bRitish playwright and novelist Hanif Qureshi has turned the potentially devastating fall that befell him into a touching and insightful ‘story’. And Twitter is the medium for that.
Every day, a new layer emerges as the author takes to the stage. It’s proof of just how crowded an experience can be. Sometimes it is supernatural.
Qureshi was in Rome when he had a fatal fall on 26 December 2022, a day after Christmas. He fainted and woke up motionless. eleven days later, he Tweeted: “Then it occurred to me that there was a mismatch between what was left in my mind and what was left in my body. I myself was divorced. I believed that I was dying. I thought I had three breaths left.
This was the start of Qureshi’s latest story arc. He’s been confined to a hospital bed since that fateful day in December, tweeting to a loyal audience that’s literally immersed in a life-or-death scenario. He passes on the words to his son, Carlo, who shares them on Twitter and in the Substack newsletter.
“A strange thing happened to me, I went to Rome for a few days with my wife and now I will never go home again. I have no home now, no center. I am a stranger to myself. I don’t know who I am now. Something new is emerging.
Other times, he misses the mundane details. “Last night around nine o’clock, I watched a few minutes of The Glass Onion, which I enjoyed.”
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He explores his past in his dispatches- talking About his inspirations, stylistic determinations and how he is reorganizing his entire existence, “Looking at this event, I realized that I had to start all over again as a person and as a writer. I had to be a comic writer, a serious writer, a writer who could integrate the craziest and most interesting elements on the same page. I started taking myself seriously.
This is how Qureshi is using Twitter and Substack, bringing in a whirlwind of objects and emotions. The television shows he watches, the tiles on the ceiling of his hospital room he counts, the loneliness, the love – everything finds expression. He gives advice and shares it thought Even on writing
“So a four-day break, with absolutely nothing to distract you, can be a good form of shock therapy for a stuck writer. In fact, maybe there are no stuck writers, just rested ones.” , who wait.
Qureshi’s career began 20 years ago as a pornography writer. their 1985 screenplay, my beautiful laundrette, “where a young gay Anglo-Pakistani man pursues his dream of opening a laundromat with his lover, a young white streetfighter with two-tone hair,” was a runaway success. According to LithubIt featured “Pakistani gangsters and Thatcherite slum lords, lost college students and white supremacists from the National Front” and proved to be a turning point for both him and the film’s actor, Daniel Day-Lewis.
It appears that the author has often turned inward for his work. his 1998 novel intimacy It was also rumored to be autobiographical. He continues to reflect on family life, discussing his parents, wife and children. “She was not mean, cruel, or insensitive. In fact, she could be kind. What she wanted to do was reduce the environment around her to an extreme inertness, where nothing lived and could could only flourish,” he wrote in a Twitter post.
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Followers and well-wishers around the world respond with engagement and encouragement to the ailing author by sharing their experiences. For these lovely gestures, Qureshi feedback In interesting ways: “In this shy world, all my love, Hanif,” or “In this shy time, your dear cripple, Hanif.”
Qureshi’s vulnerability is an example of radical honesty. We see suffering in all its horror, the harshest of its edges. To emerge from this heavy scaffolding is beauty. Qureshi can no longer hide behind the characters or narratives he has created.
The story is unfolding – with or without him. And he has no choice but to expose himself. He is a slave to it.
“The only good thing that can be said for paralysis is that you don’t have to go to shit and pee,” he said. writing,
Essays and academic papers will be written on Qureshi’s latest work, and every word will be twisted. But for now, here we have it: There was a Pakistani-British writer named Hanif Qureshi, and at one point, we knew him intimately.
(Edited by Zoya Bhatti)