NW

Zadie Smith's NW opens with a quote that dates back to the London of 1381, when a large gathering of common folk marched into the city down the old Kent Road, demanding higher wages and the abolition of serfdom. John Ball, one of the rebellion's nominal leaders, put forth the rhetorical question: "When Adam delved and Eve span / who was then a gentleman?" -- which by implication rejected the idea of there even being such a thing as a gentry class. King Richard II addressed the rebels from the opposite side of the River Thames (safely out of arrow reach) and promised clemency for all. When they laid down their arms, Richard had their leaders executed, their heads mounted on spikes outside the Tower of London. Richard's speech, interestingly, was the first known instance of an English king actually speaking English (since 1066, England's Norman rulers had spoken French).

Fast forward six hundred years or so, and set your compass for NW, a quadrant of London created by the postal system. There are a few "posh" or middle-class neighborhoods there -- Hampstead and its heath, College Park, and St. John's Wood (pronounced "sinjuns wood"), the last of which was home to a record high price paid for a private home. But large areas of the district are working class and poor, their inhabitants dwelling in council flats (what we'd call public housing) in places with names like West Hendon, Cricklewood, Wood Green, Tottenham, and Colindale (the latter once home to the British Library's newspaper room, before it went digital and was closed down). There's no Mary Poppins here, no Jane and Michael Banks -- but there are plenty of Leroys, Kevins, and Olivers -- and, in Zadie Smith's world, Leahs, Keishas, Felixes and Nathans.

Theirs is a world of unpredictable outcomes and mixed verdicts, of ambitions simmering in a pot from which there's no easy escape. Some are "cleaning up" their lives, though sometimes it turns out that it doesn't matter; others have "arrived" at higher class status, but still lead lives doubled by subterfuge. Cultural identities are jumbled in the heap, and while coming from a Jamaican or Pakistani family doesn't prevent some from climbing the class ladder, it also doesn't guarantee any kind of group solidarity -- it's every man and woman for themselves.

The structure of the novel mirrors this jumble, with short epiphanies and snippets of chatter sprinkled among longer, more narrative passages. Some sections take one down the proverbial stream of consciousness, while others are almost entirely dialogue. Typographically, that dialogue is handled rather differently here: we don't have traditional lines of speech with quote marks, but rather a smaller typeface, inset from the main text, as though we were momentarily donning another lens. The effect can be mesmerizing, but also confusing. You also may find yourself puzzling over a word -- of course, you can always Google it -- but you may also find the slang dictionary at peevish.co.uk to be of some use. Oh, and a map of course! -- this one is scalable, though this one's more fun; another will show you how to get about by bus. There's even a map of poverty itself, which will show how intermixed and variegated it is.

A Small Place

With her book A Small Place, Jamaica Kincaid takes on the most difficult of dialogues -- that between the native of a 'small place' such as Kincaid's home of Antigua, and the tourist who comes to visit. Not long ago, the government bureau in charge of Antigua launched a marketing campaign, complete with photographs of turquoise waters and palmy beaches. The slogan: "It's your island." Except it's not.

The current slogan, "The beach is just the beginning," is not much of an improvement.

Kincaid's book is very explicitly addressed to the tourist who visits Antigua, and the text very directly summons this reader as "you." There aren't many books like this, written in the second person -- it doesn't allow for distance, and can make some readers uncomfortable. In this case, that's exactly the effect Kincaid is aiming for.

But are "you" responsible for the problems of Antigua? Perhaps "you" have never gone there. But people like you have gone there, and when they have gone as tourists, they experienced all the things Kincaid's "you" experienced -- lovely beaches, tropical-themed mixed drinks, and lovely clean hotel rooms. More important, though, is what "you"will not see: the pothole-filled uneven road, paved only once for the visit of Queen Elizabeth; the sewage outlets that pollute the only beaches available to Antiguans, or the island's only library, its roof partially collapsed and many of its books ruined. "You" may be frustrated with the educational or career choices open to you, but they will probably be much greater than those available to Antiguans, whose only post-secondary school is a school that trains hotel workers.

When I've taught this book in the past, students sometimes feel offended; they reason that they themselves haven't done what this "you" did, or else that, after all, the tourist dollars that Antigua gets are vital to its economy, which would only be worse off if "you" stopped going. But that's the bind of tourism; if it's the only business in town (or on the island), it doesn't bode well for the natives of the place, whoever they are.  What is picturesque to one person is poverty to another; what seems a boon to one is a curse upon the other.  And, as Kincaid observes, "Every native of every place is a potential tourist, and every tourist is a native of somewhere." It's only that, with the economic systems of former colonies such as Antigua, the native never gets the opportunity to exercise this potential. We may well say, in political terms, that European countries no longer have colonies in the Caribbean, but in economic terms, alas, this is not yet true.

NB: Along with this book, I'm asking everyone to read Kicaid's "Columbus in Chains."

The Empire Writes Back

In the film The Name of the Father, the link between the English oppression of the Irish and the inhabitants of its many later colonies is made clear. Daniel Day-Lewis's character, the (falsely) accused IRA bomber Gerry Conlon, arrives in the prison commissary and is offered a piece of a jigsaw puzzle of the British Empire -- to eat! Seeing his puzzled expression, one of his fellow inmates, from Jamaica, explains that the puzzle has been soaked in LSD: "we been droppin de British Empire for the las' six months!"

It's the perfect subterfuge for the "subjects" of this multi-century colonialist project, an empire upon which -- for a very long time -- the sun never set. When finally it did, many of the former colonies found themselves torn apart by internal forces, sometimes with the "help" of ill-considered partitions such as those between Ireland and Northern Ireland, or India and Pakistan. One of the most persistent aspects of this old imperial grasp has in fact been the English language itself; in every country its fall from dominance played out differently. In Jamaica, English morphed into "Patwah," a version of English which re-arranges subject and object pronouns, elides initial and terminal consonants, and has even developed its own system of verb conjugations. Throughout the Caribbean, different such versions developed, once wrongly characterized as mere "dialects," but now recognized as Englishes in their own right, part of what the Trinidadian-Canadian poet Marlene Nourbese Philip calls the "Caribbean demotic." A similar evolution occurred in the former English colonies in West Africa, as well as on the Indian subcontinent, and even in Hong Kong and Singapore. The English of Singapore -- dubbed "Singlish" -- is a phenomenon all in itself.

So this week, we'll be reading -- and listening to -- a few brief works from a variety of these cultures. We'll start with Philip's “Discourse on the Logic of Language," part of her larger collection She Tries Her Tongue: Her Silence Slowly Breaks. After that, we'll read an essay by the late Nigerian writer Amos Tutuola, originally written for a collection I was editing, “My Vernacular.” We'll also read two poems by the Jamaican poet Louise Bennett: “Jamaica Language” and “Colonization in Reverse." Lastly, we'll listen to two powerful pieces by the dub poets Smiley Culture (“Cockney Translation") and Ranking Ann (“Kill de Police Bill”). I'd note that this last track was a protest against a proposed policing and crime bill in the UK Parliament, a response to the Brixton "Riots" of 1981 (like the L.A. "Riots" of 1992, they were seen by many poor and Black people as more of an uprising than a riot). In an added irony, the recording of Ranking Ann's song was financed by her local County Council (these were later to be dissolved under Margaret Thatcher's conservative government).

p.s. I've added a few notes on "Cockney Translation"