'Identity is a pain in the arse': Zadie Smith on political correctness
The writer Zadie Smith laid
into identity politics in a headline session at the 14th Hay Cartagena
festival, insisting novelists had not only a right, but a duty to be free. Asked how she felt
about cultural appropriation, she told an audience of nearly 2,000 at the
festival in Colombia on
Friday: “If someone says to me: ‘A black girl would never say that,’ I’m
saying: ‘How can you possibly know?’ The problem with that argument is it
assumes the possibility of total knowledge of humans. The only thing that
identifies people in their entirety is their name: I’m a Zadie.”
She conceded that the
assertion of a collective identity was sometimes necessary “to demand rights”,
but cited the dismay of her husband – the poet and novelist Nick Laird – at
finding himself increasingly categorised. “He turned to me and said: ‘I used to
be myself and I’m now white guy, white guy.’ I said: ‘Finally, you understand.’
But the lesson of that is that identity is a huge pain in the arse. The strange
thing to me is the assumption [of white people] that their identity is the
right to freedom.”
She went on to
question the role of social
media in policing personal development. “We are being asked to be
consistent as humans over great swathes of time. People are searching through
social media. But everyone is changing all the time.” In an essay in her
collection, Feel Free, she investigated one such change in herself, when she
fell in love with the music of Joni Mitchell, a singer she had despised when
she was a mixed-race teenager growing up on a London housing estate. “The
reason for hating Joni Mitchell was that I didn’t listen to classical or
‘white’ music,” said Smith. “Then I had an epiphany, and suddenly realised that
her voice was beautiful. It’s a responsibility to be as open as you possibly
can to the world as an aesthetic object.”
Returning to the issue
of political correctness, she reflected on her debut novel White Teeth, which
had depicted characters from many backgrounds but, she said, had been given an
easy ride by the white critics because “[its characters] were mostly brown. It
had all sorts of mistakes I’m sure but if I didn’t take a chance I’d only ever
be able to write novels about mixed-race girls growing up in Willesden.” Speaking in the home
city of Gabriel
García
Márquez,
Smith admitted that she was not a great fan of magic realism, preferring to
deal in more concrete realities.
She ended by citing
Gustave Flaubert’s Madame
Bovary as an example of the power of the reprobate imagination. “Women
have felt very close to these fake, pretend women invented by men. It makes us
feel uncomfortable in real life. This is not real life. It’s perverse, but it’s
what’s possible in fiction. There’s no excuse for its irresponsibility, but
fiction is fundamentally irresponsible.”
