Table Of ContentHANIF KUREISHI
The Black Album
adapted for the stage by the author
Table of Contents
Title Page
Newness in the World
Characters
Act One
Act Two
About the Author
By the Same Author
Copyright
Newness in the World
AN INTRODUCTION TO
THE BLACK ALBUM – THE PLAY
It was in the summer of 2008 that I suggested to Jatinder Verma that we attempt
a theatrical dramatisation of my second novel, The Black Album.
The Black Album was a novel I had begun to think about in 1991, not long
after the publication of my first book, The Buddha of Suburbia. Unlike that
story, which I’d been trying to tell in numerous versions since I first decided to
become a writer, aged fourteen, The Black Album was more or less
contemporary, a ‘state of Britain’ narrative not unlike those I’d grown up
watching, enthralled and excited, in the theatre, particularly the Royal Court, and
on television.
Around the time of its original publication in 1993, and after the BBC film of
The Buddha of Suburbia, there had been talk of filming The Black Album. But
instead of returning to something I’d just written and was relieved to have done
with, it seemed easier to write a new piece, with similar themes. This was My
Son the Fanatic, a film set in the North, and shot in and around Halifax, starring
Rachel Griffiths and Om Puri.
However, as the twentieth anniversary of the fatwa was approaching, and with
The Black Album set in 1988–89 and concentrating on a small group of religious
extremists, both Jatinder and I thought that my pre-7/7 novel might shed some
light on some of the things which had happened since.
Not that I had read the novel since writing it; and if I felt hesitant – as I did –
to see it revived in another form, it was because I was anxious that in the present
mood, after the bombings and atrocities, it might, in places, seem a little
frivolous. But the young radical Muslims I came to know at the time did appear
to me to be both serious and intelligent, as well as naive, impressionable and half
mad, and my account of their activities and language reflected what I learned in
mosques and colleges. The novel records the kind of debates they had. And it
wasn’t as though the subject of liberalism and its relation to extreme religion had
gone away.
It was debate, ideological confrontation and physical passion that Jatinder and
I had in mind when we sat down to work on the translation from prose to play.
The novel, which has a thriller-like structure, is a sprawl of many scenes in
numerous locations: foul pubs, a further education college, a mosque, clubs,
parties, a boarding house, cafés, Deedee’s house and the street. As it was
impossible in the theatre to retain this particular sense of late-eighties London,
we had to create longer scenes and concentrate on the important and even
dangerous arguments between the characters as they interrogated Islam,
liberalism, consumer capitalism, as well as the place and meaning of liter a ture
and the way in which it might represent criticism of religion.
The first draft was too much like a film and would have been unwieldy to
stage. Jatinder reminded me that we had to be ruthless. He also reminded me,
with his persistence and imagination, how much I’ve learned about editing from
the film and theatre directors I’ve worked with. If we were to create big parts for
actors in scenes set in small rooms, we needed to turn prose into fervent talk,
having the conversation carry the piece. We had to ensure the actors had
sufficient material to see their parts clearly. Each scene had to be shaped. The
piece had to work for those who hadn’t read the book.
It was this we worked on over a number of drafts, and it was the usual
business of writing: cutting, condensing, expanding, developing, putting in jokes
and trying material in different places until the story moved forward naturally. I
was particularly keen to keep the humour and banter of students and their often
adolescent attitudes, particularly towards sexuality. This was, after all, one of
their most significant terrors: that the excitement the West offered would not
only be too much for them, but for everyone.
The fatwa against Salman Rushdie in February 1989 had re-ignited my
concern about the rise of Islamic radicalism, something I had become aware of
while in Pakistan in 1982, where I was writing My Beautiful Laundrette. But for
me that wasn’t the whole story. Much else of interest was happening around the
end of the eighties: the music of Prince; the collapse of Communism and the
‘velvet revolution’; the rise of the new dance music along with the use of a
revelatory new drug, Ecstasy; Tiananmen Square; Madonnausing Catholic
imagery in Like a Prayer; and post-modernism, ‘mash-ups’ and the celebration
of hybridity – of exchange and creative contamination – which is partly the
subject of The Satanic Verses.
