The Lingering Chill of Rushdie's Fatwa

How far has the fall-out from the fatwa chilled the literary muse in Britain? asks Boyd Tonkin in The Independent today, the latest in a succession of writers to consider the knock-on effects ahead of the twentieth anniversary on February 14th. He finds ;

From time to time, extreme reactions from self-appointed guardians of faith do hint at a tinder-box mood of outrage without and caution within.

Other authors also contribute their views, including Hanif Kureishi :

One of the effects of Obama is that people are more aware that the white phase is over. In the future, we'll all be in nations made up of a number of minorities. Everything is going to have to be argued for: questions of language, honour and insult. Literature is the space where all of this can be taken seriously and thought about deeply... The problem is, if you become too respectful, there's no real contact...

and Suhayl Saadi :

The Rushdie Affair was a wholly negative phenomenon... It empowered both Islamism and liberal imperialism and set up the "straw man" dualism in which, globally, writers of Muslim origin are perpetually expected to display loyalty to one or other of these extremist positions... All novels are political, but this book became a political football in which the only winners were the hooligans.

Writing from the Asylum?

Of course, it's the controversial soundbite, the caustic comment, that grabs the headlines at a literary festival, and author Hanif Kureishi speaking at the Hay Festival provides a particularly juicy one, calling university creative writing courses :

... the new mental hospitals.

and implying that such courses for create serial killers.

Kureishi, who is now a research associate on the creative writing course at Kingston University in London adds :

But the people are very nice. ... When I teach them, they are always better at the end - and more unhappy.

His concern seems the be that such courses set up false expectations among students that a literary career will inevitably follow:

The fantasy is that all the students will become successful writers - and no one will disabuse them of that.

Yasmin has Something to Tell You

So there is a new novel out by my brother ... . I was, of course, relieved to learn from a recent review that the central character's sister wasn't based on me, but appears to be another family member. There is quite a bevy of us now – my mother and father in The Buddha of Suburbia; Uncle Omar, portrayed as an alcoholic in a bedsit in My Beautiful Laundrette, then lauded in Hanif's memoir, My Ear at his Heart; an ex-girlfriend, Sally, who renamed his film Sammy and Rosie Get Laid as "Hanif Gets Paid, Sally gets Exploited". A semi-autobiographical novel, Intimacy (1998) centred around a man leaving his wife and kids for a younger woman. Tracey Scoffield, his ex-partner ("the wife") was not impressed. She stated that the book wasn't a novel: "You may as well call it a fish." There are probably many more...

Yasmin Kureishi speaks out in the Independent about her brother's appropriation of family members as fiction fodder.

Hanif talks about his new novel, Something to Tell You, growing up a non-white kid in London, and family relationships in the Telegraph.

I am a huge Kureishi fan and have read just about everything he's written including screenplays, but this piece really does raise once again the great moral dilemma for writers. How much of your family life should you feel able to put in your work? Is the art in the end more important that whether feelings get hurt? (The question has of course come up on this blog several times before.) And, of course, does Kureishi go too far?

I see an awful lot of self-censorship by writers who say, I can't possibly tell the story while so-and-so is alive ... and a lot of good material that is never likely to be used.

Sheddings and Beheadings

One of the National Short Story Prize finalists, Hanif Kureishi, is reportedly very angry with the BBC which has cancelled the radio broadcast of his shortlisted story.

Weddings and Beheadings describes the work of a cameraman who has been forced to take on work filming the executions that have become a feature of recent kidnaps in the Middle East. BBC officials felt that broadcasting it "would not be right" as concern grows for BBC Gaza correspondent Alan Johnson.

Kureishi says:

There are journalists and newspapers in peril all the time around the world. We support them by supporting freedom of speech rather than by censoring ourselves.

I agree.

Incidentally, you can read Kureishi's story on the Prospect Magazine website.

Postscript:

Maureen Freely on the Guardian blog makes the very important point that even nice censorship is censorship and therefore cannot be condoned.

... and the more we condone it, the more we wrap it up in sheepish clothing, the more we convince ourselves that it is the only way to fend off the wolves, the more of it we'll see.

(Photo nicked from the BBC website.)

The Vampire and the Alimony Whore

Breaking-up is hard enough at the best of times. But how much more painful must it be when one partner is a writer and draws on the pain of a relationship to provide fuel for fiction?

Peter Carey's ex-wife, theatre director, Alison Summers found herself in the unenviable position of having to explain to sons Sam and Charley why they were all suddenly being beseiged by journalists around the world:'

Your dad has written a book and apparently the main character resembles him and the ex-wife resembles me in the way he has been talking about me the last three years.'

Carey's latest novel Theft: A Love Story has just gone on sale in the US. It's a story of an art theft but features an acrimonious divorce between an Australian artist and a nameless woman he refers to as 'the Plaintiff' and 'the alimony whore'. The author denies any autobiographical reference, but Summers sees the novel as a thinly veiled attack and calls Carey 'a vampire' because, she says, he has consumed everything in her life.

(The whole story here and here in the Sydney Morning Herald and thanks Iolanda for the link. The picture above also from the SMH shows the couple in happier times - obviously.)

Of course, other authors have drawn on painful divorces and today's Independent has a list of them:

In 1984, the columnist Julie Burchill walked out on novelist Tony Parsons leaving him to raise their son Bobby single-handedly. He later published Man and Boy, a tear-jerking story of a single father and his son. Burchill says:

I've always been sceptical about how much the characters in Man and Boy resembled us - the runaway wife and mother is decent, slender and dull, while the saintly husband and father is attractive, good in bed and has all his own hair. Which, quite frankly, rules us both out.

Touché!

Philip Roth's ex-wife, actress Claire Bloom, described him as "cruel, erratic and emotionally manipulative" in her autobiography. He exacted his revenge with I Married a Communist, in which the character of Eve Frame is based on Bloom.

Hanif Kureishi said of his novel Intimacy that it was about the demise of a relationship and he wanted to be "intentionally horrible - I wanted to write about an event as it happened".

Kureishi's former partner Tracey Scoffield, called the book was an unfictionalised account of the end of their relationship. She said his attempt to call the work a novel was "total hypocrisy - you might as well call it a fish. No one seriously believes that the book is only fiction. It all shows how little responsibility he feels towards his children."

Anyway, the moral of the story is just think twice before you marry a novelist!

Related Posts:

Kidnapping Peter Carey (25/5/06)