[Tre flussi di coscienza dettati da un letto d'ospedale.] 

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January 10, 2023.

This Morning I Looked Out the Window.

Since I became a vegetable I have never been so busy. Last night at around nine I watched a few minutes of Glass Onion, which I enjoyed. Then I lost connection and everything went dark.
I fell asleep and woke at one and was conscious for the rest of the night. I had many ideas but since I can’t use my hands and make notes, I have to shout them at my poor son Carlo who is trying to get some sleep.
This is how I write these days; I fling a net over more or less random thoughts, draw it in and hope some kind of pattern emerges.
This morning three very beautiful Italian physiotherapists came to my room. They wore clean white uniforms with orange trim. They put me in what looked like a blue plastic bathing machine.
Then they hoisted me up and 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 had been inspecting Tammy Abraham’s legs before examining mine. 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.
Still, I have lost all sense of time. I don’t know what day is it or what month.
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.
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. The women too of course, with their long black hair and magnificent eyes.
I’ve had many intimate conversations with young queer and non-binary staff members. They are afraid for the future of Italy, which as you know has the misfortune of being governed by a fascist.
For these fabulous young people, to make a life they will have to leave their beautiful country and find a more sympathetic and humane environment. This is a great loss.
Italy is one of the great gay civilisations of Europe. The Vatican is gay as is the fashion industry. The entire aesthetic of the renaissance is based on polyamorous sexuality.
A few years again Britain had a very dangerous, if not catastrophic, Brexit debate which tore our country apart. Something similar has happened in Italy with Giorgia Meloni.
All Nazi and fascist programmes believe that the removal of a few miscreants will create a bright and new future. It is a cretinous conviction.
I’ve enjoyed being in this hospital. Everyone here has treated me with respect and courtesy. But there is something tragic, if not disconcerting, to see how closed it is when it comes to race. Every day I wonder where my brothers and sisters of colour are.
Are they kept in a special place to avoid contaminating the others? It would be a terrible thing if the country with the best food and culture and the most cultivated people turned itself into an island, isolated from the rest of the world.
Isabella D’amico Kureishi wants to make an intervention into this conversation. She says my knowledge of her country is not so varied and wise, and that I am not best placed to comment on the ills of Italian society given I have not bothered to learn her language.
I tell her it would be easier for everyone in Italy to learn English than for me to understand Italian.
Literature, to its glory, is a dirty bastard form. From the most vulgar and scurrilous, to the most sublime and poetic. You can put anything in a book, twist it about and turn it into something unforgettable.
An insect, a hero, a ghost or Frankenstein’s monster. Out of these mixings will come magnificent horrors and amazements. Every day when I dictate these thoughts, I open what is left of my broken body in order to try and reach you, to stop myself from dying inside.
You are keeping me alive.
Big drink up for all of you tonight. Tomorrow should be more fun. You will be hearing from me underwater as I am trying hydrotherapy. I will be writing about sex; that is, sex without legs and fingers, sex without genitals and orgasms. It should be a blast.
The day after that, if there is another day, I will try and say something about drugs. Who could resist?
Stay with me friends, don’t let me go.
In these shitty times, your loving cripple, Hanif.

https://twitter.com/Hanifkureishi/status/1612863436412653578

[In "assenza*" di un titolo, avrei potuto battezzarlo come si fa per consuetudine con le poesie che ne sono sprovviste, utilizzando la prima riga del componimento (*che, in effetti, è tutta costituita da parole principianti con una maiuscola, a voler "suggerire/indicare" la sua natura intestatoria), "Questa Mattina Ho Guardato Fuori dalla Finestra", oppure, ancora "meglio!", la seconda, "Da Quando Sono Diventato un Vegetale", e ciò sarebbe stato tutto molto coerentemente Wodehouse-Roth.]

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January 11, 2023.

The Door Opens.

