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2bbef84
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The Jackson gaffe, with its Oedipal violence ("I want to cut his nuts out"), is especially poignant because it goes to the heart of a generational conflict in the black community, concerning what we will say in public and what we say in private. For it has been a point of honor, among the civil rights generation, that any criticism or negative analysis of our community, expressed, as they often are by white politicians, without context, wit..
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Zadie Smith |
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0015efc
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Ryan is indispensable. There
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Zadie Smith |
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6d782fe
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I felt a wonderful lightness in my body, a ridiculous happiness, it seemed to come from nowhere.
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Zadie Smith |
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49b475a
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I felt I was losing track of my physical location, rising above my body, viewing my life from a very distant point, hovering over it.
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Zadie Smith |
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f9f3519
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can." I didn't think it was true, but it was kind and I clung to it and kept taking the class, and"
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Zadie Smith |
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6ed9f1c
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I knew my mother was in the process of becoming, or trying to become, "an intellectual," because my father often threw this term at her as a form of insult during their arguments."
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Zadie Smith |
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d810131
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Liberal? Hosh-kosh nonsense!' No one was more liberal than anyone else anywhere anyway. It was only that here, in Willesden, there was just not enough of any one thing to gang up against any other thing and send it running to the cellars while windows were smashed.
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Zadie Smith |
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04e759f
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Unlike my mother, he had no anxiety in connection with her, he found her single-minded dedication to her dancing sweet, and also, I think, admirable- it appealed to his work ethic- and it was very clear that Tracey adored my father, was even a little in love with him. She was so painfully grateful for the way he talked to her like a father, although sometimes he went too far in this direction, not understanding that what came after borrowin..
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Zadie Smith |
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91ed14c
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And perhaps for my mother this dream was the truth, and just by dreaming it she felt she had brought it to pass.
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Zadie Smith |
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3a193c9
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Unlike my mother, he had no anxiety in connection with her, he found her single-minded dedication to her dancing sweet, and also, I think, admirable- it appealed to his work ethic- and it was very clear that Tracey adored my father, was even a little in love with him. She was so painfully grateful for the way he talked to her like a father, although sometimes he went too far in this direction, not understanding that what came after borrowin..
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Zadie Smith |
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d1373e2
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Race. Land. Ownership. Faith. Theft. Blood. And more blood. And more. And
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Zadie Smith |
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0a6ba76
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His mind was a small thing with big holes through which passions regularly seeped out, and The Faith of Jamaicans was soon replaced in the inverse sieve of his consciousness by other interests: The Excitability of the Military Hindoo; The Impracticalities of the English Virgin; The Effect of Extreme Heat on the Sexual Proclivities of the Trinidadian.
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Zadie Smith |
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3713291
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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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8b7c57c
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When I showed her my well-worn copy of Stormy Weather she reacted in a way I hadn't anticipated, she was offended by it--hurt, even. Why was everybody black? It was unkind, she said, to have only black people in a film, it wasn't fair. Maybe in America you could do that, but not here, in England, where everybody was equal anyway and there was no need to "go on about it." And"
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Zadie Smith |
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040fbfa
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this light was something else again. It buzzed and held you in its heat, it was thick, alive with pollen and insects and birds, and because nothing higher than one story interrupted its path, it gave all its gifts at once, blessing everything equally, an explosion of simultaneous illumination. "What"
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Zadie Smith |
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51efe85
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It was during this time that Archie learnt the true power of do-it-yourself, how it uses a hammer and nails to replace nouns and adjectives, how it allows men to communicate. A lesson he kept with him all his life.
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Zadie Smith |
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d787bbb
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Brute force outraged her, I think, because it was outside her beloved realm of language, and in response to it she really had nothing to say. Despite her revolutionary stylings I don't think my mother would have been very useful in a real revolution, not once the talking and the meetings were over and the actual violence began. There was a sense in which she couldn't quite believe in violence, as if it were, in her view, too stupid to be re..
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Zadie Smith |
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68cdc7d
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although entrapment in this case was only another word for love.
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Zadie Smith |
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7ed31a0
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she was someone who lived in her own dreamscape, who presumed that everyone around her was at all times feeling exactly as she was.
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Zadie Smith |
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f499a39
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My childhood took place in the widening gap.
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Zadie Smith |
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747b38c
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For ridding oneself of faith is like boiling sea-water to retrieve the salt - something is gained but something is lost. Though
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Zadie Smith |
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a9012e6
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It was a garden of abundance and decay: the tomatoes were too ripe, the marijuana too strong, woodlice were hiding under everything.
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Zadie Smith |
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d68fc68
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for any daughter of hers was to do more than just survive--as my mother had--she was to thrive, learning many unnecessary skills, like tap dancing.
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Zadie Smith |
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19540da
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I knew there was something not quite right about her rigid notions--black music, white music--that there must be a world somewhere in which the two combined.
