Zadie Smith Interview: Such Painful Knowledge

okay swing time that is the title of your book end of a movie that I know forwards and backwards oh really because I spend a lot of time like you did watching Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers but it also means that this is a novel that swings in time doesn't it it's actually not a film that I knew very well I obviously I remembered the title and originally I wanted to put a comma after swing and my husband said that was the most interesting he'd ever heard we took on well but so I watched the film as a process of writing the book and I didn't remember it very well at all I think I remember the roller skating part that was about it but um a lot of the movies in the book aren't movies I knew particularly well or and the main movie thread in it about Jenny Lagoon she's not someone I'd ever heard of until I started writing the book so it was a kind of they're false memories you know I didn't really have them I kind of constructed them as I went along one of the many great pleasures of reading swing time is that it's impossible not to go on the internet and see a lot of Clips yeah I wanted that and I really feel it's something I learned from younger writers that that your reader is a kind of cyborg because of these phones that you all have in your pockets and so a lot of the business of literature is defunct you know it's not necessary I think if you open middlemarch there are all these loving descriptions of a certain piece of English land a certain kind of house or this is all unnecessary now you know so I don't I don't do it anymore and I presume that the reader has this power to Google and that instead of just being a depressing thing it can be quite creative you know you kind of play with the knowledge that they will look up these clips and see what you saw could sound a bit depressing because they would be you out of kid you out of work no it's just a new way to work you've always had to find new ways to work you know photography the challenge to painting and the Internet is a challenge to a certain kind of prose that's fine you're going to read a little extract get us into the which would you place us or you starting and the very I always read the beginning so I'm guess it's gonna be a little bit later on and this is just about the character the narrator her mother and her best friend Tracy who lives in a different council estate on the other side of the road long before it became her career my mother had a political mind it was in her nature to think of people collectively even as a child I noticed it and felt instinctively that there was something chilly and unfeeling in her ability to analyse so precisely the people she lived among her friends her community her own family we were all at one in the same time people she knew and loved but also objects of study living embodiment of all she seemed to be learning I put Middlesex Polytechnic she held herself apart always she never submitted for example to the neighborhood cult of sharpness the passion for shiny shell suits and sparkling fake gems for whole days spent in the hair salon children and fifty quid trainers Surtees paid for over several years on hire-purchase although neither would she ever entirely condemned it people are not poor because they've made bad choices my mother liked to say they make bad choices because they're poor but though she was serene and anthropological about these matters in her college essays all while lecturing me and my father across the dinner table I knew in her real life she was often exasperated she didn't pick me up from school anymore my father did that now because the scene there aggravated her too much in particular the way each afternoon time collapsed and all those mothers became kids again kids who'd come to click their kids and all these kids together turn from school with relief free finally to speak with each other in their own way and to laugh and joke and eat ice cream for the waiting ice cream van and to make what they considered to be a natural amount of noise my mother didn't fit into all of that any longer she still cared for the group intellectually politically but she was no longer one of them every now and then she did get caught up in it usually by some error of timing and found herself trapped in a conversation with a mother often Tracey's whilst in lane on these occasions she could turn callous making a point of mentioning each new academic achievement of mine or inventing some although she knew that all Tracy's mother could offer in return was more of our dance teachers praise which was to my mother an entirely worthless commodity my mother was proud of trying harder than Tracy's mother than all the mothers of having got me into a half-decent state school instead of one of the several terrible ones she was in a competition of caring and yet her fellow contestants like Tracy's mother were so ill equipped when placed beside her that it was a fatally lopsided battle I often wondered is it some kind of trade-off do others have to lose so we can win [Applause] I think this is a pretty wonderful introduction to the narrator's mother who is a very important figure and a very complicated one can we talk a little about mothers can we talk about this mother to begin with because she has aspirations and and I mean if you write them down on the paper I would like to help my community and I want to have a better education for myself and my child that sounds wonderful but she is somehow really annoying yes I think I was thinking about the way that some struggles are even when