This was also the period, or so I like to think, when Britain became aware that
it was changing, or, in effect, had already changed from a monocultural to a
multi-racial society, and had realised, at last, that there was no going back. This
wasn’t a mere confrontation with simple racism, the kind of thing I’d grown up
with, which was usually referred to as ‘the colour problem’. (When I was a
young man it was taken for granted that to be Black or Asian was to be inferior
to the white man. And not for any particular reason. It was just the case: a fact.)
No, it was much more. Almost blindly, in the post-war period, a
revolutionary, unprecedented social experiment had been taking place in Britain.
The project was to turn – out of the end of the Empire and on the basis of mass
immigration – a predominantly white society into a racially mixed one, thus
forming a new notion of what Britain was and would become.
And now was the time for this to be evaluated. The fatwa in 1989, and the
debate and arguments it stimulated, seemed to make this clear. Was it not
significant that many of these discussions were about language? The Iranian
condemnation of a writer had, after all, been aimed at his words. What, then, was
the relation between free speech and respect? What could and could not be said
in a liberal society? How would different groups in this new society relate – or
rather, speak – to one another? How far could they go? What were the limits?
The coercive force of language was something I had long been aware of. As a
mixed-race child growing up in a white suburb, the debased language used about
immigrants and their families had helped fix and limit my identity. My early
attempts to write now seem like an attempt to undo this stasis, to create a more
fluid and complicated self through storytelling. One of the uses of literature is
that it will enable individuals to enlarge their sense of self – their vocabulary, the
store of ideas they use to think about themselves.
In the 1970s, many of us became aware, via the scrutiny of the gay, feminist
and Black movements, of the power that language exerted. If the country was to
change – excluding fewer people – so did the discourse, and why not? Language,
which implicitly carried numerous meanings, developed all the time through
creative use and misuse; if it was never still it could be revised, coaxed in other
directions. There were terms applied to certain groups which were reductive,
stupid, humiliating, oppressive. (Children, of course, are described constantly by
their parents in ways which are both narrowing and liberating – and they have a
good idea of what it is to live in an authoritarian world. It wasn’t for nothing that
I had been fascinated in my late teens by Wittgenstein’s apothegm, ‘The
meaning of a word is its use.’)
If there was to be better speaking, the language had to be policed in some
way, the bad words being replaced by the good. This, of course, became known
as political correctness, where language was forced to follow a – usually lefist –
political line. Inevitably there was a backlash, as this form of political control
seemed not only harsh and censorious but sometimes ludicrous and irrelevant.
Liberals were in a tricky position, having to argue both for linguistic
protectionism in some areas and for freedom in others. So that when some
Muslims began to speak of ‘respect’ for their religion and the ‘insult’ of The
Satanic Verses the idea of free speech and its necessity and extension was
always presented as the conclusive argument. Criticism was essential in any
society. This could be said, but not that. But how would this be decided, and by
whom?
The Marxists, too, were finding the issue of the fatwa difficult. It was only
partly a coincidence that Islamic fundamentalism came to the West in the year
that that other great cause, Marxist-Communism, disappeared. The character of
the stuttering socialist teacher in The Black Album – Deedee Osgood’s husband
Brownlow – was partly inspired by some of the strange convolutions of the
disintegrating Left at the time.
At a conference in Amsterdam in 1989 I remember arguing with John Berger,
who was insisting that complaints about The Satanic Verses were justified, as
they came from the downtrodden proletariat. Why, he said, would he want to
support a privileged middle-class artist who was – supposedly – attacking the
deepest beliefs of an otherwise exploited and humiliated Muslim working class?