Another shitty night. One of the worst. I went to sleep at eight o’clock after taking my medication and by one o’clock I was wide awake. Not only that, my head had become jammed down the side of the bed.
I can’t move my arms nor legs and no one could hear me. It seemed like a good opportunity for some contemplation.
What could I think about?
My father had been a journalist and a writer. Several of my uncles had been journalists in India, running movie or what were called filmie magazines.
I read dozens of biographies of writers when I was a teenager. From Balzac to Proust and Zola, Dickens and Colette and Henry Miller, and the autobiographical masterpieces of my then-hero James Baldwin.
Their lives, with all the carousing, fucking and fighting and general riotous living – writing seemed like work I might enjoy.
The first writers that I met were Brian Patten and Adrian Henri, the great Liverpudlian poets. As president of the student union at Bromley College of Technology, I organised a gig headlined by the Pink Fairies.
Brian Patton was there, a writer published by Penguin. I handed him a brown envelope with ninety pounds in it. He read a poem and then fucked off home on the bus.
When I was eighteen, I took the train up to Victoria, walked to Sloane Square, went into the upstairs bar of the Royal Court Theatre and through into the auditorium. Standing on stage was a tall thin man pointing vigorously at an actress.
This was Samuel Beckett. He was directing Billie Whitelaw for his play Footfalls.
I started to work at the Royal Court that night and I saw many real writers at work for the first time. I stood within a few feet of the great David Storey and Edward Bond and the masterful Caryl Churchill, who would whizz around the building encouraging the young people.
To me these were amazing figures because they were capable of making language sing and turning actors into their instruments.
Every night I went into the bar next to the Royal Court and sat there with my newspaper. I would stare at Samuel Beckett, a man who liked a drink. I became friends with his brilliant lighting director, a man called Duncan, which enabled me to get closer to Beckett.
I noticed that if a young woman approached him with a pile of his own books, Sam would look cheerful and sign them gladly.
Of the young writers, the most charming was always Christopher Hampton. He had had a play produced at the Royal Court when he was fourteen-years-old called Total Eclipse about the relationship between Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine.
Christopher was gracious enough to introduce me to his agent Peggy Ramsay, who invited me to her office in the West End.
She was fierce and intimidating and she certainly scared the shit out of me. She sat on the couch, waved her legs about and said; “In my younger days I was never averse to a little fucking in the afternoon.”
I handed her an adaptation I had done of Dostoevsky’s Notes From the Underground. I noticed that somehow she contrived to get strawberry jam on the manuscript, sticking the pages together. With some contempt she handed it back and remarked that it looked a little short.
Many years later when she had dementia her office burnt down. She told the actor Simon Callow that it was an act of revenge and that I was responsible.
The reason I’m telling you this is not because my head is still stuck between the wall and the bed, and that we must pass the time with some amusement, but because I need you to know that writers were living creatures in the world, and were paid to use their imagination.
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.
After the event, there was a dinner given by Gaia Servadio in Chelsea (her beautiful daughter, Allegra Mostyn-Owen, later married Boris Johnson).
Salman Rushdie gave me a copy of Midnight’s Children and I returned to my tiny flat at 48 Barons Court Road, lay on my mattress on the floor and read the book all the way through. I then walked down the river to Hammersmith, up to Chiswick Bridge, and then back home again.
I drank a bottle of wine and read the whole book again. I guess this moment might have been like when Pete Townsend or Eric Clapton saw Jimi Hendrix play for the first time, or when The Beatles met Bob Dylan.
Rushdie invited me to his house for dinner with Angela Carter. He was whirl of information, wit and wide talk. He had extensive knowledge, everything from Star Trek to the great myths.
Seeing this phenomenon, I realised I had to start again as a person and as a writer. I had to become a comic writer, a serious writer, a writer who could integrate the maddest and the most interesting elements on the same page. I began to take myself seriously.
The nurse arrived. She’s managed to pry my head from the breach position and settled me down. There are other stories that I would like to tell, for instance of Raymond Carver. There is this beautiful opening line in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, it reads:
“A man without hands came to the door to sell me a photograph of my house. Except for the chrome hooks, he was an ordinary-looking man of fifty or so.”
This image struck me tonight, since I am the man with no hands.
Yesterday I promised revelations regarding sex and drugs but since I am stuck in this room without air or light, I am not in the best mood. I promise there will be filth in abundance to come.
That’s entertainment folks. In these shitty times, your loving writer, Hanif.

https://twitter.com/Hanifkureishi/status/1613268367003222016

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January 12, 2023.

Rome.
A Shattering.

At last, not such a bad night. Asleep at nine and excluding a few interruptions, I was unconscious until five. The previous evening I had asked for more sleeping aids but was told they had run out. Perhaps I had already consumed the hospital’s supply. But last night was better.
Having not left this room for seven days I seem to be adjusting to my condition, unfortunately.
At six-thirty in the morning, to the sound of crashing buckets and loud voices, the nurses came to wash and change me. They lift you up in a blanket, roll you around and scrub you. They wash your genitals and your arse, often whilst singing jolly Italian songs.
One of the male nurses is particularly fond of Bruce Springsteen, and during the procedure he likes to sing along to dancing in the dark. I don’t mind so much, I enjoy the company.
Next up is breakfast, a bowl of dirty cold tea in which a sugary biscuit is dumped. They spoon it into my mouth.
It’s then my physios come. There are four of them. They are determined to get me upright, which involves strapping me into a blue machine with my feet on the floor and standing me up vertical. I have to say this is a horrible experience.
I have not been vertical for some time. The world seems completely at the wrong angle, everything is in the wrong place and the colours seem to fly around everywhere, unattached to any specific objects, like hallucinations.
I thought I might vomit and I couldn’t breathe. They lay me down and told me that it would take some time for me to get used to standing up again. I now see why I spent so much of my previous life lying on the sofa.
The next adventure involves me being placed on a trolly and being dragged on my back for miles around the hospital for various tests. I’m beginning to figure out where I am from the position of the ceiling tiles.
Last night things got tense in this little room; Isabella was tired if not exhausted and there were some unpleasant conflicts between us. The issue of cleaning of my teeth brought things to a head.
Isabella, as you might imagine, is not a dentist. Using a toothbrush, some floss and a cocktail stick, she tried to brush my teeth as I was dictating my latest blog. I began to feel that I was both a helpless baby and a terrible tyrant.
To be in a position like this is to have to endure both vulnerability and frustration.
A few days ago a bomb went off in my life, but this bomb has also shattered the lives of those around me. My wife, my children, my friends. There is no family untouched by catastrophe.
What seems to be happening is that all my relationships are being renegotiated. It makes everybody mad, it changes everything. There is guilt, rage and resentment.
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. My accident was a physical tragedy, but the emotional outcomes for all of us are going to be significant, but also very interesting.
I’m proud to be dependent on others who love me. I’ve had thousands of kind offers from friends and complete strangers offering me very expensive and useful things to help me continue writing. It should go without saying that I am profoundly moved and grateful.
I’d like to add that I really enjoy writing this diary. At least I haven’t lost the one thing that was most valuable to me, that is my ability to express myself. I hope soon to be writing some stories and little essays on other topics which I hope might interest you.
That’s all for tonight folks.
In this shitty world, your loving writer, Hanif x

https://twitter.com/Hanifkureishi/status/1613592561750245396