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1d8a6ba
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It looks backward, at the past, and it learns from what's gone before. Some people never learn." My" --
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Zadie Smith |
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e021455
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It was nostalgia for an era and a culture that had meant nothing to me in the first place, and perhaps because of this I was, in the eyes of my colleagues, cool, by virtue of not being like them.
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Zadie Smith |
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60edc4a
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Extreme inequality fractures communities, and after a while the cracks gape so wide the whole edifice comes tumbling down.
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Zadie Smith |
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efdf6be
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Actually creating an animal just so it can die -- it's like being God! I mean personally I'm a Hindu, yeah? I'm not religious or nothing, but you know, I believe in the sanctity of life, yeah? And these people, like, the mouse, plot its every move, yeah, when it's going to have kids, when it's going to die. It's just .
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Zadie Smith |
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1b6301f
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She dressed for a future not yet with us but which she expected to arrive. That's what her plain white linen trousers were for, her blue-and-white-striped "Breton" T-shirt, her frayed espadrilles, her severe and beautiful African head--everything so plain, so understated, completely out of step with the spirit of the time, and with the place."
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Zadie Smith |
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f6ebc54
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From where I stood it was a pose that collapsed many periods in her life into one: mother and lover, big sister, best friend, superstar and diplomat, billionaire and street kid, foolish girl and woman of substance.
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Zadie Smith |
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4d7853f
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But like a lot of people whose vocation it is to change the world he proved to be, in person, outrageously petty.
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Zadie Smith |
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769780a
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Crazy enough to start a war. There aren't many people like that. Most of us just follow along once war has been announced.
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Zadie Smith |
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0b6130b
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Once you almost said--to a sneaky fellow from the Daily News, who was inquiring--you almost turned to him and said, Motherfucker, I am music. But a lady does not speak like that, however, and so you did not.
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Zadie Smith |
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248f44e
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Neither my readers nor I are in the relatively sunlit uplands depicted in White Teeth anymore. But the lesson I take from this is not that the lives in that novel were illusory, but rather that progress is never permanent, will always be threatened, must be redoubled, restated and *reimagined* if it is to survive.
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progress
politics
optimism
outlook
white-teeth
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Zadie Smith |
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ccdda25
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Well, we can say that Aimee lives in her bubble," he said, interrupting me, "and so does your friend and, by the way, so do you. It's possible that it's like this for everyone. The size of the bubble is different, this is all. And perhaps the thickness of the--what do you call this in English?--skin--film. The thin layer on a bubble."
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Zadie Smith |
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e19dc8c
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No one is more ingenious than the poor, wherever you find them. When you are poor every stage has to be thought through. Wealth is the opposite. With wealth you get to be thoughtless
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Zadie Smith |
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abc86eb
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I don't see anything ingenious about poverty like this. I don't see anything ingenious about having ten children when you can't afford one." Fern put his glasses back on and smiled at me sadly. "Children can be a kind of wealth," he said."
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Zadie Smith |
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3277cc2
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People are not poor because they've made bad choices, my mother liked to say, they make bad choices because they're poor.
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Zadie Smith |
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1152eb3
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Great care was taken at all times to protect me from reality. They'd met people like me before. They knew how little reality we can take.
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Zadie Smith |
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62250b1
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Everybody knows that if people hang around for any length of time in an urban area without purpose they are likely to become "antisocial."
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antisocialism
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Zadie Smith |
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c13dd9c
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But first a description: Clara Bowden was beautiful in all senses except maybe, by virtue of being black, the classical. Clara Bowden was magnificently tall, black as ebony and crushed sable, with hair plaited in a horseshoe which pointed up when she felt lucky, down when she didn't. At this moment it was up. It is hard to know whether that was significant. She needed no bra - she was independent, even of gravity - she wore a red halterneck..
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Zadie Smith |
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bfbdacc
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The way he understood the world was so genuinely alien to me that it felt as if he occupied a parallel reality, which I didn't doubt was the real one, but which I couldn't 'speak to,' to use a favorite phrase of his.
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Zadie Smith |
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3fd1e12
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A clear and unified voice. In that context, this business of being biracial, of being half black and half white, is awkward.
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Zadie Smith |
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d440806
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It's the fear of being mistaken for Joyce that has always ensured that I ignore the box marked "biracial" and tick the box marked "black" on any questionnaire I fill out, and call myself unequivocally a black writer and roll my eyes at anyone who insists that Obama is not the first black president but the first biracial one. But I also know in my heart that it's an equivocation; I know that Obama has a double consciousness, is black and, at..
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Zadie Smith |
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fe0946e
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many learned things can be said about the Venus of Urbino but if you don't open your eyes and recognize her first and foremost as an erotic object how can you claim that you've seen her at all?
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Zadie Smith |
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83ce959
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it's a good friend who wakes a friend from her dream
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Zadie Smith |
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9a32131
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But I haven't described Dream City. I'll try to. It is a place of many voices, where the unified singular self is an illusion. Naturally, Obama was born there. So was I. When your personal multiplicity is printed on your face, in an almost too obviously thematic manner, in your DNA, in your hair and in the neither-this-nor-that beige of your skin--well, anyone can see you come from Dream City. In Dream City everything is doubled, everything..
