Intimations: Six Essays

by Zadie Smith

There were special words for me, lurking on the horizon, prepackaged to mark the possible future stages of my existence. I might become a spinster. I might become a crone. I might be a babe or a MILF or ‘childless’. My brothers, no matter what else might befall them, would remain men.

A thinker erects an immense building, a system, a system which embraces the whole of existence and world-history etc. – and if we contemplate his personal life, we discover to our astonishment this terrible and ludicrous fact, that he himself personally does not live in this immense high-vaulted palace, but in a barn alongside of it, or in a dog kennel, or at the most in the porter’s lodge. If one were to take the liberty of calling his attention to this by a single word, he would be offended. For he has no fear of being under a delusion, if only he can get the system completed …. by means of the delusion.

I dropped that apple, and, lo, it was putrid and full of worms.

People find themselves applauding a national health service that their own government criminally underfunded and neglected these past ten years. People thank God for ‘essential’ workers they once considered lowly, who not so long ago they despised for wanting fifteen bucks an hour.

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.

Watching this manic desire to make or grow or do ‘something’, that now seems to be consuming everybody, I do feel comforted to discover I’m not the only person on this earth who has no idea what life is for, nor what is to be done with all this time aside from filling it.

The only relief is two faces facing forward, towards the screen. New lovers for the first time wonder about love. Is love enough? Perhaps a dog should be added to this endless pas de deux? Or some other living creature? Young people hunger for the touch of strangers – of anyone. Club kids go to bed at nine.

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.

But when the bad day in your week finally arrives – and it comes to all – by which I mean, that particular moment when your sufferings, as puny as they may be in the wider scheme of things, direct themselves absolutely and only to you, as if precisely designed to destroy you and only you, at that point it might be worth allowing yourself the admission of the reality of suffering, if not for yourself, exactly, then in preparation for that next painful bout of video-conferencing, so that you don’t roll your eyes or laugh or puke while listening to what some other person seems to think is pain.

mundane realities – universal health care, free university education, decent public housingfn1 – all now recast as revolutionary concepts, and thought of, in America (consistently by the right but not infrequently by the left) as badges of radical leftism.

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.

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. The immediate infection comes the moment the store in question calls the cops and the voice down the line asks after the race of this master criminal who has just tried to use a phoney twenty-dollar bill with the ink still wet upon it. 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. You don’t just lecture or book this type of body or take it down to the station. It would have no respect for you if you did that – after all, it is more than used to rough treatment. Nor can it really be taken serious...

Three strands in the DNA of the virus. 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, the prison-industrial complex and, of course, police departments. Like a virus, they work invisibly within your body until you grow sick with them. I truly believe that many people are unaware they carry the virus at all until the very moment you find yourself phoning the cops to explain the race of the man you thought looked suspicious walking through his own neighbourhood, or who spoke back to you in Central Park, or whatever the fuck it is.

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 neighbourhood worthy of their presence when its percentage of black residents falls low enough that they can feel confident of the impossibility of infection?

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.

They are very happy to ‘blackout’ their social media for a day, to read all-black books, and ‘educate’ themselves about black issues – as long as this education does not occur in the form of actual black children attending their actual schools.

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 we might finally reach some kind of herd immunity. I don’t think that any more.

‘All that you have is your soul.’

Practical morality. A calendar filled with every birthday, every anniversary. Nothing put off till tomorrow. No love abstracted, instead everything made concrete and demonstrated. Memory and memorialization as an act of love, completed on behalf of all the other people less organized, less able to remember, and therefore grateful for the prompt. The value of being that person who remembers the childhoods of others better than they themselves recall them, and takes it upon themselves to preserve said childhoods for safekeeping. Sending an old friend’s childhood back to them at the very moment they are most in need of it.

Delirium, delight, youth, sunshine, love letters, love songs! ‘Love me,’ sang the Cardigans, ‘Fool me,’ and we did both – it was all we had to do. It is possible to grow disdainful of love songs of this type. But never to entirely forget what it was to hear truth in pop lyrics.

History as the antidote to dogma. Identity as area of interest, as the form in which you’ve chosen to expend your love – and your commitment.