they're righteous are personally deforming you know you know a good example is you know when when I first started writing essays or doing student work I think a lot of what I wrote was quite angry and then you're encouraged in England anyway to take on what is considered a sophisticated voice and this sophisticated voice is is neutral it holds no grudges it is kind of serene and is that the voice you're talking in now and the problem with that is it's easy to be serene when your life is easy it's nice to be nice when people are nice to you but but when you're not you you're in struggle you know and that creates a lot of rage and I was always interested in the kind of personal deformations that involves you know when you feel that you're in a kind of battle and and at street level I suppose in my family certainly in my extended family you felt this battle I don't think white middle-class mothers of my generation put their kids out to school every day with anxiety you know they didn't have fear and so you can be civilized and serene and you have you can elaborate things like a sense of humor or a passion for sculpture or you have time for these kind of control but when your main concern is kind of survival in your mind where the warranted or not everything else is a luxury in t see what I mean and I I did think about that a lot I mean I had my call extended Carribean families in London you had the cousin you knew was in jail or somebody who had died of substance abuse you have all these kind of cautionary tales so just trying to survive takes a lot of work takes a lot of single-mindedness and and I think some of that can be difficult I mean the mother character in this book is a little bit more me than my mother but certainly all the mothers I knew they weren't easy people but they didn't have the luxury of being easy people they were fighting what they considered to be a battle everyday but apparently the kids are also fighting a battle since they turned their backs on the school and then go out into the real life yes where they can be as they are and make the noise they think me is that a general thing do you think for kids or is this specific also well I think I've just been reading before that lunch today I was reading a book I should have read a long time ago by the only time I get to read is when I'm away from my children so I had I had this book I've been wanting to read for awhile which is called black and British it was a TV series recently in England it's by Nigerian academic and I was reading the book and even in the first two chapters his argument is basically that black the black presence in Britain is at least a thousand years old which is evidentially true and also that the the diaspora and Britain are deeply intertwined at every moment in their history and I think if I had been 13 and known any of that I would have had a substantially different consciousness I think it's an incredible thing to take from children any knowledge of what they're doing in a place I think that's that is one of the most deforming things of all it's just you just had no clue the thing I always remember which is deeply embarrassing when I told my American friends they can't believe it but when I was about 12 having a discussion with some other Jamaican British children and in this conversation we will realize because I'd recently seen things like rapido a picture of an Arawak Indian who was described as a Jamaican native and I had never heard I didn't understand what that meant because I thought my family people like me were native to Jamaica so you had all this knowledge about the slave trade as it applied to West Africa and America but I suppose I hadn't really considered the idea that the entire population of Jamaica is a descendant of a slave trade that was news to me at 12 and I think that's a very strange and late piece of knowledge yes and to have known it earlier would have explained the great deal and it was knowledge you could achieve at home yes my mother I see her problem now and I have a child this there's never a good time to tell your child about slavery oh oh the Holocaust it's not when is that a good day it's never sometimes I think about it and some conversations go towards it and I think she's seven does she need to know about the Holocaust right now can I wait till nine or twelve or so I'm not surprised at that she taught us a lot of things but I can see the hesitancy it's very hard to explain to a child mass atrocity it's actually quite a difficult conversation to have even if you're eager for them to understand that it's such painful knowledge yeah in this half half-decent school as you say where the narrative is going to school and where Tracy eventually comes to there is an amazing mix of children of all kinds of backgrounds which you would think maybe would sort of make the problem go away everybody is from everywhere else or in my service so so is that a possibility he didn't make the problem go away but it was a very interesting atmosphere you had kind of white liberal families basically ex-communists crowd which sent their children to these schools on political principle you know recent migrants working-class kids who have had no choice middle-class idealists it was that's an interesting mix of people so you know it might not in the kind of school that my it's highly on regulators test but to me there's an extremely effective place to be a really interesting place to be for those of you have not had time or possibility to reach swing time yet we might just say a few words about where we are it's so yeah it's the story of two girls