Intimations

by Zadie Smith

THERE WILL BE many books written about the year 2020: historical, analytical, political, as well as comprehensive accounts. This is not any of those—the year isn’t halfway done. What I’ve tried to do is organize some of the feelings and thoughts that events, so far, have provoked in me, in those scraps of time the year itself has allowed. These are above all personal essays: small by definition, short by necessity.

I am no more a Stoic now than I was when I opened that ancient book. But I did come out with two invaluable intimations. Talking to yourself can be useful. And writing means being overheard. MAY 31, 2020 LONDON

We all had somewhere to be. But some powerful instinct had drawn us here, and the predatory way we were ogling those tulips put me in mind of Nabokov, describing the supposed genesis of Lolita: “As far as I can recall, the initial shiver of inspiration was somehow prompted by a newspaper story about an ape in the Jardin des Plantes, who, after months of coaxing by a scientist, produced the first drawing ever charcoaled by an animal: this sketch showed the bars of the poor creature’s cage.” I’ve always been interested in that quote—without believing a word of it. (Something inspired Lolita. I’m certain no primates were involved.) The scientist offers the piece of charcoal expecting or hoping for a transcendent revelation about this ape, but the revelation turns out to be one of contingency, of a certain set of circumstances—of things as they happen to be.

Death has come to America. It was always here, albeit obscured and denied, but now everybody can see it. The “war” that America is waging against it has no choice but to go above, around and beyond an empty figurehead. This is a collective effort; there are millions of people involved in it, and they won’t easily forget what they have seen. They won’t forget the abject, exceptionally American, predicament of watching individual states, as New York’s governor, Andrew Cuomo, memorably put it, bidding as if “on eBay” for lifesaving equipment. Death comes to all—but in America it has long been considered reasonable to offer the best chance of delay to the highest bidder.

American leaders might find inspiration not in Winston Churchill’s bellicose rhetoric but in the peacetime words spoken by Clement Attlee, his opposite number in the House of Commons, the leader of the Labour Party, who beat Churchill in a postwar landslide: “The war has been won by the efforts of all our people, who, with very few exceptions, put the nation first and their private and sectional interests a long way second. . . . Why should we suppose that we can attain our aims in peace—food, clothing, homes, education, leisure, social security and full employment for all—by putting private interests first?”

In each generation, a few too many people will feel moved to pen an essay called, inevitably, “Why I Write” or “Why Write?” under which title you’ll find a lot of convoluted, more or less self-regarding reasons and explanations. (I’ve contributed to this genre myself.) Only a few of them are any good* and none of them (including my own) see fit to mention the surest motivation I know, the one I feel deepest within myself, and which, when all is said, done, stripped away—as it is at the moment—seems to be at the truth of the matter for a lot of people, to wit: it’s something to do.

Now I am gratified to find this most honest of phrases in everybody’s mouths all of a sudden, and in answer to almost every question. Why did you bake that banana bread? It was something to do. Why did you make a fort in your living room? Well, it’s something to do. Why dress the dog as a cat? It’s something to do, isn’t it? Fills the time. Out of an expanse of time, you carve a little area—that nobody asked you to carve—and you do “something.”

But perhaps the difference between the kind of something that I’m used to, and this new culture of doing something, is the moral anxiety that surrounds it.

The people sometimes demand change. They almost never demand art. As a consequence, art stands in a dubious relation to necessity—and to time itself. It is something to do, yes, but when it is done, and whether it is done at all, is generally considered a question for artists alone.

I carved out meaning by creating artificial deprivations within time, the kind usually provided for people by the real limitations of their real jobs. Things like “a firm place to be at nine a.m. every morning” or a “boss who tells you what to do.” In the absence of these fixed elements, I’d make up hard things to do, or things to abstain from. Artificial limits and so on. Running is what I know. Writing is what I know. Conceiving self-implemented schedules: teaching day, reading day, writing day, repeat. What a dry, sad, small idea of a life. And how exposed it looks, now that the people I love are in the same room to witness the way I do time. The way I’ve done it all my life.

only way out is through.

There is no great difference between novels and banana bread. They are both just something to do.

Here is this novel, made with love. Here is this banana bread, made with love. If it weren’t for this habit of indirection, of course, there would be no culture in this world, and very little meaningful pleasure for any of us.

You start to think of contempt as a virus. Infecting individuals first, but spreading rapidly through families, communities, peoples, power structures, nations. Less flashy than hate. More deadly.

“The virus doesn’t care about you.” And likewise with contempt: in the eyes of contempt, you don’t even truly rise to the level of a hated object—that would involve a full recognition of your existence. Before contempt, you are simply not considered as others are, you are something less than a whole person, not quite a complete citizen. Say . . . three fifths of the whole. You are statistical. You are worked around. You are a calculated loss. You have no recourse. You do not represent capital, and therefore you do not represent power. You are of no consequence. No well-dressed fancy lawyer will come running to the scene to defend you, carrying a slim attaché case, crying, “That’s my client!” You are easily jailed and easily forgotten. The stakes are low. And so: contempt.

