{"id":51237,"date":"2017-01-18T21:30:56","date_gmt":"2017-01-18T21:30:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=51237"},"modified":"2017-01-18T21:30:56","modified_gmt":"2017-01-18T21:30:56","slug":"shaken-out-of-time-black-bodies-and-movement-in-zadie-smiths-swing-time","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=51237","title":{"rendered":"Shaken Out of Time: Black Bodies and Movement in Zadie Smith\u2019s Swing Time"},"content":{"rendered":"

Shaken Out of Time: Black Bodies and Movement in Zadie Smith\u2019s <\/strong><\/em>Swing Time<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

Virginia Quarterly Review<\/a>
\nVolume 93, Number 1, Winter 2017<\/a>
\npages 196-199<\/p>\n

Kaitlyn Greenidge<\/strong><\/a>
\nBennington College, Bennington, Vermont<\/em><\/p>\n

Swing Time<\/em><\/a> By Zadie Smith<\/a>, Penguin, 2016, 464p. HB, $27.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Midway through Zadie Smith\u2019s<\/a> new novel, Swing Time<\/em><\/a>, the unnamed narrator watches two girls walk \u201chand in hand\u201d down a dusty road in an anonymous, fictionalized African country. \u201cThey looked like best friends,\u201d she notes\u2014that \u201clooked\u201d suggesting the mysteries of friendship that the novel has been dedicated to up until that point. \u201cThey were out at the edge of the world, or of the world I knew, and watching them, I realized it was\u2026almost impossible for me to imagine what time felt like for them, out here.\u201d The girls inevitably remind the narrator of her own lost, best friend, Tracey, who angrily haunts the novel, forever resisting the narrator\u2019s attempts to regulate her to incorporeality<\/a>. Of their friendship, she notes, \u201cWe thought we were products of a particular moment, because as well as our old musicals, we liked things like Ghostbusters<\/em> and Dallas<\/em>. We felt we had our place in time. What person on earth doesn\u2019t feel this way?\u201d But the narrator is unable to place the two girls before her in any time. \u201cWhen I waved at those two girls\u2026I couldn\u2019t rid myself of the idea that they were timeless symbols of girlhood\u2026I knew it couldn\u2019t possibly be the case but I had no other way of thinking of them.\u201d<\/p>\n

In an interview in T: The New York Times Style Magazine<\/em><\/a> this past fall, Smith noted, \u201cIt just seemed to me that what was done to black people, historically, was to take them out of the time of their life. That\u2019s what fundamentally happened. We had a life in one place and it would have continued and who knows what would have happened\u2014nobody knows. But it would\u2019ve gone a certain way, and we were removed from that timeline, placed somewhere entirely different, and radically disrupted. And the consequences of that are pretty much unending. Every people have their trauma. It\u2019s not a competition of traumas. But they\u2019re different in nature. And this one is about having been removed from time.\u201d Swing Time<\/em> is a novel that is fundamentally concerned with this question. What do we do, how do we respond, when we are violently shaken out of time, when we lose the thread of our own lives, when we are so certain of the narrative of our life and then are suddenly, jarringly, shaken loose? How do we reconcile, what are the lies and myths we tell ourselves, to try and reclaim our time? And when do those lies hurt us and when do they help us find our footing again?<\/p>\n

When we meet the narrator of Swing Time<\/em>, she is deep in the midst of mysterious disgrace, briefly infamous worldwide for a perceived wrong she\u2019s committed against a Madonna<\/a>-like global superstar who goes by the single name of Aimee. The narrator is Aimee\u2019s assistant: She has worked tirelessly for the past decade helping Aimee, a white woman, set up a school for girls in that unidentified African country. Aimee is a woman who has created her own myth for herself, using sex and youth and pop music to forge a destiny that would not have been available to any woman a generation before her. The narrator meets her by chance, devotes her life to her, and finds herself unmarried and childless, a cog in the superstar celebrity machine of Aimee\u2019s life. But it becomes clear, even though the narrator has spent her adult life serving Aimee, it\u2019s not the pop star who holds her attention. Instead, she exists in a kind of suspended dream state, reliving her brief friendship with Tracey, the only other mixed-race girl in the narrator\u2019s neighborhood in the early 1980s. The narrator\u2019s parents are genteelly poor, and her mother, in particular, is ambitious: She reads postcolonial theory and takes courses on Marxism, ruthlessly forging her identity as a poor, black woman in Britain<\/a> into a professional activist and self-conscious, self…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Shaken Out of Time: Black Bodies and Movement in Zadie Smith\u2019s Swing Time Virginia Quarterly Review Volume 93, Number 1, Winter 2017 pages 196-199 Kaitlyn Greenidge Bennington College, Bennington, Vermont Swing Time By Zadie Smith, Penguin, 2016, 464p. HB, $27. Midway through Zadie Smith\u2019s new novel, Swing Time, the unnamed narrator watches two girls walk […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1295,12,5,8,10],"tags":[26014,18988,26015,1344],"class_list":["post-51237","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-africa","category-articles","category-book-reviews","category-media-archive","category-uk","tag-kaitlyn-greenidge","tag-virginia-quarterly-review","tag-vqr","tag-zadie-smith"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51237","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=51237"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51237\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":51238,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51237\/revisions\/51238"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=51237"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=51237"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=51237"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}