Nieuws: Hanif Kureishi voor een groot deel verlamd na val, werkt aan herstel

Wat de oorzaak van de val is, is nog wat onduidelijk, maar op Tweede Kerstdag (Boxing Day) is Hanif Kureishi in Rome, duizelig geworden en ten val gekomen. Op Twitter schrijft hij (laat hij door zijn zoon Carlo schrijven) dat hij ontwaakte in een plas bloed en geen controle meer had over zijn armen of benen. ‘Het is onduidelijk of ik ooit weer een pen kan vasthouden.’ Kureishi is inmiddels geopereerd en er lijken lichte verbeteringen te zijn. Vandaag kon hij weer rechtop zitten. Salman Rushdie schrijft hem elke dag om hem te bemoedigen. Er is wel één voordeel aan verlamd zijn, zegt Kureishi: je hoeft je niet te verplaatsen om poepen en te pissen.

I had just seen Mo Salah score against Aston Villa, sipped half a beer, when I began to feel dizzy. I lent forward and put my head between my legs; I woke up a few minutes later in a pool of blood, my neck in a grotesquely twisted position, my wife on her knees beside me.

— Hanif Kureishi (@Hanifkureishi) January 6, 2023

It occurred to me then that there was no coordination between what was left of my mind and what remained of my body. I had become divorced from myself. I believed I was dying. I believed I had three breaths left.

— Hanif Kureishi (@Hanifkureishi) January 6, 2023

From the floor my wife heard my frantic shouting. She saved my life and kept me calm. For a few days I was profoundly traumatised, altered and unrecognisable to myself. I am in the hospital. I cannot move move my arms and legs.

— Hanif Kureishi (@Hanifkureishi) January 6, 2023

I have sensation and some movement in all my limbs, and I will begin physio and rehabilitation and soon as possible. I want to thank the doctors and nurses at the Gemelli hospital, Rome, for all their extraordinary kindness, competence and care.

— Hanif Kureishi (@Hanifkureishi) January 6, 2023

and begin work again, and continue some kind of half life.

If you have any ideas about how you might help, please comment below and my son will be in touch.

I want to thank all my readers for their love and support over the years.

Love Hanif

— Hanif Kureishi (@Hanifkureishi) January 6, 2023

De ietwat positievere berichten van vandaag:

Four physiotherapists came to my room. They started to move me with the determination of putting my feet flat on the floor. They turned me, and for a moment I sat on the bed staring ahead of me. I have to say, I felt proud and amazed and incredibly dizzy.

— Hanif Kureishi (@Hanifkureishi) January 9, 2023

Little did I know, years later, sitting up straight on the edge of a bed, I would undergo my own personal metamorphosis.

— Hanif Kureishi (@Hanifkureishi) January 9, 2023

The word vocation comes from the Latin vocatio,“a call, summons”. Here in hospital, where I spend nights and days with nurses and doctors, the word has gained resonance for me.

— Hanif Kureishi (@Hanifkureishi) January 9, 2023

Sometimes at three or four in the morning, when I am my most sleepless, a charming young man comes and sits with me. He wears glasses and of course a mask, and I doubt I’d ever recognise him on the street. Apparently he is a highly trained pianist, as well as being a doctor.

— Hanif Kureishi (@Hanifkureishi) January 9, 2023

There are many interpreters of the classical repertoire, but for me, as an artist, one should try and make something new every day, something one has never done before.

— Hanif Kureishi (@Hanifkureishi) January 9, 2023

You may be afraid of saying something, but you can never anticipate how the other will receive it.

— Hanif Kureishi (@Hanifkureishi) January 9, 2023

I grew up in a mixed British-Indian household, and as a child I spent a lot of time listening to people speaking in a language I didn’t understand, Urdu or Punjabi, mixed with cockney English.

— Hanif Kureishi (@Hanifkureishi) January 9, 2023

I find in these trying circumstances that the naïve questions are the ones that cut through. I ask one nurse how she found her vocation. She said to me, a nurse came to her mother’s house when she was a child of seven and saved her mum, that was when she knew.

— Hanif Kureishi (@Hanifkureishi) January 9, 2023

I could perhaps of become a barber, an architect, or Chancellor of the Exchequer. But a writer I am, and sitting here again in this dreary room for another week, like a Beckettian chattering mouth, all I can do is speak, but I can also listen.

— Hanif Kureishi (@Hanifkureishi) January 9, 2023

My devoted son @carlokureishi has been posting these notes on the internet every day, and this is the one thing, apart from the love of the wife, that keeps me alive and gives me meaning, because so many people read these rather sad if not rambling pieces, and they respond to me.

— Hanif Kureishi (@Hanifkureishi) January 9, 2023

Recently I felt myself slowing down as a writer, as one does as one gets older, but the ideas have not stopped coming. Characters, voices, situations, I’m as full of them as ever, if not more.

— Hanif Kureishi (@Hanifkureishi) January 9, 2023

My friend Salman Rushdie, one of the bravest men I know, a man who has stood up to the most evil form of Islamofascism, writes to me every single day, encouraging patience. He should know. He gives me courage.

— Hanif Kureishi (@Hanifkureishi) January 9, 2023

That’s all folks for today. The only good thing to be said for paralysis is that you don’t have to move to shit and piss.

Have a big drink on me. Until tomorrow dear friends, in this shitty world, all my love.

Hanif.

— Hanif Kureishi (@Hanifkureishi) January 9, 2023

(still uit dit YouTube-filmpje)