THE OFFICER HAD a sadistic version of the same face. Why are you bothering me with this bullshit? The bullshit in this case being a man explaining he couldn’t breathe under the pressure of the officer’s knee on his neck. A man called George. He was alerting the officer to the fact that he was about to die. You’d have to hate a man a lot to kneel on his neck till he dies in plain view of a crowd and a camera, knowing the consequences this would likely have upon your own life. (Or you’d have to be pretty certain of immunity from the herd—not an unsafe bet for a white police officer, historically, in America.) But this was something darker—deadlier. It was the virus, in its most lethal manifestation.

To have any real chance of catching the virus from the answer “white,” you’d have to add a qualifier like “homeless” or “on meth.” The lack of capital would have to be strikingly evident—visible. But the answer “black” immediately carries a heavy load, and a number of potentially violent actions—that would have been unlikely otherwise—suddenly become psychologically possible.

They can’t possibly feel as we do. You can whip them and they go back to work. And having thus placed them in a category similar to the one in which we place animals, he experienced the same fear and contempt we have for animals. Animals being both subject to man and a threat to him simultaneously.

In theory, these principles of slavery were eradicated from the laws of the land—not to mention the hearts and minds of the people—long ago. In theory. In practice, they pass like a virus through churches and schools, adverts and movies, books and political parties, courtrooms and the prison-industrial complex and, of course, police departments. Like a virus, they work invisibly within your body until you grow sick with them.

One of the quirks of the virus—as James Baldwin pointed out—is that it makes the sufferer think the symptom is the cause. Why else would the carriers of this virus work so hard—even now, even in the bluest states in America—to ensure their children do not go to school with the children of these people whose lives supposedly matter? Why would they still—even now, even in the bluest states in America—only consider a neighborhood worthy of their presence when its percentage of black residents falls low enough that they can feel confident of the impossibility of infection? This mentality looks over the fence and sees a plague people: plagued by poverty, first and foremost. If this child, formed by poverty, sits in a class with my child, who was formed by privilege, my child will suffer—my child will catch their virus. This not-so-secret terror is lodged as firmly in blue hearts as in red; it plays a central role in the spread of the contagion. (To fear the contagion of poverty is reasonable. To keep voting for policies that ensure the permanent existence of an underclass is what is meant by “structural racism.”)

If the virus and the inequalities it creates were ever to leave us, America’s extremities would fade. They wouldn’t disappear—no country on Earth can claim that—but some things would no longer be considered normal. There would no longer be those who are taught Latin and those who are barely taught to read.

White college kids would not smoke weed in their dorms while their black peers caught mandatory sentences for selling it to them.

But the questions have become: Has America metabolized contempt? Has it lived with the virus so long that it no longer fears it? Is there a strong enough desire for a different America within America? Real change would involve a broad recognition that the fatalist, essentialist race discourse we often employ as a superficial cure for the symptoms of this virus manages, in practice, to smoothly obscure the fact that the DNA of this virus is economic at base.

It would involve the (painful) recognition that this virus infects not only individuals but entire power structures, as any black citizen who has been pinned to the ground by a black police officer can attest. If our elected representatives have contempt for us, if the forces of so-called law and order likewise hold us in contempt, it’s because they think we have no recourse, and no power, except for the one force they have long assumed too splintered, too divided and too forgotten to be of any use: the power of the people.

I used to think that there would one day be a vaccine: that if enough black people named the virus, explained it, demonstrated how it operates, videoed its effects, protested it peacefully, revealed how widespread it really is, how the symptoms arise, how so many Americans keep giving it to each other, irresponsibly and shamefully, generation after generation, causing intolerable and unending damage both to individual bodies and to the body politic—I thought if that knowledge became as widespread as could possibly be managed or imagined that we might finally reach some kind of herd immunity. I don’t think that anymore.

Damn.

Mr. Rainbow In his classroom, what was on your desk, in front of you, was yours to perfect. To do as well as you were able. Handwriting—even back then, a dead art—was to be taken as seriously as spelling, as math, as memorizing the events of 1066. Joy and rigor were the same thing: if the whole choir was to get the benefit of “Bali Ha’i” it would be by way of a martial attention to each part of the whole. There was nowhere to hide in that choir. And no pride to be taken in the fact that we, “the singers,” were removed from the school as a whole every Tuesday afternoon and presented with this task. There was nothing special about us to be found in that fact, not even when, months later, we sang “Bali Ha’i” perfectly, just as he had trained us to do. Yes, we sang it well; the song was beautiful. We owed it to the song.

an educational system that proves unable to see a boy as a child, seeing him only as a potential threat. That any child who enters such a prejudiced system will be in grave danger. Be he ever so beautiful and talented, inspired and inspirational, loving and loved—he can still be broken.

Kellas To consider yourself lucky, even in situations which almost anybody else would consider extremely difficult and unfair. To think, reflexively, of whoever suffers. To forgive anyone who has wounded you, no matter how badly, especially if there is any sign whatsoever that a person has, in wounding you, also wounded themselves. To make no hierarchical distinction between people. To tell any story just as it happened, only exaggerating for humor, but never lying, and never trying to give yourself the flattering role.