HANIF 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.
Some of the attitudes among the kids I talked to for The Black Album reminded me of Nietzsche’s analysis of the origins of religion, in particular his idea that religion – and Nietzsche was referring to Christianity – was the aggression of the weak, of the victim or oppressed. These attacks on the West, and the religion they were supposed to protect, were in fact a form of highly organised resentment or bitterness, developed out of colonialism, racism and covetousness. The violent criticism of Rushdie, an exceptionally gifted artist of whom the community should have been proud, was in fact a hatred of talent and of the exceptional, a kind of forced equalisation from a religion which had not only become culturally and intellectually mediocre, but which was looking to an invented past for solutions to contemporary difficulties.
Towards the end of The Black Album, with the help of his lecturer and soon-to-be-girlfriend Deedee Osgood, Shahid understands that he has to withdraw from this group in order to establish himself on his own terms at last. This isn’t easy, as the group has provided him with solidarity, friendship and direction, and doesn’t want to let him go.
He extracts himself, in part, by beginning to discover the exuberance and freedom of his own sexuality and creativity. ‘How does newness come into the world? How is it born? Of what fusions, translations, conjoinings is it made?’ asks Salman Rushdie, relevantly, at the beginning of The Satanic Verses.
It is also no accident that British and American pop, as exemplified for Shahid by Prince’s intelligent, sensual and prolific creativity, is in a particularly lively phase. The clubs and parties Deedee takes Shahid to represent a continuing form of the youthful celebration and self-expression that Britain has enjoyed since the sixties.
If, along with mythology, religions are among man’s most important and finest creation – with God perhaps being his greatest idea of all – Shahid also learns how corrupt and stultifying these concepts can become if they fetishise obedience and ritual, if they are not renewed and rethought. Like language itself, they can become decadent, and newness doesn’t have an easy time. Blasphemy is as old as God and as necessary; religion and blasphemy are made for one another. Without blasphemy religion has no potency or meaning. There’s nothing like a useful provocation to start a good conversation, and this can only be to the advantage of religion, keeping it tied to scepticism.
In The Black Album it turns out that Shahid is one of the lucky ones, stron
g enough to find out – after flirting with extreme religion – that he’d rather affect the world as an artist than as an activist. The others in his group are not so intelligent or objective; or perhaps they are just more passionate for political change.
Whatever the reasons – and it is probably too late for psychological explanations – something had begun to stir in the late eighties which has had a profound effect on our world, and which we are still trying to come to terms with.
The Black Album was first performed in the Cottesloe auditorium of the National Theatre, London, on 14 July 2009. The cast was as follows:
Shahid Hasan Jonathan Bonnici
Riaz al Hussain Alexander Andreou
Strapper Glyn Pritchard
Hat Beruce Khan
Deedee Osgood Tanya Franks
Tahira / Zulma Shereen Martineau
Andrew Brownlow Sean Gallagher
Chad Nitin Kundra
Chili Robert Mountford
Director Jatinder Verma
Set Designer Tim Hatley
Costume Designer Claudia Mayer
Lighting Designer Jvan Morandi
Video Designer Tom Hadley
Choreographer Shobana Jeyasingh
Music Sister Bliss
Music Assciate John Gingell
Sound Designer Fergus O’Hare
Graphics and Animation Sara Nestruk
Characters
Shahid Hasan
Strapper
Riaz al-Hussain
Hat
Chad