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Zadie Smith |
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dd3dbdb
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Mum, you just said it yourself: you can't save everybody.
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Zadie Smith |
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c709dba
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Our mothers served as our balance, as our foot-rests.
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Zadie Smith |
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68f571c
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It had to do with emotion. Whatever I was feeling I was able to express very clearly, I could "put it over."
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Zadie Smith |
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36ac94f
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Maybe you could say she was overly precise sometimes, not especially creative, or lacking in soul.
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Zadie Smith |
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d7a6282
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It felt to me as if I were on a certain train, heading wherever it was people like me usually went...except now suddenly something was different. I'd been informed that I would be getting off at an unexpected stop, further down the line. I thought of my father, pushed off the train before he'd barely left the station. And of Tracey, so determined to jump off, exactly *because* she'd rather walk than be told what stop was hers or how far she..
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Zadie Smith |
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ca85444
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Well, maybe I use the wrong word in English. I mean that for Lamin the future is as certain as the past.
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Zadie Smith |
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882ce6d
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Not long ago I sat next to a young Portuguese novelist at dinner and told him I intended to read his first novel. He grabbed my wrist, genuinely distressed, and said: 'Oh, please don't! Back then, all I read was Faulkner. I had no sense of humor. My God, I was a different person!' That's how it goes. Other people's words are so important. And then without warning they stop being important, along with all those words of yours that their word..
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Zadie Smith |
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f73dd9a
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It dawned on me that he saw me as a sort of child, someone to be treated with kid gloves and presented with reality by degrees.
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Zadie Smith |
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aefb049
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In my conscious life, though, I cannot honestly say I feel proud to be white and ashamed to be black or proud to be black and ashamed to be white. I find it impossible to experience either pride or shame over accidents of genetics in which I had no active part. I understand how those words got into the racial discourse, but I can't sign up to them. I'm not proud to be female either. I am not even proud to be human--I only love to be so. As ..
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Zadie Smith |
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38cb982
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She measured time in pages. Half an hour, to her, meant ten pages read, or fourteen, depending on the size of the type, and when you think of time in this way there isn't time for anything else
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Zadie Smith |
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911dc89
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Libraries are not failing 'because they are libraries'. Neglected libraries get neglected, and this cycle, in time, provides the excuse to close them. Well-run libraries are filled with people because what a good library offers cannot be easily found elsewhere: an indoor public space in which you do not have to buy anything in order to stay.
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Zadie Smith |
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e2f1f25
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When your personal multiplicity is printed on your face, in an almost too obviously thematic manner, in your DNA, in your hair and in the neither-this-nor-that beige of your skin - well, anyone can see you come from Dream City. In Dream City everything is doubled, everything is various. You have no choice but to cross borders and speak in tongues. That's how you get from your mother to your father, from talking to one set of folks who think..
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Zadie Smith |
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17d52fe
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The fundamental skill of all mothers--the management of time--was beyond her.
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Zadie Smith |
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9b0be08
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This iswhat divorce is: taking things you no longer want from people you no longer love
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Zadie Smith |
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4f22dab
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He was no great believer in destiny, Archie, but on reflection it did seem that a special effort of predestination had ensured his life had been picked out for him like a company Christmas present - early, and the same as everyone else's.
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Zadie Smith |
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cca04f9
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Not even the Catholics would forgive them for it (and Catholics give out forgiveness at about the same rate politicians give out promises and whores give out)
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Zadie Smith |
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7d29525
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Even by the standards with which she is familiar, Liberia is exceptional. "Three quarters of the population live below the poverty line--that's one U.S. dollar a day--half are on less than fifty cents a day. What infrastructure there was has been destroyed--roads, ports, municipal electricity, water, sanitation, schools, hospitals--all desperately lacking or nonexistent; eighty-six-percent unemployment, no street lights. . . ."
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Zadie Smith |
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bd2f2a4
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In 1822 freed American slaves (known as Americo-Liberians, or, colloquially, Congos) founded the colony at the instigation of the American Colonization Society, a coalition of slave owners and politicians whose motives are not hard to tease out. Even Liberia's roots are sunk in bad faith. Of the first wave of emigrants, half died of yellow fever. By the end of the 1820s, a small colony of three thousand souls survived. In Liberia they built..
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Zadie Smith |
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d118dc5
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Bong country is beautiful. Lush green forest, a sweet breeze. There are pygmy hippopotamuses here and monkeys; a sense of Liberia's possibilities. Rich in natural resources, cool in the hills, hot on the beach.
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Zadie Smith |
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c28431e
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Most of us have complicated backstories, messy histories, multiple narratives. It was a high-wire strategy, for Obama, this invocation of our collective human messiness. His enemies latched on to its imprecision, emphasizing the exotic, un-American nature of Dream City, this ill-defined place where you could be from Hawaii and Kenya, Kansas and Indonesia all at the same time, where you could jive talk like a street hustler and orate like a ..
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Zadie Smith |
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6370c0b
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Nine SPEAKING IN TONGUES The following is based on a lecture given at the New York Public Library in December 2008. 1
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Zadie Smith |