‘BLACKNESS ITSELF’
Zadie Smith’s novel asks: What does it mean to be part of this diaspora?
Swing Time
Zadie Smith Penguin Books Talking to Zadie Smith, you find yourself doing internal math. It could be because the impact of her 2000 debut novel White Teeth is so fresh in the collective memory. It could also partly be down to the impression, in photographs and in person, that she hasn’t aged a day since then. Whatever it is, it can be hard to get to grips with the fact that she is now 42.
“One of the great things about writing is that you can be young forever,” says Smith on the phone from her New York home. “It’s one of the few fields in which age comes to a woman as advantage instead of humiliation and loss, so I’m very grateful to be in the business I’m in.”
Swing Time, Smith’s fifth novel, has its narrative ballast in the deep bond between the unnamed narrator and her best friend Tracey: two dance-obsessed mixed-race girls growing up in London subsidized housing whose lives diverge when the narrator takes a job as a personal assistant to a Madonna-like pop superstar — a route that eventually leads to West Africa, where the star pursues a charity project.
That’s a lot of ground covered — did Smith have an overarching theme in mind as she was writing?
“I suppose in the back of my head I was thinking of blackness itself,” says Smith, who grew up in London the daughter of a Jamaican mother and an English father.
“What does it mean to be part of this diaspora — personally, historically, existentially? What is it, if anything, that unites this incredibly diverse community of people who were thrown to the seven corners of the world by one historical event?”
On a more micro level, the depiction of a childhood friendship takes the novel into explorations of the factors — talent, opportunity and its lack thereof, luck both good and bad — that can cause such a bond to break.
“The thing that it seems to me all children deserve by right is a decent education, no matter what inborn talents or merits they may have,” says the mother of two.
“That concerns me. And also the idea that someone can have enormous natural talents, like Tracey does, and find herself in a situation which takes no accounting of that or has no means of allowing her to succeed.”
Like much of Smith’s work, Swing Time is infused with music, so it makes sense to ask if she might care to make an addition to the eight-song selection of personal favourites she made on BBC’s Desert Island Discs three years ago.
“Well, I’m very attached to Humble by Kendrick Lamar,” she says. “In this political moment, humility would be such a wonderful quality to express, and he does it so eloquently. I also listen to a lot of British grime music, people like Skepta and Stormzy, who’ve been huge in England for almost 10 years now.
“I find a lot in English culture now to be nostalgic, and the black British musicians are one of the few cultural highlights for me because they have nothing to be nostalgic about. Their music is so forward-thinking, so funny, so irresistible.”
Smith divides her time between New York, where she teaches at NYU, and London. “It’s purely a function of when the New York public schools have their holidays,” she says of how the time is allotted. “I do miss London, my family most of all.”
Given the strong British ties Smith has maintained, it’s hardly surprising that an event in a part of West London very near where she was raised and where she has set much of her fiction — this summer’s deadly and horrific fire at Grenfell Tower — hit close to home.
“I thought for a little bit that I was going to write about it, but just couldn’t,” an emotional Smith says of her feelings in the fire’s aftermath. “I think when you have so much rage, it’s very hard.
“The fact that the building was covered in flammable but esthetically pleasing material so that the millionaires in Notting Hill didn’t have to look at an eyesore. … What else can you say?”
Living in the city that produced the current U.S. president, and also making frequent forays into the heartland — she recently returned from a trip to Utah — Smith has a nuanced view of her adopted country.
“I’d have to go back to (former British prime minister Margaret) Thatcher to remember this visceral feeling toward somebody whose authority I had to live under,” she says.
“But I love America, despite myself. A thing about Americans that I feel very strongly is the decency at a social level. In my interaction with Americans — not in what they say online or in the privacy of their own homes or in their KKK meetings, but when you meet them on the street or in the airport — they are, to a fault, polite. Incredibly civil and incredibly concerned with good manners and good behaviour among citizens.
“So no matter your political stripe, I don’t think anybody heard those lines about grabbing p---y and went home satisfied.”
Asked about her current novelin-progress and what it means to be writing in the time of Donald Trump and Brexit, Smith invokes the writer she calls her hero, George Saunders, author of this year’s Man Booker Prize-winning novel Lincoln in the Bardo.
“My novel is set in the 1840s, but I don’t think it’s possible to live in this environment and not process it in your work. George’s novel is set in the time of Lincoln, but to me it’s absolutely about this political moment. He shows that you can go that far back and be current. And my novel’s called The Fraud — so make of that what you will.”