By Freya Bainbridge
As York St John University marks Black History Month, Freya reconsiders the work of Zadie Smith.
I read a comment recently on the reboot of the TV series Charmed, and its inclusion of the black female protagonist. It came from a young woman who had realised that as a young woman of colour she had seen every single episode of the original show, but Charmed had never seen her.
Zadie Smith, in an essay from her collection Changing My Mind, reflects on Zora Neal Hurston’s novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, about Janie Crawford, a young black woman determined to be her own person in the early twentieth century. Her mother had given it to her to read when she was a teenager, but Zadie had resisted.
“But you’ll like it.” Her mother tells her. Zadie responds,
“Why? Because I’m black?”
As a young burgeoning writer, she disliked identifying with the fiction she read, she wanted to like a novel because it represented good writing, not because it represented her. “Like all readers,” she writes, “I want my limits to be drawn by my own sensibilities, not by my melanin count.” But she gives the book the benefit of the doubt. She sits back, gets comfortable, and reads. She devours it. She finds herself losing her literary battles one by one; aphorisms, mythic language, the love tribulations of women, all of these she considers as literary faux pas, yet she cannot deny her admiration of them when used by Hurston. More than that, though, she realises that she does identify with the novel: “Fact is, I am a black woman, and a sliver of this book goes straight into my soul.” She cannot help but respond to the way the novel speaks to her, despite loathing a response that could be deemed ‘extra-literary’.
In the end though, Zadie realises that it wasn’t the novel that she had a problem with, or even the fact that she was supposed to like it because she was black. It was the way in which black women in literature had begun to be put on a pedestal, pressed into service as role models. They had become unreal creatures, “unerringly strong and soulful…African queens, divas, spirits of history”. They were perfect. Too perfect. They lacked the complexities, flaws and uncertainties of real women. “The truth is,” Zadie writes, “black women writers…have been no more or less successful at avoiding the falsification of human experience than any other group of writers.” They aren’t superhuman, after all. Just human. And a black character is just a character. Hurston herself tried to stress this point in her own fiction, writing “Negroes are no better nor no worse, and at times as boring as everybody else.” Hurston had grown up in an all-black town, unaware that she was supposed to consider herself as a minority, something exotic, something other. She was just Zora.
And Zadie is just Zadie. As a black writer, she doesn’t stick within the confines of “black literature”, she colours outside of the lines. So maybe she opens the essay collection with a meditation on the representation of black womanhood in fiction (and returns to it throughout) but she also writes on Barthes, Kafka and Nabokov. She waxes lyrical about her devotion to Katherine Hepburn, reviews V for Vendetta and Casanova, and lounges by the pool in LA during Oscar weekend. Literary circles are quick to laud Zadie Smith as one of Britain’s leading black writers, but she’s also just a writer.
I find myself thinking of that young woman’s comment about Charmed a lot. I hope she finds in it a young black woman like herself, I hope she finds someone she can identify with. I hope she finds a woman that is imperfectly perfect, ripe with contradiction and complexity. I hope her mother will ask her how she found it, like Zadie’s did when she nonchalantly dropped Hurston’s novel on the dining table one evening. I hope she can respond, like Zadie, begrudgingly, with a reluctant smile on her face:
It was basically sound.
Black History Month Exhibition in Fountains
The Literature Programme and ILE have teamed up to create a display celebrating writers of colour whose work is read, studied and enjoyed by staff and students at YSJU.
Frederick Douglass and his Legacy: 2-3pm, DG123. Monday 29 October
Frederick Douglass was born into slavery. He escaped in 1838 and became one of most famous and influential abolitionists in America. His autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, was a literary bestseller and is still read and studied all over the world. In 2018, people all over the world are celebrating the 200th anniversary of Douglass’s birth.
The School of Humanities, Religion and Philosophy is proud to host a lunchtime session to honour the work and life of Frederick Douglass. Come along on 29th October to learn a little more about Douglass’s amazing story and to explore his legacy. Dr Anne-Marie Evans will be discussing the cultural legacy of Douglass’s life and work, including thinking about contemporary texts such as Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad(which was, of course, the YSJU Big Summer Read this year!) and WGN’s critically acclaimed television series Underground.
There will be free refreshment available at the event. Please email Anne-Marie Evans (a.evans@yorksj.ac.uk) if you have any questions.