Embracing Uncertainty: Hanif Kureishi’s Buddha of Suburbia and The Black Album

Abstract

As Sukhdev Sandhu writes, ‘If there is one figure who is responsible for dragging Asians in England into the spotlight it is Hanif Kureishi’ (230). His novels The Buddha of Suburbia (1990) and The Black Album (1995) trace a trajectory for young Asian English men and together give a picture of some of the ways their experiences — and England — have changed from the 1970s to the end of the millennium. Kureishi has the knack of capturing the Zeitgeist in each of these novels. The Buddha of Suburbia focuses on the 1970s during a heady time of experimentation with drugs, sexuality Eastern philosophy, progressive struggles and counter-cultural youth movements, and when moving from the suburbs into London seemed to give access to all that one could possibly desire. Overall, The Buddha of Suburbia is an optimistic book that captures the wide-eyed enthusiasm of the period, while not shying away from addressing racism and the damage it causes. Kureishi shows the 1970s as a time when the assumption that white people were better than everyone else was still a firmly established norm in mainstream culture and when racism was more overt, something he has challenged not only with this novel, but his screenplays, such as My Beautiful Laundrette (1985). Equally representative of its time, The Black Album is a bleaker novel that updates the marginalisation young Asian Britons experience. It takes place during 1989 when the Ayatollah Khomeini issued the fatwa against Salman Rushdie for blasphemy in his novel The Satanic Verses against the Muslim religion.