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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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470c2f8
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Then again, the more time I spend with the tail end of Generation Facebook (in the shape of my students) the more convinced I become that some of the software currently shaping their generation is unworthy of them. They are more interesting than it is. They deserve better.
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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 |
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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 |