Zadie Smith “Speaking in Tongues”

Zadie Smith: writer in many tongues

I feel I should expand on the Zadie Smith article (“Speaking in Tongues“) that I mentioned a couple of posts ago. I can’t think of a more insightful piece about how we use language. She starts by talking about her own experience of losing her own ‘voice’ when she went to the “univocal” university that is Cambridge. The loss did not occur immediately. She could still rely on the North West London voice of her upbringing for some time. Gradually this shrivelled away, so that she was left with the voice of a high-brow literary academic, splitting her time between London and Harvard. The loss leaves her marvelling at the multivocal virtuosity of Barack Obama. She is writing just after he was elected President for the first time, so, like most of us, is still overwhelmed by his rhetorical capabilities. She points out that in his first autobiographical volume, Dreams from My Father, he “can do young Jewish male, black old lady from the South Side, white woman from Kansas, Kenyan elders, white Harvard nerds, black Columbia nerds, activist women, churchmen, security guards, bank tellers, and even a British man called Mr. Wilkerson, who on a starry night on safari says credibly British things like: “I believe that’s the Milky Way.”” Her conclusion: “This new president doesn’t just speak for his people. He can speak them.”

Her comments helped me to understand why I enjoyed Obama’s books so much. I’d listened to it on auditotape rather than reading it and been wowed by what I thought was his voice. But really I had been wowed by his voices. The President of the United States is a ventriloquist. I wonder at the frustrations he must feel at having to restrict his range to satisfy the constraints of office?

One senses the good-natured jealousy Zadie Smith feels at Obama’s gifts. And how it must hurt a novelist to lose the full range of voices she once drew on at will. I wouldn’t worry unduly at Smith’s condition, though. Reading her latest novel NW, after this article, it is clear that it addresses many of her concerns about voice. It is the most astonishing display of multivovalism I have come across in a novel. She can do ageing trade unionist, upwardly mobile female barrister, posh boy keeping it real, Irish nurse, Jamaican father, council estate drug dealer and middle-class public sector worker. She does an Obama. It’s a brilliant book. One of the best I have read in many years.