This seemed to me to be an eccentric and perverse point of view, particularly
from a writer who valued freedom, and when it was obvious that the opportunity
to dissent, to be critical of leaders and authorities – and to be free of censorship –
was necessary for anyone to live a good life, as the many writers, critics and
journalists in prison in Muslim countries would no doubt attest.
To struggle my way through this thicket of fine distinctions, difficult debates
and violent outcomes, I invented the story of Shahid, a somewhat lost and
uncertain Asian kid from Kent, whose father has recently died – and who joins
up, at college, with a band of similar-minded anti-racists. The story develops
with Shahid discovering that the group are going further than anti-racist
activism. They are beginning to organise themselves not only around the attack
on Rushdie, but as Islamo-fascists who believe themselves to be in possession of
the Truth.
This is a big intellectual leap. As puritanical truth-possessors, Riaz’s group
and those they identify with have powerful, imperialistic ideas of how the world
should be and what it should be purged of. Soon, believing the West has sunk
into a stew of decadence, consumerism and celebrity obsession – a not-untypical
fantasy about the West, corresponding to a not-unsimilar fantasy of the West
about the sensual East, as Edward Said has argued – they believe it is their duty
to bring about a new, pure world. They want to awaken benighted people to the
reality of their situation. To do this they insist on a complete dominance of
people’s private lives, and of women and female sexuality in particular.
Some of these attitudes were familiar to me, as I grew up in the sixties and
seventies when the desire for revolution, for violent change, for the cleansing of
exploitative capitalists and a more ethical world, was part of our style. Almost
everyone I knew had wanted, and worked in some way to bring about, not only
the modification of capitalism, but its overthrow. For us, from D. H. Lawrence to
William Burroughs and the Sex Pistols, blasphemy and dissent was a blessed
thing, kicking open the door to the future, bringing new knowledge, freedom and
ways of living. The credo was: be proud of your blasphemy, these vile idols have
been worshipped for too long! The point was to be disrespectful, to piss on the
sacred and attack authority. As Guy Debord wrote, ‘Where there was fire, we
carried petrol.’
But there was, mixed in with this liberation rhetoric, as in other revolutionary
movements – either of the left or right – a strong element of puritanism and self-
hatred. There was a desire for the masochism of obedience and self-punishment,
something not only illustrated by the Taliban, but by all revolts, which are
inevitably vitiated by the egotism of self-righteousness and in love with self-
sacrifice. This concerns not only the erotics of the ‘revolutionary moment’, the
ecstasy of a break with the past and the fantasy of renewal, but also the human
pen chant for living in authoritarian societies and intransigent systems, where
safety and the firm constraint of the leader are preferable to liberal doubt,
uncertainty and change. As George Bataille reminds us in an essay written in
1957, ‘Man goes constantly in fear of himself. His erotic urges terrify him.’
Riaz, the solemn, earnest and clever leader of the small group which Shahid
joins, understands that hatred of the Other is an effective way of keeping his
group not only together but moving forward. To do this, he has to create an
effective paranoia. He must ensure that the image and idea of the Other is
sufficiently horrible and dangerous to make it worth being afraid of. The former
colonialistic Western Other, having helped rush the East into premature
modernity, must have no virtues. Just as the West has generated fantasies and
misapprehensions of the East for its own purposes, the East – this time stationed
in the West – will do the same, ensuring not only a comprehensive
misunderstanding between the two sides, but a complete disjunction which
occludes complexity.
Of course, for some Muslims this disjunction is there from the start. To be
bereft of religion is to be bereft of human value. Almost unknowingly, Muslims
who believe this are making a significant sacrifice by forfeiting the importance
of seeing others, and of course themselves, as being completely human. In
Karachi, I recall, people were both curious and amazed when I said I was an
atheist. ‘So when you die,’ said one of my cousins, ‘you’ll be all dressed up with
nowhere to go?’ At the same time Islamic societies, far from being ‘spiritual’,
are – because of years of deprivation and envy – among the most materialistic on
earth. Shopping and the mosque have no trouble in getting along together.
