Hanif Kureishi speaks candidly about life in a wheelchair after breaking neck in fall

Watch Hanif Kureishi speaks candidly about life in a wheelchair after breaking neck in fall - The Independent on Dailymotion

Transcript

00:00The second volume, which I think will be called Are You With Me Now, is about my first year

00:05out of hospital as a disabled person. What it's like to go out in the world with people

00:12looking down at you, you know, and with you going into Tesco, trying to look up to see what's on

00:18the shelves above you. And then looking in, there's a big TV screen in Tesco. You can see

00:24yourself. You see this little figure in a wheelchair coming up the aisle and you think

00:29that's me. That's my life now. That's what I look like to other people. And the feeling,

00:35the humiliation and sense of degradation you feel having been reduced to this pathetic creature

00:41in a wheelchair. Can I ask you, Hanif, how you think about the future? I want to walk to Gale's,

00:46actually, a coffee shop. And my ambition is to go out into my front garden, get onto the pavement

00:54and leg it up to the coffee shop at the end of the street, where I will eat a cheesy

01:00twizzle stick. It's quite a walk, but I think that with my physios, I might be able to do it.

01:09I consider it to be the great walk to freedom. A bit like Nelson Mandela coming out of prison

01:16and walking towards freedom. That's going to be my ambition to get to a coffee shop at the

01:22end of the street. I'm going to make a video of it, which I'll open on my substack.