Family narratives

Last night I went to hear Hanif Kureishi read at the Cochrane Theatre in Holborn.

Hanif Kureishi is one of Britain's most successful authors, and his body of work - novels, screenplays and memoirs - have brought the British Asian experience into the mainstream and opened up the subject to an entire generation.

I prefer his earlier works - books such as The Buddha of Suburbia and screenplays such as My Beautiful Launderette - because they deal, in exquisite detail, with the messy interplay of diverse ethnicities, sexualities and political persuasions, to his later works that focus more on the claustrophobic minutiae of personal relationships. But here I'm passing judgement more on my own tastes than on Kureishi's.

His latest book is a novel-memoir - "My Ear at his Heart: Reading my Father" - describing the discovery of his late father’s manuscript. The manuscript details the father’s life in India, post-partition Pakistan, post-war Britain and his role as husband to an English wife and father to Hanif. The discovery, combined with turning 50, conspire to make Kureishi ponder his and his family's history:

"Some sort of search is beginning. I guess you don't really go looking for your parents until middle age. For me, this has become a quest, for my place in Father's history and fantasy, and for the reasons my father lived the semi-broken life he did. As a boy with one sister and a mother who is an only child, I was fascinated by Dad's large family, by the cricket teams, the swimming, the companionship. A number of my close male friendships have been attempts to recreate what I imagined was a 'brotherhood'."

The reading made me reflect on my own family narratives. As my parents age, I too find myself paying keener attention to their stories of childhoods in India before, during and after Independence, of building a life in England, of negotiating the minefield of parenthood. They're stories that beg to be told, then passed on, before they are lost forever. But asking them to share their experiences with me is uncomfortable, because it throws up the spectre of mortality - for all three of us.

Other links today:
+ The loneliness of being German. In striving to exorcise their past Germans have surrendered their ability to love themselves and their country.
+ The paradox of race and no-race. Geneticists and historians grapple with the gray areas of race
+ Wikipedia's entry on "race"