Zadie Smith | Commencement Speech 2014 | The New School

it is the strange destiny of authors of to witness their words take on lives of their own take for instance is a dismiss elegant line the past is always tense the future perfect it has become a standby of wedding toasts and yes commencement speeches and yet after more than a decade the words still bear her mark clever but not glib funny but profoundly expressive of sorrow and hope was there ever aligned more Zadie Smith it is the kind of uncommon ly elegant turns a phrase that we have come to expect upon opening one of her novels since her debut with the acclaimed white white teeth Miss Smith has produced one brilliantly realised novel after another the autograph man on beauty in NW readers of the New York Review of Books have also come to look forward to her clear-eyed essays on issues ranging from environmental degradation to joy to Facebook for Zadie Smith there is no topic too great no argument too ferocious race class and gender the societal value of art in literature the burden of history she has explored them all guarding her readers towards a more nuanced understanding of our world in ourselves it is now my great honor to introduce our keynote speaker Zadie Smith welcome graduating class of 2014 and congratulations you did it you made it how do you feel I guess I can only hazard a guess which means thinking back to my own graduation in England 1997 and extrapolating did I feel like you I should say first that some elements of the day were rather different I wasn't in a stadium listening to a speech I was in an 18th century Hall kneeling before the Dean who spoke Latin and held one of my fingers don't ask me why still the essential facts were the same like you I was finally done with my degree and had made of myself a graduate and like you I now had two families the old boring one that raised me and an exciting new one consisting of a bunch of freaks I'd met in college but part of the delightful anxiety of graduation day was trying to find a way to blend these two tribes with their differing haircuts and political views and hygiene standards and tastes and music I felt like a character in two different movies and so old I really believed I was ancient impossibly distant in experience from the freshmen only three years below I was as likely to pretend the squirrel as a freshman which strange relationship with time is perhaps unique to graduates and toddlers nowadays age 38 if I meet someone of 41 I don't conclude that friendship is impossible between us but when I was 21 the gap between me and an 18 year old felt insurmountable just like my four-year-old daughter who'd rather eat sand and have a playdate with a one-year-old and what else oh the love dramas so many love dramas mine other people's they take up such a large part of college life it seems unfair not to have them properly reflected in the transcript any full account of my university years should really include the fact that I majored in English literature with a minor in drunken discussions about the difference between loving someone and being in love with that person what can I tell you it was the 90s we were really into ourselves we were into self curation in the 90s we even had a thing called year off trousers which signified any kind of ethnic or exotic pants one brought back home from a distant ideally third world country and these trousers were meant to alert to a passing stranger the fact we've been somewhere fascinating and thus added further color to our unique personalities personally I couldn't afford a year off but I was very compelled by those trousers in short the thing I wanted most in the world was to be an individual I thought that's what my graduation signified that I had gone from being one of the many to one of the few to one of the ones who would have choices in life after all my father didn't have many choices his father had none at all unlike them I had gone to university I was a special individual well looking back it's easy to diagnose a case of self-love people are always accusing students of self-love of self obsession and this is a bit confusing because college surely encourages the habit you concentrate on yourself in order to improve yourself isn't that the whole idea and out of this process hopefully emerge strikingly comp individuals with high self-esteem prepared for personal achievement when we graduate though things can get a little complicated for how are we meant to think of this fabulous person we've taken such care of creating if University made me special did that mean I was worth more than my father more than his father before him did it mean I should expect more from life than them did I deserve more what does it really mean to be one of the few are the fruits of our education a sort of gift to be circulated generously through the world or are we to think us of ourselves as pure commodity on sale to the highest bidder well let's be honest you're probably feeling pulled in several directions right now and that's perfectly natural in the 90s the post graduation dilemma was usually presented to us as a straight ethical choice between working for the banks and doing selfless charitable work the comic extremity of the choice I now see was perfectly deliberate it men you didn't have to take it too seriously and so we peeled off from each other some of us many of us join the banks but those that didn't had no special cause to pat ourselves on the back with rare exceptions we all pursued self-interest more or less it wasn't a surprise we'd been raised that way born in the 70s we did not live through austerity did not go to war like my father or his father for the most part we did not join large political or ideological movements we simply inherited the advantages of for which a previous generation had fought and the thing so many of us feared was the idea of being subsumed back into the collective from which we've come of being returned to the world of the many or doing any work at all in that world in my case this new attitude was particularly noticeable my