yes it made me in a dance class in the early 80s and they're both mixed-race but one of them is the wrong way around switchin England in England in those days was to have a black mother and a white father was quite unusual and they grow up together as they separate for various kind of personal and academic reasons it just traces their early life till about the age of their early 30s and let's say there's a very beautiful description of the attraction they have to each other and that is that they are like cut out of the same piece of skin you have the same tone of skin this is something I feel about race actually the you know the the received liberal wisdom these days I think even Obama tweeted this recently is that children aren't born racist they have to be taught to be racist I really disagree I think children are instinctively racist and I think lots of things that are natural are not particularly good the problem with the analogy is that the assumption that if it's natural it must be good well also you know kidney cancer and dying of hunger industry is also natural but point of civilized life is that you try and improve upon nature which is usually disastrous and red in tooth and claw but I do think that the children have a deep mystic for like you know if they if they grow up that's when I started my staff recurring completely black environments and they see a white person they're horrified by instinct no matter how young they are it's completely horror like what is that there's a deep instinct in people not to understand what is different from them because that's natural doesn't mean that something to be encouraged or pursued as a policy lots of instincts and people are lamentable so when I thought about those children I thought they are attracted to each other because they are similar they have a kind of gut tribal instinct that girl across the room looks like me she seems like me we have the same skin that's my girl that's my girl that that's of I totally you can deny that instinct in people it's about how far you let it go that tribal instinct and what you have to allow in tribalism tribalism isn't is natural but it's not the only instinct we have and it is I mean Tracy is her girl but she is a very difficult girl because on one hand she has this wonderful ability she can dance the way that anybody who has ever wanted to dance I mean she's a dancer right and and the narrator wants to dance and she dances I mean I as far as I can tell she's even quite good dance she sings better than she dances but but because the narrator's mother is so keen on educating her and getting her out of there she's she's taken away from from this environment while Tracy's mother who is I don't know if you would say she's a more loving mother when she's she's also a more lost mother like has Tracy go that way and and that separates the girls that's one of the things and actually Tracy in my humble opinion is not a very nice girl no but but she's also kind of engaged in a battle I always think Tracy is someone who has an enormous amount of spirit and energy and someone like that can be directed in many different forms I suppose all of my novels I've always been concerned about natural capacities talents which I think everybody has in some form there isn't anyone on earth who doesn't have something of value to offer and then the question of how we organize our social lives is how do we exploit that value exploit is that seems like a negative word but to not have your value exploited is to be completely forgotten you know not to be able to use your hands when you're good with your hands or use your mind when you're good with your mind and nothing about racism sexism exception would matter if it weren't for the mass loss of ability that's when I think of the history of slavery I think of 6 million people whose human value whatever it was was spilt on the ground it never amounted to anything was never allowed to my anything it's the most awful waste of human capacity and so that's that's the way I I look at it that that you have all these people with possibilities within them of all different kinds and when they are lost when they are not seen that that's a terrible collective loss and Tracy is one of those people she has a great amount of spirit will but nowhere to place it when the race that has I would say less ability to do something she's she's actually annoying in a different way yeah with with his passive but she's luckier yeah and she's luckier and and then again not really lucky because she gets a job being an assist personal assistant for a very famous singer right Amy and this is a person when we talk about voices amy is also a person she's from Australia originally but you cannot hear that she has a sort of universal voice doesn't she and all the way through always thinking about power the way people use people basically in some ways that are tolerable in some ways which are unforgivable that storyline basically came out if I suppose living in New York and seeing so many young people talented young people with lots of ability selling their skills and times to the highest bidder you know in any capacity which is what the economy demands now there's really extreme examples I'd love to see a novel which is about all the apps that basically utilize young people there's something called TaskRabbit do you have that here yet well you can just press your phone and some person will come and make your bed you know I mean physically make a bed out of a book and you pay them by the hour or put I mean in New York you hear stories about literally TaskRabbit being