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Zadie Smith |
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a1ff64a
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So now I started playing hardball; now I picked the Dictaphone up and demanded to know about the shrapnel, for Harvey has some shrapnel in his groin, I know he does, and he knows I know. A doctor found it in a routine X-ray in 1991, forty-seven years after Harvey thought it had been removed. I was sixteen at the time, EMF had a hit with "Unbelievable" and I was wearing harem pants. If" --
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Zadie Smith |
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7f9493f
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But I could see she wanted to talk, that her pat phrases were like lids dancing on top of bubbling cooking pots, and all I had to do was sit patiently and wait for her to boil over.
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Zadie Smith |
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b1f0f3f
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She dressed for a future not yet with us but which she expected to arrive.
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Zadie Smith |
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9c708f2
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There is a breed of Tuesday in January in which time creeps and no light comes and the air is full of water and nobody really loves anybody
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Zadie Smith |
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2dc054a
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Why do you insist on taking the scooter if you know you're not going to want to use it?'The child spoke with her wet lips brushing the flesh of her mother's ear: 'I don't know what I'm going to want until when I want it.
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Zadie Smith |
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e932bb0
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In the case of On Beauty, my OPD spun completely out of control: I reworked those first twenty pages for almost two years. To look back at all past work induces nausea, but the first twenty pages in particular bring on heart palpitations. It's like taking a tour of a cell in which you were once incarcerated.
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Zadie Smith |
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cf71893
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within our intimacy, I could not be a girl, nor could I be anyone's baby, I could only be a female human, and the sex I understood was of the kind between friends and equals, bracketing conversation, like a shelf of books between bookends.
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Zadie Smith |
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346a6cd
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within our intimacy, I could not be a girl, nor could I be anyone's baby, I could only be a female human, and the sex I understood was of the kind that occurs between friends and equals, bracketing conversation, like a shelf of books between bookends.
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Zadie Smith |
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ea51251
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You need a certain head on your shoulders to edit a novel, and it's not the head of a writer in the thick of it, nor the head of a professional editor who's read it in twelve different versions. It's the head of a smart stranger who picks it off a bookshelf and begins to read. You need to get the head of that smart stranger somehow. You need to forget you ever wrote that book.
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Zadie Smith |
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a409973
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Those who read Middlemarch in that way will find little in Their Eyes Were Watching God to please them. It's about a girl who takes some time to find the man she really loves. It is about the discovery of self in and through another.
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Zadie Smith |
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6e8e474
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In place of negative falsification, we have nurtured, in the past thirty years, a new fetishization. Black female protagonists are now unerringly strong and soulful; they are sexually voracious and unafraid; they take the unreal forms of earth mothers, African queens, divas, spirits of history; they process grandly through novels thick with a breed of greeting-card lyricism. They have little of the complexity, the flaws and uncertainties, d..
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Zadie Smith |
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add8642
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These forms of criticism that make black women the privileged readers of a black woman writer go against Hurston's own grain. She saw things otherwise: "When I set my hat at a certain angle and saunter down Seventh Avenue. . . . the cosmic Zora emerges. . . . How can anybody deny themselves the pleasure of my company? It's beyond me!" This is exactly right. No one should deny themselves the pleasure of Zora--of whatever color or background ..
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Zadie Smith |
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9d36201
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How long that song seemed--longer than life.
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Zadie Smith |
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57ddfe4
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The only thing to see is the obligatory third-world Coke billboard, ironic in exact proportion to the distance from its proper American context. This one says COKE--MAKE IT REAL. Just after the Coke sign there is a contrary sign, an indication that irony is not a currency in Liberia. It is worn by a girl who leans against the exit in a T-shirt that says THE TRUTH MUST BE TOLD.
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Zadie Smith |
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22ac998
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Fewer American flags [in Brooklyn] than in Florida but more than in San Francisco.
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Zadie Smith |
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ea4011a
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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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c3007f2
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the sheer beauty of the voice, its monumental dose of soul, the pain implicit within it, bypassed all my conscious opinions, my critical intelligence or sense of the sentimental,
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Zadie Smith |
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9a52dbf
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When he returned he looked burdened, and without introducing the topic in any formal way, he began to talk to us about the inside, about how you found, when you were inside, that it wasn't like the neighborhood, no, not at all, it was very different, because when you were inside everybody understood that people had better keep to their own kind, and that's how it was, "like stayed with like," there was hardly any mixing, not like up at the ..
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Zadie Smith |
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6ce0f2d
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The other problem with Brother Ibrhm ad-Din Shukrallah, the biggest problem perhaps, was his great affection for tautology. Though he promised explanation, elucidation, and exposition, linguistically he put one in mind of a dog chasing its own tail: "Now there are many types of warfare . . . I will name a few. Chemical warfare is the warfare where them men kill each other chemically with warfare." --
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Zadie Smith |
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e2f33da
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But the light in front of the mosque-- the light I stood in as I was greeted like a local hero, simply for rising from my bed three hours after most of the women and children I lived with-- this light was something else again. It buzzed and held you in its heat, it was thick, alive with pollen and insects and birds, and because nothing higher than one story interrupted its path, it gave all its gifts at once, blessing everything equally, an..
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Zadie Smith |