{"id":29943,"date":"2013-03-31T02:10:57","date_gmt":"2013-03-31T02:10:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=29943"},"modified":"2015-11-28T19:27:58","modified_gmt":"2015-11-28T19:27:58","slug":"speaking-in-tongues","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=29943","title":{"rendered":"Speaking in Tongues"},"content":{"rendered":"

Speaking in Tongues<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

The New York Review of Books<\/a>
\nVolume 56, Number 3<\/a> (2009-02-26)<\/p>\n

Zadie Smith<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

The following is based on a lecture given at the New York Public Library in December 2008.<\/em><\/p>\n

1.<\/p>\n

Hello. This voice I speak with these days, this English voice with its rounded vowels and consonants in more or less the right place\u2014this is not the voice of my childhood. I picked it up in college, along with the unabridged Clarissa<\/em> and a taste for port. Maybe this fact is only what it seems to be\u2014a case of bald social climbing\u2014but at the time I genuinely thought this<\/em> was the voice of lettered people, and that if I didn\u2019t have the voice of lettered people I would never truly be lettered. A braver person, perhaps, would have stood firm, teaching her peers a useful lesson by example: not all lettered people need be of the same class, nor speak identically. I went the other way. Partly out of cowardice and a constitutional eagerness to please, but also because I didn\u2019t quite see it as a straight swap, of this voice for that.<\/p>\n

My own childhood had been the story of this and that combined, of the synthesis of disparate things. It never occurred to me that I was leaving the London district of Willesden for Cambridge. I thought I was adding<\/em> Cambridge to Willesden, this new way of talking to that old way. Adding a new kind of knowledge to a different kind I already had. And for a while, that\u2019s how it was: at home, during the holidays, I spoke with my old voice, and in the old voice seemed to feel and speak things that I couldn\u2019t express in college, and vice versa. I felt a sort of wonder at the flexibility of the thing. Like being alive twice.<\/p>\n

But flexibility is something that requires work if it is to be maintained. Recently my double voice has deserted me for a single one, reflecting the smaller world into which my work has led me. Willesden was a big, colorful, working-class sea; Cambridge was a smaller, posher pond, and almost univocal; the literary world is a puddle. This voice I picked up along the way is no longer an exotic garment I put on like a college gown whenever I choose\u2014now it is my only voice, whether I want it or not. I regret it; I should have kept both voices alive in my mouth. They were both a part of me. But how the culture warns against it! As George Bernard Shaw delicately put it in his preface to the play Pygmalion<\/em>, \u201cmany thousands of [British] men and women\u2026have sloughed off their native dialects and acquired a new tongue.\u201d…<\/p>\n

…2…<\/p>\n

…Until Obama<\/a>, black politicians had always adhered to these unwritten rules. In this way, they defended themselves against those two bogeymen of black political life: the Uncle Tom<\/a> and the House Nigger<\/a>. The black politician who played up to, or even simply echoed, white fears, desires, and hopes for the black community was in danger of earning these epithets\u2014even Martin Luther King<\/a> was not free from such suspicions. Then came Obama, and the new world he had supposedly ushered in, the postracial world, in which what mattered most was not blind racial allegiance but factual truth. It was felt that Jesse Jackson<\/a> was sadly out of step with this new postracial world: even his own son felt moved to publicly repudiate his \u201cugly rhetoric.\u201d But Jackson\u2019s anger was not incomprehensible nor his distrust unreasonable. Jackson lived through a bitter struggle, and bitter struggles deform their participants in subtle, complicated ways. The idea that one should speak one\u2019s cultural allegiance first and the truth second (and that this is a sign of authenticity) is precisely such a deformation.<\/p>\n

Right up to the wire, Obama made many black men and women of Jackson\u2019s generation suspicious. How can the man who passes between culturally black and white voices with such flexibility, with such ease, be an honest man? How will<\/em> the man from Dream City keep it real? Why won\u2019t he speak with a clear and unified voice? These were genuine questions for people born in real cities at a time when those cities were implacably divided, when the black movement had to yell with a clear and unified voice, or risk not being heard at all. And then he won. Watching Jesse Jackson in tears in Grant Park<\/a>, pressed up against the varicolored American public, it seemed like he, at least, had received the answer he needed: only a many-voiced man could have spoken to that many people.<\/p>\n

A clear and unified voice.<\/em> In that context, this business of being biracial, of being half black and half white, is awkward. In his memoir<\/a>, Obama takes care to ridicule a certain black girl called Joyce<\/a>\u2014a composite figure from his college days who happens also to be part Italian and part French and part Native American and is inordinately fond of mentioning these facts, and who likes to say:<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not black\u2026I\u2019m multiracial<\/em>\u2026. Why should I have to choose between them?\u2026 It\u2019s not white people who are making me choose\u2026. No\u2014it\u2019s black people<\/em> who always have to make everything racial. They\u2019re<\/em> the ones making me choose. They\u2019re<\/em> the ones who are telling me I can\u2019t be who I am\u2026.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

He has her voice down pat and so condemns her out of her own mouth. For she\u2019s the third bogeyman of black life, the tragic mulatto<\/a>, who secretly wishes she \u201cpassed<\/a>,\u201d always keen to let you know about her white heritage. It\u2019s the fear of being mistaken for Joyce that has always ensured that I ignore the box marked \u201cbiracial\u201d and tick the box marked \u201cblack\u201d on any questionnaire I fill out, and call myself unequivocally a black writer and roll my eyes at anyone who insists that Obama is not the first black president but the first biracial one. But I also know in my heart that it\u2019s an equivocation; I know that Obama has a double consciousness, is black and, at the same time, white, as I am, unless we are suggesting that one side of a person\u2019s genetics and cultural heritage cancels out or trumps the other…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Speaking in Tongues The New York Review of Books Volume 56, Number 3 (2009-02-26) Zadie Smith The following is based on a lecture given at the New York Public Library in December 2008. 1. Hello. This voice I speak with these days, this English voice with its rounded vowels and consonants in more or less […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,63,1196,8,10,20],"tags":[14230,7008,1344],"class_list":["post-29943","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-barack-obama","category-literary-criticism","category-media-archive","category-uk","category-usa","tag-new-york-review-of-books","tag-the-new-york-review-of-books","tag-zadie-smith"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29943","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=29943"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29943\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":44321,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29943\/revisions\/44321"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=29943"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=29943"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=29943"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}