used so someone come and put a light bulb in or put a painting on the wall so this kind of incompetence is then farmed out to young person who no matter what you're doing at that moment must then you know you might be watching Netflix eating a burger but the phone goes and you are now basically a kind of servant right anywhere in the city for anyone at any time under the idea of a I didn't know fluid economy that that really interests me all that stuff cuz obviously everybody has to has to work but but that kind of work clearly is without unionization without guarantee without I mean it's literally labor for money in the moment so in in my book the character is that isn't quite that but she is kind of factotum so everything that she is has been sublimated to the will of somebody else which is what personal assistant often means in New York these days it's hiring someone to do your bidding in all areas at all times and I found that quite an interesting example of exploitation of power I want to talk more about that but I would like to go back to the two girls because yeah I think that the whole story about this friendship is is very moving even though I've now perhaps so the wrongly saying that one is annoying and the other one is a bit but I mean many girls are at they're sort of - in their tender years and and but there's something about this it's it's like a love affair it is and I mean I told the story before but I think part of which what sparked it was having my own daughter and seeing the way she related to other girls and other girls related to her because I suppose it in the culture the the cliche of it is that girls are jealous of each other they're envious they fight because they compare each other and certainly there is an aspect of that but I think what's much more acute it's this kind of radical empathy I don't mean empathy in the kind of lovely generous way but just the ability to imagine what somebody else's life is like which it seems to me to generalize a little bit for whatever reason and if it's an essential quality or acculturation or whatever it is girls from an early age display I noticed it once when I went on a to a children's party with my daughter and as we were leaving another little girl who's in her class said to me where you going now I said home what he can do at home I don't know we're just going to read a story what story she's gonna read I don't know maybe two stories what time she gonna go to bed I don't know maybe eight is she gonna have the hot chocolate I don't know she wanted to know every single stage of what was gonna happen with my daughter when they were parted so she could compare it to her own experience where is my son if he's leaving another boy says bye and literally that boy could be dead and he wouldn't it would not cross his mind until he saw him again he's like are you yeah you that friend of mine I saw yesterday that that difference I thought was really interesting that women continue to it's like a projection so I I think it's sold in the culture as a negative thing but I think it's quite interesting the ability to wonder exactly what your friend is doing went what she's doing it what heard a new relationship is like and then of course and a dog had extends to what's her marriage like what's a car like what's a house like what's the fray it's a kind of compulsion but but it's it's very narrative in at its root you know which part the reason I think the history of the novel is so almost before any other art forms so entwined with women you know some of its earliest practitioners and its greatest practitioners are women and the readers are women and and the readers are women yeah absolutely the story guys yeah many of them are at least well this may explain why I was sitting in at an Italian beach this summer and I was so impressed by the amazing amount of talk that came out of the mouth of the Italian women they could they don't stop they don't stop at all or maybe they were asking these questions so what are you going to do afterwards in hives what is the what could as you say the positive side of things that you normally see negatively is this a kind of a writers delight I think it's just interesting like there I remember watching some of you might have seen the last season of girls and Lena Dunham sure and there's a lot of critique about oh well why do they have to all fall out at the end why are they all angry with each other women don't hate but I thought what it was more about was the fact that these women had a real relation with each other they were incredibly involved with each other which obviously inevitably involves bus-stops arguments anger if you're not involved with each other if you're only meeting as American men quite often do to watch a football game or flip a burger there's no danger of that kind of argument because you never in it that deep in the first place so I think it's a kind of tribute to the intimacy of those relations that they can cause so much German Drang you know I don't think that's a bad thing I'm asking you because I do feel also in swing time that there is I mean a lot of the things that you would say this is how it is to be multicultural is is good and you know the good you you do switch up and down a bit the good and the bad because there is a part of the story which plays out in West Africa mm-hmm where a me the singer travels to and and obviously the narrator's is with her and also there without her and and some things play out there which are not entirely good you would think that coming to the original source of wealth a country where people live