I tried befriending it when I started (and stopped) reading White Teeth and On Beauty a few years back, this on the recommendations of well-meaning bookish friends. Of what I read, I felt afterward...detached...disengaged...just dunce cap dumb. Her prose just flew over my head, making me second guess what I read, how I read it. Did I not get it? Do I even know how to read? Ugh.
I saw a reviewer on GoodReads brand her right: she is a "glib genius". Her text truly preens in the mirror with little regard. Now, don't think me emerald green envious of her obvious gifts. Smith is an intelligent and perceptive writer who crushes stereotypes that woman of color can analyze Middlemarch one moment and label 50 Cent as a "leading man" with a straight face the next (and all in the same book, mind you), but she's still in a glass casing of academia, removed from a sense of realness.
I thought Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays would be an easier meal to digest and get on the right track with Zadie instead of a sprawling novel that I'd end up getting lost in. All it is is a collection of essays that cover various subject matters ranging from literature to film, and just possibly Smith would be better read in smaller, concise portions?
No such luck.
Changing My Mind --- while meant to be an inconsistent collection of random thoughts --- works in theory, but on paper the thought processes within just don't come together in an effective way.
The main problem I have with this collection is Smith can't get out of her own head, and assumes everyone else is inside her head and wants to navigate it. She loves her some George Eliot, E.M. Forester, and David Foster Wallace, but since I only know of them and their works at surface level, these pieces were a wordy slog to get through. For someone who is a lover of classic Hollywood, her assessment on Katharine Hepburn's approach to character and Greta Garbo's stoic solitude are well-written Wikipedia entries. Her movie reviews analytical nightmares, with the "jokes" dry (and yes, as an uncouth American I get this the British humor MO, but Zadie didn't stir a chuckle...). She makes what should've been a scathing foray into the garish ridiculousness of an Academy Awards weekend a bore. She even academics to death a Christmas memory. Good grief.
Oddly, Smith sounds more at ease and less on airs when she discussed her love for Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God ("What Does Soulful Mean?"), a brilliant 5-star assessment on code switching and President Barack Obama ("Speaking In Tongues"), and a heartfelt memory about her father's time in WWII ("Accidental Hero"). Every other piece (aside from a neat, but superfluous haven't-we-heard-this-advice-before-in-every-writing-book-ever-written essay about writing) down to the wacky film reviews, she was "putting on". With these three explorations she wasn't. I got to feel the real Zadie Smith in these essays, the wordsmith that warrants the showers of critical praise, the writer who climbed out of her own head and looked away from the mirror to share her genius, not show off with it.
Though her most recent essay collection 2018's Feel Free is tempting to crack open, I don't plan on reading any more Zadie Smith anytime soon, unless it's to savor "Speaking In Tongues" and "What Does Soulful Mean?" when the mood strikes. Then again, there is always room to change the mind, right?
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from the margins
- Rating: **
- 320 pages
- Published November 12th 2009 by The Penguin Press
essay breakdown
What Does Soulful Mean?
In the face of romance novels and the criticisms that "women chase men" within them, Smith makes a grand case for Their Eyes Were Watching God by humanizing a woman's pursuit for life, and specifically how she makes being a Black woman "appear a real, tangible quality":
"It’s about a girl who takes some time to find the man she really loves. It is about the discovery of self in and through another. It implies that even the dark and terrible banality of racism can recede to a vanishing point when you understand, and are understood by, another human being. Goddammit if it doesn’t claim that love sets you free [...] to be soulful is to follow and fall in line with a feeling, to go where it takes you and not to go against its grain".
How Janie resists to be idolized, categorized, and defined by others is the true essence and education of the novel, the essence and education of Zora as a person herself, and I agree wholeheartedly with Smith's assessment of this classic.
I could read "Speaking in Tongues" forever. It's layered and exact in a way that not a lot of essays today are written today. It not only made me miss Obama as a president, it made me miss him as the person he was while in office. However you feel about him, Smith offers a pragmatic appraisal on his his political acumen. How as a president he didn't just speak for the people, rather "he can speak them". Reading this in retrospect with the current criminal catastrophe we have in the Oval Office, his vocal fluidity and his code switching --- a type of communal burden people of color are faced with when they find themselves in predominately, mostly professional white spaces --- holds an even greater importance when it is put in practice to lead diverse peoples in a nation that still carries its heavy historical sins around its neck:
"His is the story of a genuinely many-voiced man. If it has a moral, it is that each man must be true to his selves, plural. [...] For Obama having more than one voice in your ear is not a burden, or not solely a burden-it is also a gift".
"Throughout his campaign Obama was careful always to say 'we'. He was noticeably wary of 'I'. By speaking so, he wasn’t simply avoiding a singularity he didn’t feel, he was also drawing us in with him. He had the audacity to suggest that, even if you can’t see it stamped on their faces, most people come from Dream City, too. Most of us have complicated backstories, messy histories, multiple narratives. It was a high-wire strategy, for Obama, this invocation of our collective human messiness. His enemies latched on to its imprecision, emphasizing the exotic, un-American nature of Dream City, this ill-defined place where you could be from Hawaii and Kenya, Kansas and Indonesia all at the same time, where you could jive talk like a street hustler and orate like a senator."
I also loved how she dissected what it means to be a Black person in the 21st Century, expressing some of the same crossroads I've been at in my own life as I try to define 'Blackness' for myself:
"We were going to unify the concept of Blackness in order to strengthen it. Instead we confined and restricted it. To me, the instruction, “keep it real” is sort of a prison cell, two feet by five. The fact is, it’s too narrow. I just can’t live comfortably there. 'Keep it real' replaced the blessed and solid genetic fact of Blackness with a flimsy imperative. It made Blackness a quality each individual black person was constantly in danger of losing. And almost anything could trigger the loss of one’s Blackness: attending certain universities, an impressive variety of jobs, a fondness for opera, a white girlfriend, an interest in golf. And of course, any change in the voice. [...] The reality of race has diversified. Black reality has diversified. We’re all surely black people, but we may be finally approaching a point of human history where you can’t talk up or down to us anymore, but only to us."
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