Last Friday, my imagination had a field day. I have spent sporadic moments gleaning through google to get bits of information about my favorite authors - searching through interviews, biographies, bibliographies. I’ve dug and, admittedly, I dig still. I haven’t spent that much time doing it but I have spent a good amount of time thinking what it would be like to actually see that someone live, whose words have rippled through my consciousness.
I dug and dig until I saw Zadie Smith speak. She read an excerpt from On Beauty and had a conversation about her work. And I discovered that she’s no different than any of us - we, with our heads filled with strange ideas, configurations of neurons that fire along, triggering memories and bridging connections between us, between people with similar or distant connections.
Zadie is an inhabiter. Her novels are considered ’social.’ She is an inhabiter because she explores the bodies, the social chemistries and configurations of those she doesn’t know anything about. She was once about to give a talk and as she stepped to the mic but before opening her mouth, she received a letter from the Bangladeshi community (delivered by an East Asian boy). The letter was more a list, indicating the various ways Zadie had screwed up in her representation of their community in White Teeth. For her, inhabitation comes with its quirky sets of incongruence and inaccuracy; no one ever said she was an accurate inhabiter.
Part of the reason she can inhabit so well is because she is a professional reader; at least, thats what she calls herself. She has taken up writers that many of us would never dare to read; she purposely mixes things up and reads everything she can get her hand on. She juxtaposes Kafka with Wallace and absorbs everyone (or everything) in between. She has a way about her that oozes of experience, of understanding the world in a way many of us also experience it.
But more than that, she doesn’t place any special onus on herself. She’s just a person who writes. She doesn’t call herself a writer, she doesn’t gesticulate wildly while she’s speaking. She wears cute boots and is amusingly self-deprecating. Most of the time, though, she has no agenda and is honest about the effects her fame have had on her.
Did I mention that I like her a lot?