in in a more natural way but it's it's actually very a very difficult place I think the thing I really wanted to get and it's again in this incredible bog if you I'm reading black and British is that the histories are not separate things like it's been there's too much concentration on the idea that Britain is a kind of a modernist place until the 50s and then all these migrants turn up and it becomes multicultural the history of Britain is multicultural from the beginning there's an extraordinary anecdote in the bogey-free set not far from a bit of West Africa I was talking about this time in Sierra Leone where he describes a massive slave fortress which was built its wall was like that and the other side of the wall was the villa where they the British men who were trading in these slaves lived and drank with their wives and children so the slave yard is attached to the house it's like built onto the house and there's a little bit at the back which in the women's section which was a kind of basically he names it as a rape house that's what it was it was a place that these women were taking advantage of occasionally or whenever they could be and then these men on the side and then this proper British villa with a lovely fireplace used to put holy up even in the ground now around this fortress he says there's an incredible amount of bottles because the fascinating thing is that everybody drank such a huge amount while seeming to be happy I mean they had fancy dinners invited people and but the bottles are very significant to me that when you're living next to a slave house that you're somehow have managed to block out your consciousness on a daily basis something terrible is inside you you know something's rising up but they drank to excess and all the accounts of no British traders coming to visit this fortress it's called bunts mentioned the drinking an incredible about drinking last night everybody was incredibly drunk as if the bad conscience was in the drink you know but that anecdote evenly towards the the end of each month that slaves to be brought out the front and branded and the brand was the brand of George the third the King of England the history is like that there's no time for separation or to think that it's some kind of modern affectation of writers like me or historians like him to make the past multicultural where it wasn't the opposite is true the illusion was that we weren't completely entwined in each other's lives in morbid ways and in interesting ways and in complicated ways so when the character goes back to West Africa I think she she imagines she's going as a kind of tourist or at a distance but the history of West Africa is simultaneously the history of England the history of Portugal history of Spain these are not separate issues she's deeply involved from the beginning and just being a blanik I think when I met a lot of black tourists in West Africa who felt they were somehow separate or heard a special communication over the places they were on by virtue of their blackness I think your disabused of that to know that every little local culture is so specific so distant from your own so it's a series of kind of awakenings and cliches turned over that was my experience there anyway but you went to West Africa you've said somewhere you had a midlife crisis is that what made you go to West Africa it's funny my when my mum when I thought that ten years earlier I thought she's having a midlife crisis and then hello my turn came I think that feeling of going to a place which you were not born in which you have no direct relation to apart from with 200 years separate and feeling yourself at home that's a feeling I wanted to interrogate because of course it's sentimental like when I was in Gambia Liberia Ghana with other often African American tourists and people are crying and moved and you know part of me wants to separate from that because I think well we're still tourists we're all tourists here and we don't really know the these places were strangers to the specificity of this place but it's also hard to suppress a feeling which sometimes feels mystical you know there are accounts of people being at cape coast castle or being in The Gambia or in Sierra Leone I'm feeling the presence of their ancestors or I mean I I'm I always think of myself it's a pretty fiercely rational person but I think sometimes certain experiences test your test your rationality in that sense I did have very strong feelings when I was there even if their self created they're still present well if we're talking a little bit about ancestors could you describe your family because it's it's a it's a kind of my father's side I used to always have these um fantasies that we were secretly Jewish somewhere down the lines but it's not the case we're just English so English going back centuries back to Sutton Hoo we're just English that's all those going in because I in when I was a kid I connected it with the kind of I suppose sentimentally when the intellectual tradition or something I was concerned with of my father's family you know my grandmother was a maid in a fancy house my grandfather briefly had a fish and chip van but that went wrong you know you want you want to kind of imagine some slightly grander background for yourself so I guess that's what I was thinking about from one perspective but now and then my mother's side or just jamaicans my mother came she was that generation a little too young for Windrush so she one of many many Jamaican children it was left in Jamaica while their mothers came over to work so super traumatic thing for a