Intimations

by Zadie Smith

JUST BEFORE THE global shit hit the fan, we were in a long, involved cultural conversation about “privilege.” We were teaching ourselves how to be more aware of the relative nature of various forms of privilege, and their dependence on intersections of class, race, gender and so on. As clarifying as this conversation often was, it strikes me that it cannot now be applied, without modification, to the category of suffering. The temptation to overlay the first discourse upon the second is strong: privilege and suffering have a lot in common. They both manifest as bubbles, containing a person and distorting their vision. But it is possible to penetrate the bubble of privilege and even pop it—whereas the suffering bubble is impermeable. Language, logic, argument, rationale and relative perspective itself are no match for it. Suffering applies itself directly to its subject and will not be shamed out of itself or eradicated by righteous argument, no matter how objectively correct that argument may be.