Why Am I Like This?
Eda Gunaydin on Hanif Kureishi
Hanif Kureishi has been trying to tell me something. He first started to when I was seventeen, during a time when I was strangely attached to queer cinema, and was adamant on having one female friend at a time. I was also strangely attached to E.M. Forster’s novel Maurice (1971), which charts the tumultuous relationship between two gay men from opposing socioeconomic backgrounds. This was also the age at which I watched two films back-to-back: Kureishi’s My Beautiful Laundrette (1985), which he wrote the screenplay for, and the James Ivory film adaptation of Maurice (1987), fixating on certain scenes. After that, I was drawn to purchase Kureishi’s Oscar-nominated screenplay of the film, as well as the Forster novel, so that I could see them on the page, and annotate them carefully. I remain fixated on these texts, although My Beautiful Laundrette is arguably the least interesting—it’s certainly the least literary—of Kureishi’s large oeuvre. These are my two most well-thumbed books, and not because I’m sad and horny (although you may accuse me of this if you wish, I’ve been called worse and have been worse)—but because they comprise my interiority. They keep murmuring, replaying themselves in my psyche, trying to tell me things. I read because I want to live outside myself—the ‘I’ that I am driven to loathe. But these texts do the opposite: instead of enabling the self-effacement I seek on a regular basis, they lift that bar over my unconscious, each scene feasting on my gooey insides. In other words, the books we read read us.
When I mentioned my newfound interest in queer cinema to my eldest sister, she warned me off enjoying smut, figuring I was into them as a sneaky back entrance to softcore pornography. Of course, I couldn’t tell her that that particular ship had sailed already, at least three years prior. What she didn’t accept, and what I need you to know, is that there is a difference between a text that is horny and a text that is libidinal. I mean the latter in the Freudian sense: texts that are libidinal grip their reader, exerting a kind of a magnetic pull that those of us who believe in psychoanalysis could use in order to map our psycho-sexual drives, even those completely unknown to us.
Kureishi believes in psychoanalysis, I think. My Beautiful Laundrette starts with a Freudian slip: the play’s establishing shot shows a sign that a squatter has erected, as they are about to be ejected from a South London home: ‘WE WILL DEFEAT THE RUNNING WOGS OF CAPITALISM’. And, published a little more than two decades later, Something To Tell You (2008), Kureishi’s sixth novel, tells the story of Jamal, a Freudian psychoanalyst, for whom ‘secrets are … currency: I deal in them for a living. The secrets of desire, of what people really want, and of what they fear the most.’ The objective of psychoanalysis is to read the psyche as if it was a book—one full of double meanings, slips, gaps, omissions and repetitions: to figure out what is really being said within what is being said. But we can also use books to read into our own psyche(s): we can use them to decide what is really being read in what is being read. When I use My Beautiful Laundrette as a psychoanalytic tool, it tells me what I desire and what I fear—and now I’m going to spill it.
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I watched My Beautiful Laundrette for the first time in at least five years, with my friend Tim, in 2020. He was perturbed by the accuracy with which I could quote back certain lines. ‘Such failure, such emptiness,’ I’d mutter along with Omar, the film’s protagonist, a young British-Pakistani living in post-Thatcherite London. In that scene, he had just reunited with an ex-lover—the working class, formerly white nationalist Johnny, reflecting on their falling out over the latter’s foray into fascism. In another scene, Tania, Omar’s disaffected cousin, having just flashed her gay cousin her tits in an act of restlessness and rebellion, and who lives unhappily at home with her adulterer father Nasser and downtrodden mother Bilquis, laments: ‘Families, I hate families’. I’d mouth the words as if it were my own cue.