whole generation so you just missed your your mother for 11 years or whatever and then would join her when it was when there was enough money to find something decent to live excetera that was my mother's story and and going back I would say I mean most Jamaicans think of themselves as Ghanaian but I did that genetic test and it said Nigeria which was very surprising so I don't but I someone told me that Derek test is incredibly imprecise and not accurate so I don't know but yes yeah that's great but my mom put a lot of time and effort into Ghana so I think she was a bit disappointed they've gone the other way yeah but yeah I mean I might I think on both sides my family are not there's no you can't get any records on one hand I'm called Smith which is impossible to investigate you know in England and working-class Smith it's just it might as well be written in water you can't get anywhere and in my mother's family the there's a you mean she herself was born it's a very extreme poverty but you know like most Jamaicans my family believe they're related to various famous Jamaica's I'm not gonna bore you with a list of people were possibly related to but so I think you part of it is you Chris write your own history you know made maybe it's factual I don't know I'm not gonna repeat it but but you find ways to kind of establish your family in time and space even if you don't have family trees and written records and so on so is there and I know that your parents divorced at some point but is there a very romantic story about no British man no fortunately no no romance no I'm trying to think that all the kind of phony parents in my novels well there isn't any story as brutal as my actual parents no unfortunately not but it's nice like what writing on beauty's a part of writing is is daydreaming like what would it be like to have two parents who were wildly in love like Howard and Kiki are and who have similar interests than or you know if part of its pure daydreaming it's like a kind of childish how about the strange thing I think is that it's convincing to people so I I did have an incident when I was in a playground in New York long ago where a woman count to me and say kind of conspiratorial II oh my father taught Wellesley what did your father teach and I was like my father teach anything but I realized to her that I'm beauty that was my family in her mind you know so it's funny how that happens this kind of transition of the fiction into the real yeah I thought that was one of the reasons you did not want to write novels in first-person narrator style yeah so until now and I think in my mother's case she's so used to being mistaken for all these various amazing yeah so she doesn't I don't actually bothers about it anymore and I'm part of it is again I cut it so it's almost like acting like what would it be like if I were a dancer instead of a writer what if I had no siblings what if I had a job what if I what if what if what if it's all it's all of that even what if I'd had a friend because I never had a friend like that so it's a kind of fantasy life I know it's a kind of fantasy life but what is not a fantasy is that you actually sing very well I I think okay but oh but not yeah I'd rather write but you didn't know is that you would rather write in the beginning teacher well my my family oh there's a there's a lot of performers in my family and I think I mean my middle brother is a comedian and actor and yet he has an album out right now it's fourth I think and my little brother is a actor and he also wraps and there's a lot of that in my family now I've got singer aunts and uncles and just in the context of my family my singing was not anything to write home about let's put it that way but then the love of literature where does that come from because I think from from reading your essays that you don't read books you eat books I love to read I mean it's not my father didn't read he he had aspirations to be a reader and he had read when he was young but I never saw him read anything apart from the Evening Standard my mom is a great reader and it's really from her just because she had so many books they were everywhere and that was very helpful and but my brother said my little brother he's gonna hate me to say liberals never read my book so I don't know maybe he's reading some other book but definitely not mine and my middle brother reads but for their music was the main thing you know music kind of took them away it just depends what gets you young and I did love music but I love books more you often say about writers that you have to find your own voice I don't I don't really feel I have any voice and I think most writers that I know that I like the thing they have in common is a feeling of impersonality of not really sounding like anything or anyone and I know it's a illusion because you seem distinct in the minds of others but I think that's a characteristic of writers that I notice that they look around and think look at all these people with personality what's wrong with me I think personality is very mysterious to writers that's why it's quite fluid in them you know it's why you shouldn't marry them and stuff well you have to writers we married - yeah personalities that's not interesting yeah I think it's the opposite with poets poets have too much personality they have the opposite issue yeah well talking about personalities I would like to go back to traces personality because it's it's intriguing and it's difficult and it's a kind of painful I think there there is a painful scene in the book which is a birthday party we were talking