Issue 6: Works in progress
Discussed: Intimations by Zadie Smith, The Virus
Dear reader,
For weeks now, the inside of my skull has felt a bit like a hollowed out watermelon. There’s nothing really going on in there. I honestly fear I’m losing the plot a little, running towards answers or insights, only to have them slip out of reach each time —like Lucy pulling away the football before Charlie Brown can kick it. I’m still reading the papers, watching the news, having conversations with my friends and family, but it seems I’ve long ago stopped metabolizing each new and increasingly disturbing development in the world. Instead, I push it away. Dust it under the rug and promise myself I’ll get to it in time. When I’m done just getting through the day.
But there’s something to be said, of course, for processing things in real time instead. Dealing with them in the present is clearly a healthier coping mechanism than denial or delay. But if I could do that, I wouldn’t have to write. And that’s a different sort of compulsion isn’t it? To wait until you’re at a keyboard to try and make sense of the world. To process your thoughts for the first time as you’re typing them. In any case, I’m hardly the first person to do this. And since the rise of COVID-19, a cottage industry of essayists have been trying to pen their way into some understanding of what the hell is going on. It’s a fool's errand, but the temptation has proven too strong for most people who make a living off their words to keep it at bay for too long.
And none have gone as far as Zadie Smith. A wunderkind who published her first novel White Teeth — a sprawling intergenerational tale about two diasporic families living in London — at the age of 25 (fuck off!!), Smith is well known for her wit and preternatural command of the sentence. In her non-fiction work, she writes with authority. Her words typically lacking the insecurity that characterizes so many essays from our current era, all those sentences couched with “I think” or “unless”. But in her new collection Intimations— a series of essays and observations about COVID-19 — Smith is jarringly free of that aforementioned surety. Instead, like the rest of us, Smith’s writing her way into a temporary understanding of what’s happening, examining what she thought she knew about the world and holding a light to it. Even as she must know that writing about the virus while still in its infancy risks leaving her open to that double edged sword that gets us all in the end anyways — hindsight.
Watching this manic desire to make or grow or do “something,” that now seems to be consuming everybody, I do feel comforted to discover I’m not the only person on this earth who has no idea what life is for, nor what is to be done with all this time aside from filling it.” - Zadie Smith, Intimations.
It’s all there in the title, when you think about it. Intimations warns the reader they’re about to read a book of still unsettled thoughts, and essays couched in what Smith thinks is happening instead of what she knows is happening. She’s under no delusions that her words — or anyone else’s for that matter — will affect any real change in the world. Smith goes as far as to say so much in Something to Do, declaring: “Even when artists write manifestos, they are (hopefully) aware that their exigent tone is, finally, borrowed, only echoing and mimicking the urgency of the guerilla’s demands, or the activist’s protests, rather than truly enacting it. The people sometimes demand change. They almost never demand art.” And so it’s easier to forgive the ideas that might not hold as much weight six months from now, let alone in six years, and instead marinate in the pleasures of reading Smith’s prose.
And oh! What pleasures! In A Character in a Wheelchair in a Vestibule, she describes an aversion to crisis that’s probably all too familiar to anyone who prefers the soft embrace of a keyboard over the whirring sound of heavy machinery and grunt work of physical labour: “Suicide would hold out its quiet hand to me on the first day — the first hour. And not the courageous suicide of self-slaughter, but simply the passive death that occurs if you stay under the bed as they march up the stairs, or lie down in the cornfield as the plane fitted with machine guns heads your way.”
And what insight too! In The American Exception, Smith tackles an inadvertent moment of truth from Trump in which he laments the loss of our “old life,” a life where “we had the greatest economy we’ve ever had, and we didn’t have death.” It’s this last line Smith zeroes in on; an oligarchic president admitting that for him, death by disease or medical misfortune has always been something that happens to other, less fortunate people. “Death comes to all,” she writes. “But in America it has long been considered reasonable to offer the best chance of delay to the highest bidder.”
For a writer of a certain age, she’s also admirably understanding of the plight of the youth, perhaps having not forgotten that just a little while ago she used to be one too. Describing a generation entering into adulthood and quickly realizing the walls around them are falling down, Smith writes: “The infinite promise of American youth — a promise elaborately articulated by movies and advertisements and university prospectuses — has been an empty lie for so long that I notice my students joking about it with a black humour more appropriate to old men, to the veterans of wars.”
It’s a funny thing reading this collection, knowing the book was likely rushed to the printers at the last possible moment. It can’t help but make it feel more vital, and nowhere is this more clear than in Postscript: Contempt as Virus, the last essay Smith wrote for the book. In it, she tries to make sense of the explosion of protests against anti-Black racism in the wake of George Floyd’s death by extrapolating that the real virus threatening America’s future isn’t COVID-19, it’s contempt — a hatred of the other that runs so deep that it’s often only realized when it’s too late.
This virus dates all the way back to colonization, writes Smith, and to the first time someone looked at men and women being herded as cargo and thought “they seemed to be the type of people to wear chains.” And contempt is so insidious, she says, because “one of the quirks of the virus — as James Baldwin pointed out — is that it makes the sufferer think the symptom is the cause.”
And yet even as support for the Black Lives Matter movement grows more with each passing week, Smith’s tone is not exactly one of optimism. She knows the cure is out there — if enough people want it — but she’s stopped thinking it will be delivered any time soon.
“I used to think there would one day be a vaccine: that if enough black people named the virus, explained it, demonstrated how it operates, videoed its effects, protested it peacefully, revealed how widespread it really is, how the symptoms arise, how so many Americans keep giving it to each other, irresponsibly and shamefully, generation after generation, causing intolerable and unending damage both to individual bodies and the body politic — I thought if that knowledge became as widespread as could possibly be managed or imagined that we might finally reach some kind of herd immunity. I don’t think that anymore.”
Until next time,
Andrew