I keep returning to these two texts; I can’t help it. The way that I choose them again and again tells me that they have chosen me. In university, I wrote a literary theory essay on Forster—two, in fact—and then I wrote about the writing process surrounding that essay in my first book, an essay collection. Now I am writing this essay on Kureishi, having written about My Beautiful Laundrette for the first time in my HSC year, a ‘related text’ chosen for the module on belonging (New South Welshman of a certain age will join me in gagging as they see this word here). To write this essay, the one you are reading now, I re-read the screenplay one more time, the same copy of the screenplay I used for the HSC, and realise I have only been able to secure my own continuity—my own sameness as ’me’, who has otherwise undergone many life changes in a short span of time—through this text. What I mean by this is that I laugh, when I go to highlight something with the same kind of pen, and see that I have already highlighted something on this same page, ten years ago. I had wanted to make a note about the two options made available to the migrant who lives in the neoliberal settler-colony. Kureishi represents migrants such that they either have to accede to and become handmaidens of this brutal economic system (a family friend of Omar’s, Salim, for instance, makes his money selling drugs, enacting violence, and booting squatters from buildings over which he acts as slumlord; he is the running wog of capitalism I fear becoming), or they attempt to stay militant, maintain their dissident values (such as those held by Hussein, Omar’s formerly radically leftist father, now a heavy drinker), and get worn down, steadily, by the system. Before the play’s conclusion, Hussein remarks during a moment of sobriety: ‘This damn country has done us in. That’s why I’m like this.’ When he visits his son’s business, the laundrette that Omar has set up with Johnny, he sighs: ‘Oh dear. The working class is such a great disappointment to me.’ I fear, with equal intensity, becoming bitter like Hussein. On page 15 of the book I see that I have written something to this effect, about these two choices, and when I flip over to page 16 I see I have written the same thing, already, in the same hand.
My Beautiful Laundrette lives under Root & Branch, my first book. It is an essay collection about what it means to be a migrant in a settler-colony and to attempt to find comfort—or, oh God, even belonging—in where we are, in a world that attempts to force us to either eat or be the meat. No, it’s a binary, whether we like it or not. I see my father in Hussein, a leftie who has given up. I see my mother in Bilquis (indeed, they share a name across two different cultures): how she financially depends on her spouse, how she turns to concocting potions out of plants she finds in the backyard, attempting to practice magic in a bid to manage her own impotence.
When Cherry, Salim’s wife, meets Omar, the exchange goes like this:
I know all your gorgeous family in Karachi.
You’ve been there?
I have been Omar in this instance—wondering, trying to tell stories or insert myself into stories about places I haven’t been. Cherry bristles and immediately serves an admonishment—reminds me of my sister, older than me, born elsewhere:
You stupid. What a stupid. It’s my home. How could anyone in their right mind call this silly little island off Europe their home? … Oh God, I’m sick of hearing about these in-betweens. People should make up their minds where they are.
I pay one hundred Great British Pounds so that I can acquire the rights to quote this excerpt from My Beautiful Laundrette in my book, in the form of an epigraph that opens the final essay. Later, I read on Wikipedia that Kureishi bankrupted himself in 2013, having been swindled out of his life savings. I smile when I read this—horrible—because it makes me feel strangely better about how much I have paid to use his words. The quote has been living in my head rent-free, as the kids say, for a long time—it’s one of those ones I quote wholesale to Tim, who looks on in silence, so it’s only fitting that I pay for it. This essay now is meant to ask and answer this question, which has sat inside of me, been whispered into me by Kureishi, for many years.
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I surprise myself with how dully repetitive my thoughts are, especially these unbidden ones. I told my girlfriend something along these lines yesterday: ‘Sometimes I am incapable of formulating more than the same two repeated thoughts, over and over, but yet they feel fresh to me each time, and unattenuated in their intensity: “You are pretty”, “You are hot”, “You are pretty”, “You are hot”.’ When I read the annotations I have made in My Beautiful Laundrette and note how consistent they are, I am thrilled at how smart young Eda was, but I also think to myself—how ignorant. I realise that my mind, this same mind, will only ever produce the same insights over and over, with varying degrees of clarity, as if I were new versions of a smartphone each time. Answers come to me so slowly it sometimes takes me a decade to figure out the question I have been asking myself. One of those questions, as I have just explained, has been where am I? The second one is perhaps a little more crude, and it’s why am I so obsessed with queer texts?