about another birthday party but this is a birthday party where Tracy and the narrator come to a house of a different class you know I think you know I've seen a lot of stuff from my childhood I kind of don't dwell on and don't think about too much but it's undoubtedly a strange experience to be always surrounded by people who don't look like you a lot of the time when you're outside of your house of your family and then also to be surrounded by people whose ways of being seem so different like some of the memories like just little things like I guess in one moment in the book there's a she goes into a house and she sees a huge jar full of coins and I do remember moments like that in child are thinking what are you doing with that money why is it sitting in a jar on your kitchen counter when we used to go ten rounds over who's gonna get this pound that mum might or may or may not give us it's those little things that are completely unconscious I think if you now I have plenty of jars filled with change I didn't think twice about it all I was reading wonderful novel today in about poor students and they go into a rich person's house and and the first thing they notice is look at all that fruit in the bowl and I remember that too like who buys all these peaches and fresh orange juice and doesn't think twice about them rotting in the bowl all that kind of stuff which becomes you don't see it anymore it doesn't take very long for you to forget all of that reading that sentence and that other person's book I suddenly remembered I used to think that fresh fruit was a sign of intense wealth and it's that kind of thing that you block out and forget so it was interesting writing and trying to remember that mindset in which a jar of coins seems almost offensive like you've got so much money you just leave it hanging around in a jar and no one tries to get in it and no one steals it at night and no one's trying to buy anything with it it's just excess it's it's that kind of thing it's quite hot it's quite hard to remember I think thinking back through money is one of the hardest things to do because money is one of those things which disguises itself as nature you know you begin to think of it as natural but at this birthday party somebody actually does if not steal I mean Tracey crosses the border of how to behave but I think when you're a kid in England and you come from a slightly different background it feels like everything you do crosses the border every everything you say every the way you talk the way you move it's all shocking to everybody all the time and so I think you can have two responses which is what my response was always to be on my very best behavior trying to show everybody what did the girl I was but I always admire girls like Tracey were just weren't gonna tow that line I think it's very it was very bold it often got them into terrible trouble because it's just so easy to to fool when you're in that situation just in the practical sense you got expelled you know the expelling of black children from English state schools was you know constant you didn't expel white kids but if a boy raised black boy raised his voice or he was gone gone for a week or gone for two weeks and so it you will aware that was really easy to fall out of the system so I kind of responded by being very very good but I think if you are very very good there's a little bit of self-hatred which comes with it because you think well why do I have to be twice as good as everybody else here why am I doing this Who am I doing it for there is no easy way out of that no no and I another kind of incident that spurred this book was quite separate so I was trying to research an article about a halfway house in Cricklewood near where I live such as interviewing people who were homeless staying in this halfway house and all of them the half half of them were recent immigrants like literally just off the boat from Syria Poland all over Africa West Africa and then the other half and this is the bit I really didn't want to look at but just I couldn't avoid it because I kept on doing these interviews and it was the case where black British people of my age often he went to my school or a school near my school and the more I thought about it it's just this kind of rage like how is it possible that this halfway house is half and half black British people and people who've literally just arrived how did they find themselves in the same situation I really I'm not a sociologist or not anthropologist I'm not a political scientist they had no tools to try and understand this system but I kept on interviewing these kids a lot of them were from the Stonebridge estate which is very near my house and it was it would always start the story you ask them about their childhood and it would always be really happy till about five six seven and then it all started to go wrong in school and in every and you see how black boys in particular become these kind of enemies with the state their cute little boys and then they're not the teacher doesn't treat them like that nobody treats them like that the police parents people on the street and it really it really struck me it's like a whole generation you know I mean it just it kind of blew my mind and then as we talk through their lives quite often when we got to the very end and I tried and I asked them about what they thought it caused this all the systems that were involved this thing kept on coming up of the Illuminati which I found really fascinating it's a kind of elaborate conspiracy theory popular in America and popular amongst as I found these