Award-winning Zadie Smith enthralls audience

When Zadie Smith made her debut on campus, it was not at the Vision and Voices event at the Bovard Auditorium but in a small, tucked away room in Doheny Memorial Library. The 46-year-old British Jamaican novelist was at the library to have a preliminary interview in front of a crowd of about 30 audience members. 

It felt as if the entire room was holding its breath listening to her poignant answers, releasing only to chuckle at her quick-witted jokes, which she threw in many times during her responses.

She spoke as if she were a friend at a pub, not an accomplished writer who’s been lauded with critical acclaim and prestigious accolades since her early 20’s. The Cambridge alumna garnered attention before she even published a word. In 1997, when news broke out of a six-figure advance for her debut novel, “White Teeth,” that had yet to be finished, all eyes of the literary world were on her.

The debut novel, spanning three separate families from completely different racial, socio-economic and religious backgrounds in Northwest London, earned her the Guardian First Book Award, the Whitbread First Novel Award and widespread recognition as a fresh new face of British literature. 

It’s a spotlight that has continued to glow on Smith’s lengthy literary career. She was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2005 for her third novel “On Beauty,” has written essays and non-fiction pieces for numerous publications including the The New Yorker and The New York Times and is currently a Creative Writing MFA professor at New York University.

This intimate gathering with the accomplished writer was an adequate precursor to the grander, yet equally intimate Vision and Voices event in Bovard Auditorium. In front of over 700 people, she began the chilly evening with a reading of her short story, “Sentimental Education” from her 2019 collection of shorts, “Grand Union.”

In her deep-toned voice, Smith narrated a complex portrait of Monica, who goes to college and must interrogate her past and present through her sexual and philosophical relationships between two male colleagues, Leon and Darryl.

“The easy way she took [Darryl] into her body, for example, painlessly, subsuming him, providing him with temporary shelter until it came time to release,” read Smith in a pale pink turban, shrouded in a golden spotlight. “But it was the ‘90s. The language was not on her side. You didn’t release men. They pulled out. They were the subjects. I had become normal to hear them mouthing off in pubs, thrilled with the new license to speak sex aloud.”

The crowd was silent and patient, carefully threading together the strings of Smith’s verbose writing and off-kilter cultural references. They were leaning toward her in their chair, as if drawn into her prose.

This silence was often interrupted by a string of chuckles and belts of laughter from the audience, as Smith threw in quick-witted jokes about race, sex and perceptions of gender relations.

“[Leon] was the embodiment of the phrase ‘white youth’ when used in the police report,” Smith read. “He could steal your car in front of you, and you still wouldn’t be able to identify him in a lineup.”

Through comical nature, Smith immerses readers and listeners into heavy topics about race, class and notions of meritocracy. It’s this reference to real-life issues that Ben Parkhill, a senior majoring in narrative studies, appreciates in her writing. It’s what motivated him to come to the event.

“I read ‘Grand Union,’ the short story collection she put out, and they deal with a lot of themes of wealth disparity, issues of inequality, like racial gender lines,” Parkhill said. “A lot of it, social media, celebrity — there’s a lot of themes that are very relevant today and that still merit having books written about them.”

Another aspect that lends to the widespread admiration of Smith’s writing is the immense detail she uses, especially when carving out characters. It’s this phenomenon of “noticing” that writer and moderator Geoff Dyer noted in the beginning of the conversation with Smith after the reading.

“Your books and that story, they’re sort of founded in this sustaining,” Dyer said. “These sustained feats of noticing delicate subtleties of gestural revelation and social relations, relations, as we saw in that story, of class and race.”

It’s a theme that rings true from her debut, “White Teeth” to her later collections of essays in “Grand Union.” Smith’s writing concentrates on the minute: The tiny auburn hairs on someone’s chest, the grain of the wood of the chicken-shop table, the fleshy gap between white teeth. 

This aspect of encapsulating and categorizing physical perceptions into words is something that both writers spoke of as the conversation expanded.

“I really want to know what experiences, before you deliver me a language, in which to process it,” Smith said.

Language should be considered as a powerful tool that should be met with critical thought, Smith said. 

“I don’t understand the idea that we have this incredible skepticism about every power structure in the world but so innocent with our language,” Smith said. “Like where did these terms you’re using come from? Are they from an algorithm, are they from the past — who’s giving you these words as an expression of your own existential reality?”

It’s this aversion to conforming to the constructs of language that Aminta Skye, a freshman majoring in songwriting, heralds. She said she started reading Smith after the 2016 book, “Swing Time” was gifted to her by a friend.

“I feel like what draws me most to her work is something I would say for a Chimamanda [Ngozi], Toni Morrison as well, where it’s kind of this expression of not necessarily the Black experience as one thing, but like a Black experience without really explaining itself,” Skye said.

Skye said she values this work of creating complex, imperfect Black characters, which she feels are often diminished when a writer caters to the white gaze.

“I feel like there’s a huge distinction between Black work pandering to a white audience for the sake of being universal versus Black work by Black people for Black people not caring how it’s perceived,” Skye said.

Skye, who is half Senegalese and grew up with a Norwegian mother, said she empathizes with and appreciates how Smith stands out as a biracial woman writer in a predominantly white literary space. 

“As a mixed person, there is a certain sense of identity that I experience when I’m reading her that I hope all Black women feel to an extent that I never experienced before,” Skye said. “I don’t really gravitate to anything else [besides Black literature] at this point because I grew up never seeing that.” 

The colorful worlds that Smith constructs bring her diverse set of readers into a variety of perspectives, allowing her to touch into the complex spheres of race, class, gender, sex and ethnicity. Most importantly, her act of not noticing and not categorizing creates organic, fluid narratives that can speak to many intersections of the Black experience, whether it be in West Africa, North West London or even in Jamaica (for her next historical fiction novel still in the works).

“I’ve always felt like I was in someone else’s world, “ Skye said. ”And I feel like this author’s in my world.”