Zebra cocktails for everyone A Contrary review by Harriett Green 
 Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays Zadie Smith Penguin Press 2009 Buy this book> My signed copy of White Teeth is somewhere in my bedroom at home, a totem of one of the first authors I could relate to: she could claim to be the cultural heir of Jane Austen and Jean Rhys in the same breath, and she prodded the boundaries of race and class in the voice of a working-class girl gone Oxbridge. In this new collection of non-fiction essays and criticism, Smith extends her investigation into the cultural ruptures that upend how we perceive ourselves and society. Smith's essays cover remarkably disparate topics within the themes of Reading, Being, Seeing, Feeling and Remembering, and she holds the book together with the consistent thread of herself intertwined in each of these nimble and thought-provoking criticisms. In the opening essay, she writes of her fourteen-year-old self's first encounter with Their Eyes Were Watching God. She chronicles her early struggle with the idea that literature could be a contentious and highly contextualized entity, noting that ''like all readers I want my limits to be drawn by my own sensibilities, not by my melanin count," and yet, "those aspects of Their Eyes Were Watching God that plumb so profoundly the ancient buildup of cultural residue that is (for convenience's sake) called 'Blackness' are the parts that my own 'Blackness,' as far as it goes, cannot help but respond to personally.... I always thought I was a colorblind reader--until I read this novel, and that ultimate cliché of black life that is inscribed in the word soulful took on a new weight and sense for me."
 
From this anchoring text, Smith develops a sustained dialogue on the tension between the highly specific cultural dynamics that shape our experiences and the possibility of a universality among all of us as readers and thinking citizens. In a stellar long-form journalistic essay on her trip to Liberia, she presents a moving chronicle of a country torn apart by war, corrupt plundering, and a people retaining hope against all odds.  To this bleak portrait she answers with a transcript of a 2008 talk where she articulates her hope in Obama as a unifying voice, arguing that "black reality has diversified. It's black people who talk like me and black people who talk like Lil Wayne. . . . We're all surely black people, but we may be finally approaching a point of human history where you can't talk up or down to us anymore, but only to us."
 
From all perspectives, Smith interrogates this compelling idea of an ascribed individuality that isn't post-racial but that has shed the racialized constraints of centuries past. In her essay, "F. Kafka, Everyman" she argues, "for there is a sense in which Kafka's Jewish question ('What have I in common with Jews?') has become everybody's question, Jewish alientation the template for all our doubts. What is Muslimness? What is femaleness? What is Polishness? What is Englishness? These days we all find our anterior legs flailing before us. We're all insects, all Ungeziefer, now." This alienness and uncertainty of the modern identity emerge in a variety of contexts, Smith reveals: whether humorously recounting a night at the Oscars amid the rich and famous,  or analyzing her frustrating quest to document her father's experiences in World War II, Smith explores the chasm between perception and reality in the way people define themselves and in the way they are defined by society. In her essay on David Foster Wallace, written soon after his death, she contends that "There is a weird ambient sameness to Wallace's work. He was always asking essentially the same question: How do I recognize that other people are real, as I am? And the strange, quasi-mystical answer was always the same, too. You may have to give up your attachment to the 'self'."  Yet Smith's enterprise in this work is seemingly the opposite of Wallace's answer: in her exploration of her experiences as a reader, writer, daughter, and lover, she creates a vibrant narrative that connects to the experiences of everyone from her second cousin Denzil to George Eliot to a Liberian child. And ultimately, she affirms the reasons why literature and the act of reading is essential to the human experience: "Nowawdays I know the true reason I read is to feel less alone, to make a connection with a consciousness other than my own. To this end I find myself placing a cautious faith in the difficult partnership between reader and writer, that discrete struggle to reveal an individual's experience of the world through the unstable medium of language. Not a refusal of meaning, then, but a quest for it." Harriett Green is the English and Digital Humanities Librarian at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Index of Reviews...>http://astore.amazon.com/contrary-20/detail/1594202370Reviews_2010.htmlhttp://astore.amazon.com/contrary-20/detail/1594202370shapeimage_1_link_0shapeimage_1_link_1
COMMENTARY | POETRY | FICTION | CHICAGO ARCHIVES | ABOUT | SUBMISSIONS | BOOKSHOP | DONATE | CONTACT | SHAREArchives.htmlContrary.htmlSubmissions.htmlBookshop.htmlWritersFund.htmlContact.htmlhttp://www.addthis.com/bookmark.php?v=152&winname=addthis&pub=contrary&source=men-152&lng=en-us&s=undefined&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.contrarymagazine.com%2F&title=Contrary%20Magazine&logo=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.contrarymagazine.com%2Fcontramazon.jpg&logobg=F5F4F4&logocolor=&ate=AT-contrary/-/-/4b3771ea6b8ea1a5/1/4b329e0c06baac67&uid=4b329e0c06baac67&CXNID=2000001.5215456080540439074NXC&pre=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.contrarymagazine.com%2FContrary%2FAutumn-2009.html&tt=0shapeimage_3_link_0shapeimage_3_link_1shapeimage_3_link_2shapeimage_3_link_3shapeimage_3_link_4shapeimage_3_link_5shapeimage_3_link_6
http://www.contrarymagazine.com/