own mother was a social worker and I had teachers in my rowdy state school who had themselves been educated at precisely the elite institution I would later join but amongst my college friends I know of no one who made that choice for the most part we were uninterested in what we considered to be unglamorous pursuits we valued individuality above all things you can thank my generation for the invention of the word supermodel and the popularization of celebrity and lifestyle often used in conjunction with each other reality TV that was us also televised talent shows also ugg boots you're welcome millenials and when the fussier amongst us detected in these visions of prestigious individuality perhaps something a little crass and commercialized our solution was to go in some ways further down the same road to out individuate the celebrated individuals we became hipsters defined by the ways we weren't like everybody else one amusing much commented upon consequence of this was that we all ended up individuals of the same type not one of a kind but one of a kind but there was another aspect I knife now find melancholic we isolated ourselves it took us the longest time to work out that we needed each other you may have noticed that even now we seem somewhat stunned by quite ordinary human pursuits like having children or living in a neighborhood or getting ill we're always writing lifestyle articles about such matters in the Sunday papers that's because until very recently we were thought we were gonna get through this whole life thing purely on our own steam even if we were no fans of the ex British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher we had unwittingly taken her most famous slogan and embedded it deep within our own lives there is no such thing as society she said we were unique individuals what do we need with society but then it turned out the things that have happened to everybody since the dawn of time also happened to us our parents got old and ill our children needed schools and somewhere to play we wanted trains that ran on time we needed each other it turned out we were just human like everybody now I may have this completely backward but I get the sense that something different is going on in your generation something hopeful you seem to be smarter sooner part of these smarts is surely born out of crisis in the 90s we had high employment and a buoyant economy we could afford to spend weeks wondering about the exact length and shape of our bids or whether Kurt Cobain was a sellout your situation is more acute you have so many large collective tasks ahead and you know that we had them too but paid little attention so now I'm afraid it falls to you the climate the economy the sick relationship between the individual prestige of the first world and the anonymity of the third these are things only many hands can fix working together you are all individuals but you're also part of a generation and generations are defined by the projects they take on together even at the level of slogan you've decided to honor the concept of the many over the few that now famous 99% as far as slogans go which is not very far you're still sounds more thoughtful to me than the slogans of my youth which were fatally infected by advertising be strong be fast be boy be different bu bu that was always the takeaway and when my peers grew up and went into advertising they spread that message far and wide just be you screams the label on your shampoo bottle just be you cries your deodorant because you're worth it you get about 50 commencement speeches a day and that's before you've even left the bathroom I didn't think you'd want any more of that from me instead I want to speak in favor of recognizing our place within the many not only as a slogan much less as a personal sacrifice but rather as a potential source of joy in your life here is a perhaps silly example happen to be recently at my mother's birthday around midnight it came time to divide up the rum cake and I not naturally one of life's volunteers was press-ganged into helping a small circle of women surrounded me dressed in West African wraps and head scarfs in imitation of their ancestors many hands make short work said one and passed me a stack of paper plates it was my job to take the plated slices through the crowd hardly any words passed between us as we went about our collective task but each time we set a new round upon a tray I detected a hum of deep satisfaction at our many hands forming this useful human chain occasionally as I gave her a slice of cake an older person would look up a murmur oh yeah Yvonne's daughter but for the most part it was the cake itself that received the greeting a little nod or a smile for it was the duty of the daughter to hand out cake no further commentary was required and it was while doing what I hadn't realized was my duty that I felt what might be described as the exact opposite of the sensation I have standing in front of you now not puffed up with individual prestige but immersed in the beauty of the crowd connected if only in gesture to an ancient line of practical women working in Campania bull silence in the service of their community it's such a ludicrously tiny example of the collective action and yet clearly still so rare in my own life even this minor instance of it struck me anyway my point is it was a beautiful feeling and it was over too soon and when I tried to look for a way to put it into this speech I was surprised how difficult it is to find the right words to describe it so many of our colloquial terms for this work of many hands are sunk in infamy human chain for starters cog in the Machine brick in the wall in such phrases we sense the long shadow of the 20th century with its brutal collective movements we do not trust the collective we've seen what submission to it can do we believe instead in the individual here in America especially now I also believe in the individual I'm so grateful for the three years of college that helped make more or less of an individual out of me teaching me how to think and