Swing Time

by Zadie Smith

When the music changes, so does the dance. ‒ Hausa proverb

clear. I looked at my phone, it was sitting on the counter in airplane mode. I had been offline for seventy-two hours and can remember feeling that this should be counted among the great examples of personal stoicism and moral endurance of our times.

A truth was being revealed to me: that I had always tried to attach myself to the light of other people, that I had never had any light of my own. I experienced myself as a kind of shadow. When the event was over I walked back through the city to

What do we want from our mothers when we are children? Complete submission.

boy, is that the Chattanooga choo choo?’ Each syllable found its corresponding

That silly dance class is her whole world. It’s not her fault – that’s how she’s been raised. But you’re clever. Doesn’t matter if you’ve got flat feet, doesn’t matter because you’re clever and you know where you came from and where you’re going.’

As a fact it was, in my mind, at one and the same time absolutely true and obviously untrue, and perhaps only children are able to accommodate double-faced facts like these.

my father had told me a story about Fred Astaire himself once coming to Michael’s house, coming as a kind of disciple, and he had begged Michael to teach him the moonwalk, and this makes sense to me, even now, for a great dancer has no time, no generation, he moves eternally through the world, so that any dancer in any age may recognize him.

I can see that our mothers must have seemed a little careless when, informed by a teacher of some misbehaviour in the playground, they would – instead of reprimanding the child – begin shouting at the teacher. But we understood our mothers a little better. We knew that they, in their own time, had feared school, just as we did now, feared the arbitrary rules and felt shamed by them, by the new uniforms they couldn’t afford, the baffling obsession with quiet, the incessant correcting of their original patois or cockney, the sense that they could never do anything right anyway. A deep anxiety about ‘being told off’ – for who they were, for what they had or hadn’t done, and now for the deeds of their children – this fear never really left our mothers, many of whom had become our mothers when they were not much more than children themselves.

purchase – although neither would she ever entirely condemn it. People are not poor because they’ve made bad choices, my mother liked to say, they make bad choices because they’re poor.

for didn’t I, too, have the gift so often ascribed to my people? I could turn time into musical phrases, into beats and notes, slowing it down and speeding it up, controlling the time of my life, finally, at last, here on a stage, if nowhere else.

they would set the tempo the world wants to dance to, in

But it’s a good friend who wakes a friend from her dream.

No one is more ingenious than the poor, wherever you find them. When you are poor every stage has to be thought through. Wealth is the opposite. With wealth you get to be thoughtless.’

‘There are so many different ways to be poor,’ murmured Hawa, in a sudden leap of inspiration. She was in the middle of collecting a pile of fish-bones from the floor. ‘And rich,’ I said, and Hawa’s brother, smiling faintly, conceded the point.

The boys I’d known had had no passions, not really, they couldn’t afford them: it was the act of not caring that was important to them. They were in a lifelong contest with each other – and with the world – exactly to demonstrate who cared less, who among them gave less of a fuck. It was a form of defence against loss, which seemed to them inevitable anyway. Rakim

But like a lot of people whose vocation it is to change the world he proved to be, in person, outrageously petty.

Power had preyed on weakness here: all kinds of power – local, racial, tribal, royal, national, global, economic – on all kinds of weakness, stopping at nothing, not even at the smallest girl child. But power does that everywhere. The world is saturated in blood. Every tribe has their blood-soaked legacy: here was mine.

don’t want to be responsible for anybody else’s heart. For anybody else’s anything!’ He looked confused: ‘A peculiar idea. Once you’re alive in this world, you’re responsible.’

I tell you, if London began and ended on Dean Street, all would be … happiness.’

‘Sometimes I wonder if people don’t want freedom as much as they want meaning,’

Two people creating the time of their own lives, protected somehow by love, not ignorant of history but not deformed by it, either.

I couldn’t imagine her leaving this world without ripping its fabric.

I was her only witness, the only person who knows all that she has in her, all that’s been ignored and wasted, and yet I still left her back there, in the ranks of the unwitnessed, where you have to scream to get heard.