First Light

"I surprised myself... by appearing at eight o'clock, outside the mosque... The beauty of the morning was another surprise: it reminded me of my earliest experiences of America. New York was my first introduction to the possibilities of light, crashing through gaps in curtains, transforming people and sidewalks and buildings into golden icons, or black shadows, depending on where they stood in relation to the sun. But the light in front of the mosque... this light was something else again. It buzzed and held you in its heat, it was thick, alive with pollen and insects and birds, and because nothing higher than one story interrupted its path, it gave all its gifts at once, blessing everything equally, an explosion of simultaneous illumination."

- from SWING TIME, by Zadie Smith

Leap Day 2016

I'm thinking about dance, music, and writing these days. A year has passed since last reading and thinking on the words of Zadie Smith, and in this leap year, on this leap day, Zadie reappears. And she is leaping and dancing toward a new novel.

From The Guardian:

Swing Time is “a story about friendship and music and stubborn roots, about how we are shaped by these things and how we can survive them”, said Hamish Hamilton [ZS's publisher]. Set in north-west London and west Africa, it will follow the lives of two girls who both want to become dancers, but only one of whom has talent.

“The other has ideas: about rhythm and time, about black bodies and black music, what constitutes a tribe, or makes a person truly free. It’s a close but complicated childhood friendship that ends abruptly in their early 20s, never to be revisited, but never quite forgotten, either,” said Hamish Hamilton, which described the novel as “dazzlingly energetic and deeply human”.

In the last moments of this gifted day that comes every four years, I'm grateful for Zadie Smith's take on the world, her leaps from here to there, resting in heightened realism, in multiple viewpoints and urban, racial, and social class differences, and in the rhythms and rituals that bring us together.

Zadie Smith on Imperfect Knowledge in Fiction

Recently, I've been flat out, seriously prone, lying on the day bed in my study with a mess of old lit journals and poetry collections and trashy mags. So, yes, I've been reading a lot, grabbing whatever I can reach, mostly the old New Yorkers and Oxford Americans strewn around the room. And that's how I came across a Winter 2013 New Yorker issue that was marked to Zadie Smith's story "The Embassy of Cambodia." The story involves Fatou, an Ivory Coast immigrant who works for a well-off Pakistani family in London's Willesden suburb and becomes curious about what - beyond the never-ending badminton game, shuttlecock continuously in motion - goes on behind the high brick walls of the Cambodian Embassy. Structured in 21 parts, the story, as Smith states in her "This Week in Fiction" interview with Cressida Treyshon, "is scored like a badminton game" and considers the idea of how "people win and lose in life."

The story reminds me of why I love Zadie Smith's writing: her aesthetic, her brilliantly honest characters, and her ability to paint the London world she loves to revisit with strokes that don't prettify and cover the truth, but uncover and examine it. In the interview she speaks of the origins of this particular piece and of how, when she's writing, "everything is basically spontaneous…  I have a vague idea one day… sometimes a tone, or a single image."  Within a smaller world, the curiosity about a wider one can open up the writing, creating something expansive for the characters involved. This question of how her characters reach beyond their own scope of understanding reveals how Smith strives for "imperfect knowledge" in her fictional worlds.

““The thing that can be challenging in fiction is allowing people to exist imperfectly. There is perhaps an added pressure if the author belongs to a group that feels itself burdened by what I want to call the responsibilities of representation. But if I believed that every time I wrote a Nigerian character that he carried the heavy burden of representing “The Nigerian People” in their entirety, well, I would find it hard to write a word. I’m sure there are readers who read in that way, but I can’t—won’t—write for them. I want to write without shame or pride or over-compensation in one direction or another. To write freely.””

— Zadie Smith

How incredible to read this, even in my seemingly endless horizontal state, to understand once more - this time through the words of an author from whom I continue to learn - the true responsibility of the writer. To get the words down; to create characters that ring true and have as many imperfections as, say, you or I; and to follow those characters into the unfolding story.

To write freely.

Indeed.

Zadie, Zadie, Zadie

Zadie Smith, the writer who gave us White Teeth, On Beauty, and now NW, also gives us words of wisdom on writing.  Words I'm taking to heart.  Especially #s 6 & 7! 

Zadie Smith
1 When still a child, make sure you read a lot of books. Spend more time doing this than anything else.
2 When an adult, try to read your own work as a stranger would read it, or even better, as an enemy would.
3 Don't romanticise your "vocation". You can either write good sentences or you can't. There is no "writer's lifestyle". All that matters is what you leave on the page.
4 Avoid your weaknesses. But do this without telling yourself that the things you can't do aren't worth doing. Don't mask self-doubt with contempt.
5 Leave a decent space of time between writing something and editing it.
6 Avoid cliques, gangs, groups. The presence of a crowd won't make your writing any better than it is.
7 Work on a computer that is disconnected from the ­internet.
8 Protect the time and space in which you write. Keep everybody away from it, even the people who are most important to you.
9 Don't confuse honours with achievement.
10 Tell the truth through whichever veil comes to hand – but tell it. Resign yourself to the lifelong sadness that comes from never ­being satisfied.

photo credit: The Guardian