write you may well ask whom I to praise the work of many hands when I myself chose the work of one pair of hands the most isolated there is I can't escape that accusation I can only look at my own habit of self-love and ask what is the best use I can make of this utterly human habit can I make a gift of myself in some other way I know for sure I haven't done it half as much as I should or could have I look at the fine example of my friend the writer and activist Dave Eggers and see a man who took his own individual prestige and parlayed it into an extraordinary collective action eight to six national in which many hands work to create educational opportunities for disadvantaged kids all over this country and when you go to one of days not-for-profit tutoring centers you don't find selfless young people grimly sacrificing themselves for others what you see is joy Dave's achievement is neither quite charity nor simple individual philanthropy it's a collective effort that gets people involved in each other's lives I don't mean to speak meanly of philanthropy generally speaking philanthropy is always better than no help at all but it is also in itself a privilege of the few and I think none of us want communities to rise or fall dependent on the whims of the very rich I think we would rather be involved in each other's lives and that what stops us most often it's fear we fear that the work of many hands will obscure the beloved outline of our individual selves but perhaps itself you've been treasuring for so long is itself the work of many hands speaking personally I owe so much to the hard work of my parents to the educational and healthcare systems in my country to the love and care of my friends and even if one's individual prestige such as it is represents an entirely solo effort the result of sheer hard work does that everywhere and always mean you deserve the largest possible slice of the pie but these are big questions and it is collectively that you'll have to decide them everything from the remuneration of executives to the idea of the Commons itself depends upon it and at the core of the question is what it really means to be the few and the many throughout your adult life you're going to have a daily choice to throw your lot in with one or the other and a lot of people most people even people without the luxury of your choices are going to suggest to you over and over that only an idiot chooses to join join the many when he could be one of the few only an idiot chooses public / private shared / gated community mrs. Thatcher who was such a genius at witty aphorism once said a man who beyond the age of 26 finds himself on a bus can count himself a failure I've always been fascinated by that quote by its dark assumption that even something as natural as sharing a journey with another person represents a form of personal denigration the best reply to I know is that famous line of Terence the Roman playwright Homer some whom are Nina Hill are me alienum puto I am a human being I consider nothing that is human alien to me Montana like that so much he had it carved into the beams of his ceiling some people interpret it as a call to toleration I find it stronger than that I think it's a call to love now full disclosure most of the time I don't find it easy to love my fellow humans I'm still that solipsistic 21 year old but the times I've been able to get over myself and get involved at whatever level well what I'm trying to say is those have proved the most valuable moments of my life and I never would have guessed that back in 1997 oh I would have paid lip service to it as a noble idea but I wouldn't have believed in and the thing is it's not even a question of ethics or self-sacrifice or moral high-ground it's actually totally selfish being with people doing for people it's gonna bring you joy unexpectedly it just feels better it feels good to give you a unique and prestigious selves to slip every now and then and confess your membership in this unwieldly collective called the human race for one thing it's far less lonely and for another contre mrs. Thatcher some of the best conversations you'll ever hear will be on public transport if it weren't for the New York and London subway systems my novels would be books of blank pages but I'm preaching to the converted I see you gazing into your phones as you walk down Broadway and I know solid system must be a constant danger as it is for me as it has been for every human since the dawn of time but you've also got this tremendous contrapuntal force pulling you into the world for aren't you always connecting to each other forever communicating rarely scared of strangers wildly open ready to tell anyone everything doesn't online anonymity tear at the very idea of a prestige individual aren't young artists collapsing the border between themselves and their audience aren't young coders determined on an all-access world in which everybody is an equal participant are the young activists content just to raise the money and run no they want to be local grassroots involved those are all good instincts I'm so excited to think of you pursuing them hold on to that desire for human connection don't let anyone scare you out of it walk down these crowded streets with a smile on your face be thankful you get to walk so close to other humans it's a privilege don't let your fellow humans be alien to you and as you get older and perhaps a little less open than you are now don't assume that exclusive always and everywhere means better it may only mean lonelier there will always be folks hard selling you the life of the few the private schools private planes private islands private life there trying to convince you that hell is other people don't believe it we are far more frequently each other's shelter and correction the antidote to solipsism and so many windows on this world thank you

Channel: The New School

Views: 32,968

Keywords: The New School, Colleges in New York, NYC, Zadie Smith, Commencement 2014

Id: pjdmo6EKn8I

Length: 23min 39sec (1419 seconds)

Published: Thu May 29 2014