© 2010  |  all rights reserved

about us  |  xml feed  |  Contrary ® is a registered trademark of Contrary Magazine  |  donate $1  | contact us

SPRING 2010 COVER ABOVE THE ROOFTOP STEVE MITCHELL MY FLICKERING SELF TANIA HERSHMAN BRUJERÍA RAINA J. LEÓN LOVE POEM #39 JERRY BRUNOE STORY WITH RED HEELS IN ITS MOUTH ANNE MARIE ROONEY LETTER TO MYSELF, AGE 15 JEAN YEOJIN SUNG RECENT AWARD WINNERS SHERMAN ALEXIE MEREDITH MARTINEZ REVIEWS STEPHEN ELLIOTT ZADIE SMITH DON DELILLO KIM WRIGHT JOHN W. SEXTON Spring_2010.htmlSteve_Mitchell_Above_the_Rooftop.htmlSteve_Mitchell_Above_the_Rooftop.htmlTania_Hershman_My_Flickering_Self.htmlTania_Hershman_My_Flickering_Self.htmlRaina_J_Leon_Brujeria.htmlRaina_J_Leon_Brujeria.htmlJerry_Brunoe_Love_Poem_39.htmlJerry_Brunoe_Love_Poem_39.htmlAnne_Marie_Rooney_Red_Heels.htmlAnne_Marie_Rooney_Red_Heels.htmlAnne_Marie_Rooney_Red_Heels.htmlJean_Yeojin_Sung_Letter_to_Myself_Age_15.htmlJean_Yeojin_Sung_Letter_to_Myself_Age_15.htmlSherman_Alexie_Census.htmlhttp://www.contrarymagazine.com/Contrary/Love.htmlReviews_2010.htmlStephen_Elliott_Adderall_Diaries.htmlDon_DeLillo_Point_Omega.htmlKim_Wright_Love_in_Mid_Air.htmlJohn_W_Sexton_Petit_Mal.htmlshapeimage_5_link_0shapeimage_5_link_1shapeimage_5_link_2shapeimage_5_link_3shapeimage_5_link_4shapeimage_5_link_5shapeimage_5_link_6shapeimage_5_link_7shapeimage_5_link_8shapeimage_5_link_9shapeimage_5_link_10shapeimage_5_link_11shapeimage_5_link_12shapeimage_5_link_13shapeimage_5_link_14shapeimage_5_link_15shapeimage_5_link_16shapeimage_5_link_17shapeimage_5_link_18shapeimage_5_link_19shapeimage_5_link_20shapeimage_5_link_21