Hanif Kureishi. My Ear at His Heart: Reading My Father

Hanif Kureishi. My Ear at His Heart: Reading My Father. London: Faber and Faber, 2004. ISBN: 0-571-22403-2 Cloth, $. pp: 198.

Set out to draft a contemplative essay on the influence of authors and other matters, upon opening one of his late father's unpublished novels, Hanif Kureishi steers a radically different course.  The result: the vividly textured, brutally honest, and complex biographical meditation, My Ear at His Heart. 

As the narrative unfolds, Kureishi stitches the biographical fragments that surface in "dad's" texts together with his own uneasy memories of growing up in the London suburb, Bromley.  Invited to sit alongside Kureishi in this journey, the reader learns that his father, Shani, was born in Madras; that he was number "three or four from the end" (18) of twelve children; and that after a less then glorious run at academics (schooled in Poona and Bombay), he escaped partition and the iron-hand of his über-father (gambler and womanizer), Colonel Kureishi, as well as a fate to run the family's flailing soap business.  He sets sail for the UK where he meets Hanif's Anglo mother (of antiquary and grocer stock), takes up a civil servant job at the Pakistani Embassy to make a respectable nest for the wife and kids (Hanif and his sister).  After a life time of humdrum work--and penning novels, short stories, and drama (stage and radio), on mornings and weekends--Shani died in 1991.

This, of course, is not nearly the whole story.  Rather, as Kureishi immerses himself into his father's loosely biographical fictions, he uncovers a much more complicated figure then such facts recount. 

In a partial melding of fiction (wish fulfillment) and fact as echoed against Kureishi's own remembrance, he begins, for instance, to see how his father's obsession with writing in spite of cold-shouldering editors and agents was his way of holding tight to a dream of being a somebody in a xenophobic world where he felt himself a nobody.  And much to Kureishi's surprise, when he turns a page of his father's unpublished novel, "An Indian Adolescence", he discovers a rather rapacious and salacious side to his father; he considers whether or not this was his father's way of indulging in a lifestyle otherwise forbidden for a brown-bodied man in a Enoch Powellean river of blood UK.  In retrospect, the father's compulsion to write is not a closing of the door on his family, but a cushion against a hostile world.  It is also, as Kureishi discovers in several other of his father's unpublished texts that reach out to a pre-partition India, the spinning of threads to keep him tied to the parents he'd long left behind.  In this quest to know his father's actions a little better, the father's stubborn insistence on living a "semi-sleep" (67) life in the suburbs make palpable a deep fear of being swallowed up by the chaos of the metropolis--a space the father associates with his successfully published, cosmopolitan brother, Omar, and Colonel Kureishi's favorite; "hugging the known" allowed the father to keep at bay childhood feelings of rejection, humiliation, and failure growing up under the Colonel's heavy thumb.  And, we see Kureishi waken to his role in the father's story.  He writes, "I was being made to feel as he had felt.  He might want me to be successful, as his father had required him to be, but he was afraid of me becoming too powerful or rivalrous" (44).

The father fears the "plenitude of urban life", but Kureishi embraces it.  He recalls his first visit to London as "a revelation and a hope for this skinny light-brown kid crossing the river on the train" (7).  Unlike the father, Kureishi feels unsafe in the suburbs where he's constantly the target of racial bullying by peers and considered spontaneously "lazy" by his teachers.  Already at an early age, Kureishi began to mimic his father's ways, spending hours pounding out stories and diary entries (even a novel "Run Hard Black Man") behind closed doors trying to unjam words that might express his confusion and frustration.  With a couple of "O" levels under his belt, at age sixteen Kureishi made a swift and permanent move to the city; it was made clear that for Kureishi and the other unwanted kids ("hippies, mods, skinheads or rockers") that there was no room in the Sixth Form.  In London he attended art college where the "chances of being spat on, abused and beaten up for being a "Paki" were far less than they had been at school" (133).  Comfortable in his urban shoes, he studies drama, poetry by Plath, Gunn, and Huges, to name a few, and novelists like Philip Roth.  On the coattails of art college, he read philosophy (especially Wittgenstein) at King's College.  During this period, Kureishi dutifully worked on his craft as a writer of fiction, realizing one day that his voice would filled with the words his "father didn't like" (157).  This is the voice we see in his first screenplay made into film, My Beautiful Laundrette, and his first novel, The Buddha of Suburbia.

My Ear at His Heart is Kureishi's way of releasing years of pent-up anger and frustration toward the father.  It is also Kureishi's homage:  "Out of father's attempted writing cure, the energy of his narrow commitment, I found my own stories to tell.  I cannot overestimate what a pleasure the writing life had been and how it has sustained and made me" (198).  My Ear at His Heart  is also a kind of paean to Kureishi's other writerly "fathers": Kafka, Roth, Naipaul, Chekov, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, to name a few.  And finally, the book is for his own sons.  He reflects on one occasion, "I sit in the park watching my three sons play football, and find myself admiring the pleasures they have.  I think of the three of them together as adults, with their children, sharing this history, always having one another" (38).

Indeed, this is a book about the battles, reconcilations, and compassion between all sorts of fathers and sons.  It is a powerful testament to how fathers shape and haunt their children, but also how one can carve one's own distinctive path in the world.  My Ear at His Heart  is one of those rare books that gives so much pleasure in the reading and that leaves you with thoughts and feelings that reverberate long after its close.

--Frederick Luis Aldama, Professor of English and Comparative Studies at The Ohio State University.