At home, in Bromley, the family hinterland had no relevance or meaning. Here, he was just "a Paki". Then came Enoch Powell and the "rivers of blood" speech. "It was terrifying," he remembers. "We thought we were going to be sent back. We'd been brought over here to help run the NHS and the public services, but now we realised that we were just Pakis and niggers. There were a lot of skinheads. My dad was persecuted as he came home from work and he thought it was all too difficult. But I liked my name. I couldn't change it to Pete Brown. So what I had to do," he continues, "was uncover who I really was. You saw that a lot in the 70s: blacks, gays, women. It all came out of EP Thompson [author of The Making of the English Working Class)] and the idea that ordinary people have their own history."
Hanif Kureishi interviewed in The Observer.
You can read The Making Of The English Working Class online
here.
Posts
My Beautiful Laundrette is one of the best films ever. FACT!
ReplyDeleteAmazing script, great acting and direction.
The sexy stuff in The Buddha of Suburbia adaptation may well have been the first time I seen proper, realistic gay/bi sexuality (I think I would have been around 13 or so).
He's a great writer, I think; and that's an interesting piece, thanks.