6/30/2023 0 Comments Swing time zadie“Instead, citizens of Dream City prefer to use the collective pronoun we.” “It’s the kind of town where the wise man says ‘I’ cautiously, because I feels like too straight and singular a phoneme to represent the true multiplicity of his experience,” Smith said. It’s taken for granted that people are various creatures, and that such variety is cause for celebration, not censure. Obama’s description, in his memoir, of the liminal position he occupied between his mother’s and his father’s worlds prompted her to imagine Dream City, a fantastical place “of many voices, where the unified singular self is an illusion.” In Dream City, a person born to parents of different nations, colors, and cultures, as Smith and Obama were, doesn’t have to worry about declaring allegiance to one or the other. Illustration by Olimpia ZagnoliĪ month after Barack Obama was elected to his first term as President, Zadie Smith appeared at the New York Public Library to deliver a lecture called “Speaking in Tongues” on the vagaries of race and identity. Smith’s fifth novel follows two girls bound and battered by memory.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |