There is a polarisation in today’s political culture that led me to seek solace in screenwriting, after almost 25 years as a journalist. I found the entrenched tribalism alienating and decided instead to explore the world of fiction and film. I thought I would be distracted from the question of our divided culture, but in fact I found potential clues for how to bridge the very divide I was fleeing from.
I have spent the last six weeks travelling across Britain and the US, promoting Blinded By the Light. The film, directed by Gurinder Chadha, is a fictionalised retelling of my memoir, Greetings from Bury Park. It tells what is ostensibly a very personal story. It is located in a specific time and place – Luton in 1987 – and it is about a teenage British Pakistani boy whose life feels constrained by his class, culture and community until he discovers the liberating power of the music of Bruce Springsteen. The film is uncompromising in its cultural specificity – and given its subject matter, one would assume it would mostly appeal to British Asians who lived through the 1980s, Bruce Springsteen fans, and in particular, Asian Bruce Springsteen fans who lived through the 1980s. What I had not appreciated was the power of storytelling to engender empathy.
The most common responses to the film were in the ways that audiences found personal connections to the story. I could not have predicted that Israeli women in Jerusalem, white teenage American boys in Omaha, Nebraska and older white women in Australia who had seen the film would all contact me on social media and thank me for telling their story. I had not expected to be approached, at screenings from Glasgow to Seattle, by people who seemingly had nothing in common with the protagonist but said they had connected emotionally with the story.
Brendan in Chicago told me that while “we have very different backgrounds, I found myself reflecting about what it was like for me at that age – that feeling of being in a place where you feel you don’t fit in but realising it’s what has helped shape you, whether you like it or not”. Beth in Missouri had a pithier summation: “Worlds apart but the same.” In telling a very specific story, it turned out, I was actually telling a universal one.
Perhaps I should not have been surprised. After all, I was deeply moved and affected by This Is England, Wild Rose and Annie Hall, even though I am neither a young white English skinhead, a Scottish country-music-loving single mum, nor a neurotic middle-aged American-Jewish comedian.
Javed, the central character in my film, is a teenage British Pakistani Muslim. Blinded By the Light is being released at a time when that community is regularly demonised as the other – both Boris Johnson and Donald Trump have sought to gain political capital by mocking Muslims. I was apprehensive about whether a mainstream audience (white and non-Muslim) would be able to relate to the protagonist, yet it has been illuminating how much they have seen beyond religion and ethnicity and responded to the characters as sons, mothers and fathers – as human beings.
It is, of course, also true that these are a self-selecting group of people who have chosen to buy a ticket for the film, just as people choose to read a particular paper or watch a specific news channel. So one could argue that the film is not changing anyone’s mind, since only those who are disposed to watch it would be willing to spend the money. But when people engage with stories, they arguably do so with minds more open than when they engage with politics. When I asked a packed cinema of more than 700 people – overwhelmingly white filmgoers – in Traverse City, Michigan, how many had spent two hours in the company of a Pakistani Muslim family, not a single hand went up. “You just did,” I told them.
The fact that so many people around the world who have seen Blinded By the Light have responded with empathy to characters apparently very different to themselves offers some hope in what can feel like hopeless times. It suggests that stories can reach places that journalism cannot. It makes me believe that perhaps it is just plausible that the next time a fear-stoking politician or an attention-seeking journalist tries to demonise all Muslims, those who have seen and been moved by my film will remember young Javed and his parents, Malik and Noor. And they will recall laughing and crying in the cinema.
In a time when politicians seem intent on defining us by our differences, my film may remind them that all of us are characters in a larger human story.
• Sarfraz Manzoor is a journalist and screenwriter. Blinded By the Light, in cinemas now, is based on his 2007 memoir, Greetings from Bury Park