When it comes to My Beautiful Laundrette, I have tried to see myself in Tania. She is more highly educated than her mother, and she is angry, and feels stymied by her male relatives. But that’s not right; the answer is something else. I’m trying to pin it down. Towards the end of the play, Johnny and Tania find themselves on the fringes of a party: Tania is disgusted by the men in her family, about to leave the city for good to start afresh, while Johnny is one of the few white attendees, and the only working-class one. He has to be asked to come inside (‘He’s lower class,’ says Omar fondly. ‘He won’t come in without being asked. Unless he’s doing a burglary.’), and spends much of the evening unable to relate to anyone, standing in the corner angry and jealous but unable to communicate how he feels when he sees Omar’s relatives pressuring him to marry a woman. Tania and Johnny bond over their shared alienation: they drink a bottle of wine and wheel a bike around in the yard, Tania sitting on the handlebars until they crash, and everyone is furious and ashamed. Tania escapes, which is the right decision for her—she is glimpsed by her father boarding a train and disappears, never to be seen again. I don’t miss her. Omar and Johnny, meanwhile, attempt to stage a queer life, and attempt to sustain a functioning queer relationship, while Omar tries to maintain ties with his family to whom he is not out. In one key scene, Omar and Johnny have sex in the back room of their laundrette on opening day, and dress quickly before Omar’s relatives arrive. Hey, that’s me!
Omar and Johnny’s attempt to stage a queer life, a relationship that functions inside the constraints of class, race, and the vicious workings of capitalism, is imperfect: Johnny is brutally bashed by his former friends—those white nationalists from his past—in place of Salim, when he protects him from being violently assaulted. I always read and re-read this ending, trying to understand what is happening, what’s going to keep happening. Johnny is emotional after the beating, Omar tending to him in the back room of the laundrette. He says he has to go, but can’t quite leave quickly because his injuries are too severe. Omar jokes and tries to calm Johnny down, but ultimately won’t let him leave, insisting on cleaning up his injuries. In the screenplay, Kureishi writes this direction: ‘As the film finishes, as the credits roll, Omar and Johnny are washing and splashing each other in the sink in the back room of the laundrette, both stripped to the waist. Music over this.’ I have always desperately wanted to know what the fuck this scene means, and why I am so attracted to this relationship. I read it again. I’ve probably read My Beautiful Laundrette fifteen times since I first encountered it.
I’ve taken to calling myself a fatalist lately when I describe the way I have been unable to prevent myself from writing and publishing my first book. ‘Are you nervous?’ is a question I get asked often, and I respond that if there were any other option I would have been able to stop myself. But I couldn’t, and so I must live with the consequences as they unfold. This is incidentally the same answer I proffer when asked if I am out to my family. I don’t dictate so much of myself—I thought I did but now I know I don’t. I guess what I am saying is that I believe in the id, or the unconscious—that part of my mind I cannot access, but which is full of drives, instincts and passions that I am a stranger to except for when I am pursuing them—and the only means I have of accessing this part of myself is by pressing a book up against it and attempting to read between the lines. Reading My Beautiful Laundrette seems to be an analogous yet inverse process, akin to taking a photocopy of a photocopy: with each turn the image grows sharper and sharper, and consequently takes longer to fade. I suppose what I am saying is that Kureishi has at times acted both as my father and my therapist, Freudian ramifications of this be damned. I hold Root & Branch up as an offering to Kureishi, seeking his approval as if looking back over my shoulder at a parent, as he watches me wheel away on the bike that he taught me to ride, his hand no longer keeping me steady on the handlebars. And now I come back to him, a few months or years having elapsed between visits; me, the gormless analysand, collapsing into his armchair, ready to be assessed. Oh my God, I get it now. That’s why I’m like this.
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Works Cited
✷ E.M. Forster, Maurice (London: Edward Arnold, 1971)
✷ Hanif Kureishi, My Beautiful Laundrette , 1985, dir. Stephen Frears.
✷ Maurice, dir. James Ivory, 1987.
Eda Gunaydin is a Turkish-Australian essayist whose writing explores class, race, diaspora and Western Sydney. She has been a finalist for a Queensland Literary Award and the Scribe Non-Fiction Prize. Her debut essay collection Root & Branch is out now with NewSouth Publishing.