these lost souls and I instead of thinking I found did more and more research into Illuminati and it kind of turned up in the book I tried to think what is the theory the theory is basically that there is a kind of powerful group of people it's usually powerful Jews and power blacks together working together a very high level it always involves jay-z always Beyonce and what Warren Buffett and George Soros it's like an elaborate conspiracy theory and kind of I suppose laughable on the surface but but as it was described it was so detailed and I thought what really is is like a kind of system of study in the absence of study you know in the absence of school in the absence of university these very busy interesting clever Minds have nothing to work on but they have a phone and this kind of conspiratorial information part is very easily and it almost made more sense this explanation that there is a secret hidden group of people trying to keep you down then the true explanation which is the British state just abandoned you that seemed that was intolerable that idea so the other idea the conspiracy theory almost seemed more palatable because it involves secret shady forces and it's unstoppable and you can't control it then the sad and dismal truth that you have failed at the school level at the housing level and the welfare level it's it's so depressing that truth that I think it's pretty hard to tolerate it's interesting because in the book there's also they I mean what is reality Tracy lives with her mother without her father because the father according to Tracy is on tour with Michael Jackson right he is one of the key dancers she can point him out by kind of and this is not true no but I I mean I was a terrible liar as a child and I it's interesting when your children start lying because in a way it's very creative you know you want to encourage you these elaborate stories about when they had a shower when they didn't have a shower and worse thing but also you have this kind of moral obligation to to kind of deal with the borders of truth so that they can unless of course they want to be writers and they'll be fine but in order that they can function in the in the world but a lot of that kind of behavior like Tracy's for there is I suppose a petty criminal but I think if you live in an urban area and you meet petty criminals or small-time drug dealers or any of those kind of people but you're aware that one of the things they are among many other things are the people with the most get-up-and-go in that neighborhood you know we kind of have a kind of folk appreciation of it in burglars right the idea of a heist everybody loves a heist you make movies about Heights because you can see that there's a certain inspiration behind this criminality but in the absence of these educational structures or it's not that I want to celebrate the criminal but you are aware would like the kind of men in my neighborhood who were like that they were not stupid you know they were using the same kind of smart to the business men use that that those boys on the trade floor in London news you know they're bright so Tracy's father to me is is bright he has possibilities ideas but in the absence of any anything productive to do with them this is what happens there is a structural problem there's a structural problem it doesn't mean that if you you know the other liberal ideal is that oh if you only gave everybody a nice education the world would be beautiful in that's Denmark recently right that's just that's the founding and of course that's not true either I fundamentally believe in evil the capacity for evil but but you'll you'll never know how large that or small like first years without a slightly more level playing field in the first place we talked earlier on about shame now that you say I believe in evil I know you don't mean you believe in the devil and that people should be evil but that it exists yes I think it's mostly in the form of salep season in my view eat murder is the most solipsistic thing in the world isn't it like if only I can get rid of this person it will be easier for me if I only this person was out of my way there's nothing more so cystic than murder so but that to me is the kind of profound evil but but it's definitely real and I think when I was younger and being brought up a good liberal I preferred not to believe in it but I think as you get older it becomes clear they exist do you now live in New York yes land of Fred Astaire yeah and Donald Trump here it's like that's there for president or what is it easier to to be living in a country where you don't have the responsibility for who the president is I mean I a lot of people I know expert now want to be citizens so that they can protest so they if I get arrested that I get deported while protesting so you do in a way want to be more involved and but I am I am I think I'm still in short guy I've never been a good person in a crisis in an activist crisis you know I'm somebody like to think things through very slowly and this new cycle is too fast for me I can't even I'm not going to be writing any op-ed for the New York Times or anything I really admire the writers who are able to respond to the insanity at the speed that it's happening but I'm not one of them you

Channel: Louisiana Channel

Views: 88,075

Rating: 4.9241548 out of 5

Keywords: Louisiana Channel, Louisiana Museum, art, Zadie Smith, Wiriting, Writer, Slavery, London, Swing Time, Jamaica, White Teeth, British literature

Id: 5NWkuiDTMYk

Length: 48min 34sec (2914 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 26 2018