SmArts

October 12-18, 2015

Zadie Smith and observations

By Molly Rector

In a small Q&A session at the University of Arkansas last Monday, writer Zadie Smith told the crowd about a few childhood invitations to participate in rituals that belonged to friends of hers: “what you know is not prescribed by your genetic make-up,” she said.

Smith’s answer came in response to a question about how to balance the desire to write about things other than ourselves with the fear of appropriating and misusing cultural information that does not belong to us. In a time when we have greater access than historically possible to a range of rituals, styles of dress, food, music, and religious beliefs, Smith’s attitude makes sense: our experience, our knowledge of the world, is not limited to the cultural systems we are born into. There’s a difference, she says, between cross-culturalism and cultural appropriation.  

But I don’t want to write about appropriation, as fascinating and important as I find the thought – I want to write about Smith, who came to Fayetteville as the 2015 Distinguished Reader for the Creative Writing department at the University of Arkansas, in partnership with the Fayetteville Public Library (which has just wrapped up its annual True Lit Festival).

Smith, whom I’ve now had the privilege of hearing read twice, is brilliant – in both the Q & A I described above and in her reading, later that evening, to an audience of about 400 people, she had every listener rapt. And I think part of that has to do with the clarity and incisiveness of her observations about people. She’s the kind of person who says things that just make sense – things that, once said, make one surprised the idea hadn’t been put just that way before – of course what we know isn’t determined by our genetic make-up, of course that’s a valuable piece of the conversation about cultural appropriation.  

Smith is also hilarious. Her writing is incredibly attentive to the personal motivations of her characters, and I think the incisiveness of her observations is what frequently had her audience laughing, even though the situations she describes in her novel (parents fighting, a child unable to attend a dance class she loved) are often somewhat sad. We have a tendency to laugh when an observation is accurate enough that we recognize ourselves (or people we know) in it.

I think this is a thing that distinguishes great writers from mediocre ones: the ability to pick up on and then, in turn, portray the subtle quirks that make our familiar world seem strange. I think this is true, too, for other artists and entertainers who rely on human communication (comedians, playwrights, actors, for example).

Molly Rector is a staff writer for the Daily Record. Contact her at molly@dailydata.com.