In a 2009 speech at the New York Public Library, Zadie Smith imagined a Dream City where the concept of a singular self is an illusion — a world where people hold multiple identities and straddle them as ‘we’, not ‘I’. Smith said: “My own childhood had been the story of this and that combined, of the synthesis of disparate things.”
Smith grew up in Willesden in West London. This is where Swing Time , her fifth novel, begins. In this gritty neighbourhood, two young girls, Tracey and the nameless narrator, meet at dance class in an old church. They notice each other because their “shade of brown was the same — as if one piece of tan material has been cut to make us both.” Tracey is wild, intuitive and audacious in talk and ambition.
Friendship’s shadow
The narrator is a wallflower, enthralled by Tracey, but intelligent and analytical. They become friends even before they speak. Tracey stays with her white mother who lives her life in the service of her child, encouraging her dream of becoming a dancer.
The narrator’s Jamaican mother, a feminist who concerns herself with social conditions, not intimate relationships, and with “middle class mores”, hopes that her child will do something useful with her life.
It is a friendship of contradicting personalities, yet a passion for dance binds Tracey and the narrator. This is a story of how friendships that are cemented in childhood are not based on logic or shared interests or similar cultures, but bound by some unknown force that unites — a force so strong that even if the friendship falls apart, its shadow falls on the rest of your life.
The lives of the two veer into widely divergent paths. The narrator goes to university and becomes an assistant to a famous pop star called Aimee. She leads a glamorous, jet-set lifestyle, sacrificing her own time to keep Aimee on the go. Tracey continues performing, but doesn’t go where she has willed her mind. For one of them change is a whirlwind, for the other it is glacial.
The narrator goes from London to New York to West Africa where Aimee believes, simplistically and foolishly, that poverty, “one of the world’s sloppy errors”, can be solved only if it is done with the kind of “focus” that she has. Aimee decides to establish a girls’ school in a poor village in an unnamed country, and entrusts the nitty-gritty details of this task with her entourage.
There we meet Hawa, a young teacher, who is the kind who “only likes to have fun”, something that the narrator finds bewildering.
Two worlds
Her stay in West Africa teaches the narrator one thing: your identity lies in the eyes of the beholder. If she is black in London, she is white in Africa. If she is clever at home, she is a bit of a dimwit in this unknown land. Smith begins the book with the episode that wraps it up: a huge scandal that ends the narrator’s career. Her storytelling is so nuanced that even the added nasty twists in the climax make us feel sympathetic towards these complex, and not always likeable, characters.
Smith goes back and forth in seven parts from the narrator’s present to her childhood. Flowing through the veins of a discursive, splendid page-turner is not only the story of the evolution and decay of a friendship, but social commentary on class, race and gender.
The seemingly small differences in class between Tracey and the narrator tear them apart later. The two different worlds that Aimee and Hawa inhabit are almost comical when they meet. It is not just wonderful prose that propels this book, but humour in the gravest situations, nostalgia during a successful present, and pathos.
Smith leaves us at the end with questions that we ask of ourselves often: must we leave home to find success and happiness, or stay? What is empowerment and who defines it? In a world of breathless movement, where is home? And when we stop dancing, who is clapping?
Swing Time gets its name from the dance and music infused in it. The narrative dances as intricately as Jackson or Fred Astaire do; it may as well have some BGM. The sankofa , an African word which means ‘go back and get it’, and is symbolised by a bird craning its neck, appears regularly in the book.
It is fitting, for after all Swing Time is about how despite our personalities being a “synthesis of disparate things”, we move forward only to crane our necks at some point to look for that place that anchors us: home.
Swing Time; Zadie Smith, Penguin, ₹350
