing The Reluctant Fundamentalist that was mainly set in the US. How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia never named a city in particular but was clearly about an Asian city and was written while in Lahore. His last two novels have similarly pushed back against particular geographical names and locations. He says, “I needed to resist the instinct to be representative of this place, to say, ‘I can describe this place’ or ‘I’m reporting from this place’, because I think that is quite dangerous to allow yourself to imagine that you can be representative, and so I intentionally despecified the place of that novel.” The Last White Man was written in both Lahore and New York. He adds, “The power of literature is that we can imagine ourselves into existences that are different from our own, into lives of people who are not us, and so that’s what I really wanted to do with this book.”

Hamid’s signature style, perfected over time, is his reliance on the comma and his neglect of the full stop. His writing day is spent pacing up and down in his study and reading aloud every line to himself, rather than simply clacking at keys. He says, “I write more with my ears than my eyes,” adding, “the way we process language is through our aural circuitry. The circuitry of our hearing. And of language.”

In order to create a musicality to his text, he uses proper nouns repeatedly. To take a random example, on page 162 of my proof copy, a single sentence runs for 28 lines without a full stop, with close to 30 commas and 10 mentions of the name Oona and three mentions of Anders’ name. Hamid explains his technique, “I’ve tried to lean heavily on the comma. A comma is a kind of forward leaning pause. It’s a pause, but you keep going.”

His choice of punctuation is for reasons of both style and content. The lack of full stops endows the text with rhythm and slackens resistance. Hamid says, “You don’t stop to resist the sentence until you’ve gone quite a long way. And that’s nice because it continues to carry the reader along through ideas that may be strange, or maybe initially, off putting. If the musicality of the ideas is one that you accept, you may very well choose to accept the words”.'

Aggiornamento del 16 gennaio 2023: L'ultimo uomo bianco, pubblicato da Einaudi, da qualche giorno è in distribuzione nelle librerie italiane.

DOHA TRIBECA FILM FESTIVAL 2011

Il Doha Tribeca Film Festival si svolgerà dal 25 al 29 ottobre 2011. In cartellone Bollywood - The greatest love story ever told (2011, documentario) di Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra e Jeff Zimbalist.

Una curiosità: il Doha Film Institute, finanziatore del festival, coproduce il nuovo progetto di Mira Nair tratto dal romanzo Il fondamentalista riluttante di Mohsin Hamid. Le riprese sono iniziate la scorsa settimana.