Although I’ve intended to read this collection of reviews, occasional pieces, and cultural criticism since its publication 4 years ago, I have been overwhelmed by the torrent of new material that publishers daily crank out. I feel like I have my face under a spigot opened full bore. So I play catchup as best I can and, as it turns out, my timing here is fortuitous. Since the book’s publication, the world has turned just enough to throw Smith’s writing into sharp contrast with today’s prevailing mode of conversation about freedom. We needed Zadie Smith less in 2018 than we need her now in 2022.
Feel Free is a gathering up and gathering in of Smith’s writings published during the two terms of the Obama administration and, in a way, they reflect the optimism of that period. However, as Smith notes in the forward dated January 18, 2017, two days before the Trump inauguration, they “are the product of a bygone world.” In her own aleatory way, she addresses the question of what it means to be free, pressed as she is by the conviction that you can’t address incursions into your freedoms without first articulating what you mean when you use the word.
Smith had in view Brexit and Trumpism. She had in view her own unexpected success as a young biracial woman from working class north London who found her personal rise mirrored by the ascendancy of America’s biracial president. Her notions of freedom necessarily assume elements unique to her context. For that reason, I can’t necessarily enjoy direct access to her notions without engaging in translation and, I suspect, without doing some violence to them. After all, I’m a middle-aged white male who is, for that reason, largely insulated from the vicissitudes of life. As for nationality, Smith and I don’t really cross paths. She mentions Canada only once and then only for a thought experiment in which she imagines a meeting between Justin Bieber and Martin Buber. Oh, and there’s Joni Mitchell. Let’s not forget Joni Mitchell.
Despite our different contexts, our lives do present footings for possible bridges. I have no way to access the experience of life as a biracial person, but love and marriage have drawn me into its proximity and I would like to think that fact has allowed me to foster empathy. And our reading lives appear to move in tandem. While I have only the evidence of those books she writes about, I suspect that if we were to draw Venn diagrams of our respective reading habits, we’d note considerable overlap. Jane Austen, James Baldwin, J. G. Ballard, Julian Barnes, John Berger, Jorge Luis Borges, Martin Buber, John Cheever, J. M. Coetzee, Richard Dawkins, Don DeLillo, Joan Didion, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Geoff Dyer, E. M. Forster, Johnathan Franzen, William Gibson, and so on to the end of the alphabet. Not perfect overlap, mind you, but close. This congruence of thought worlds creates an illusion of intimacy.
Had I read Feel Free before 2022, I might have been satisfied with an illusion of intimacy as my final impression. However, early in the year, the kinds of concerns that had intruded on Smith’s Obama-era optimism—Brexit, Trumpism—made an unexpected appearance on my native soil. A long-festering populist extremism gathered the courage to show its face, mustering transport trucks and pickup trucks, and heading to Ottawa where it occupied the streets around Parliament Hill and called itself the Freedom Convoy. Suddenly, Smith’s wide-ranging inquiry had its foil in a movement close at hand. What are we to think when a writer invites us to feel free while all around us people lob the idea of freedom like a rock or a hand grenade?
True North Strong And Free
I started to read Feel Free on a road trip from Toronto to Thunder Bay. My wife—the biracial one I mentioned above—and I have an understanding when it comes to road trips: she does all the driving because it’s the only way she can keep from getting car sick; that frees me up to read since I don’t have the same issue. We were taking our daughter to her home in Thunder Bay after she completed a final term of school in Toronto. I’m not sure how we ended up with a child who feels more at home living north of Superior. We were both born and raised in Toronto and have settled into the downtown core where we live at one extreme of the urban/rural divide that sees the rest of Canada line up against Toronto, and suburban Toronto against the downtown core. We live in the centre circle of a big bullseye.
While I love the drive around the shores of Lake Superior, the points of isolation, the ruggedness, the sheer natural wonder of it, I can’t help but feel a change in the air, an electric charge, maybe, or a subtle shift in the barometric pressure. I feel it most acutely in the shift from plurality and difference to monoculture and an insistence on white conformity. Ride the subway one day, then drive north the next, and you’ll see what I mean. Do it with someone who, for obvious reasons, can’t oblige the insistence on white conformity, and you’ll feel what I mean. The pickup trucks. The gun racks. The Canadian flags flying from the back. The goatees. The ATV’s. The red plaid shirts. The cans of beer. Litter in the bush defined by used Tim Horton’s cups. Living breathing caricatures of white Canada.
Whenever I head north, I feel like I’m passing as a white man. That may sound like an odd thing for an obviously white man to say, but that’s the way I feel and I must confess that I do it badly. I start with a baseball cap and a plaid shirt and work my way through all the other markers of white Canadian masculinity, but I never really pull it off. I’m talking to a cheese vendor at a Saturday market in Thunder Bay and she says: “You’re not from around here, are you?” It’s that obvious. To be fair, Thunder Bay has a vibrant queer positive scene, community theatre, a symphony orchestra, and some excellent restaurants with solid wine lists. But stray too far from Red River and Cumberland and you’re back in Canada again. Everybody can tell by the way I carry myself, the way I speak, my vocabulary, my apparent incapacity to talk about ice fishing and hockey standings, that I don’t belong in this place.
This becomes more obvious on our return trip home, driving into Sault Ste Marie at 7:30 in the evening, Highway 17 down a line of big box stores and gas stations and discount hotels, asking at our hotel for a place to eat that might serve healthy meals and finding ourselves at Chuck’s Roadhouse Bar & Grill. Parking lot full of F150’s draped in Canadian flags. Virtually every patron white (except the one I walked in with). Big hog on a pedestal. Giant screens with baseball games and hockey playoffs. Screaming kids. Not a single mask in the room. And not a single green vegetable on the menu either. So much for healthy meals. We shouldn’t have trusted the recommendation of a girl who stands under 5 feet tall and weighs more than 200 pounds. Drive into the Sault and it’s easy to see how Doug Ford’s Conservatives could get re-elected. Meanwhile, at the federal level, Pierre Poilievre is the Conservative front-runner in a leadership race that threatens to mimic populist movements the world over. And all in the name of freedom.
How Are We To Feel Free?
How does Zadie Smith want us to feel free? This year, Canada has had to address one extreme of freedom discourse. It might best be described as a species of paranoid libertarianism. It is rights talk divorced from any sense of responsibility. She neatly captures this mode in her discussion of Key and Peele. One can see why she is drawn to the popular comedians. For one thing, they’re both biracial and wildly successful. For another thing—and this is perhaps more important—they leverage their comedy to say the unsayable and, in so doing, exemplify the kind of freedom Smith celebrates. In their Meegan and Andre sketches, Key and Peele anticipate the kind of behaviour we’ve witnessed in Ottawa. She writes: “As the sophistic, motor-mouthed Meegan, Peele gets to the core of what contemporary entitlement looks like—concern with one’s personal rights combined with non-interest in one’s duties—managing to place Meegan in that comedy sweet spot where girl power meets good old-fashioned narcissism.” Instead of Meegan, she could be talking about the Freedom Convoy’s Tamara Lich who, sadly, comes off as if she’s been scripted by comedy writers.
Another extreme of freedom discourse finds expression in the private personal talk of self-help gurus who encourage us to be the best version of ourselves we can be. Although just as self-absorbed as its paranoid libertarian counterpart, it differs insofar as it’s apolitical, more concerned with the fulfillment of personal aspirations than with the realization of the tribe’s agenda. Karen doesn’t want to run for political office; but she does want you to know that she got more steps than you today, and in better shoes. I have no access to sociological data that supports me here, but I would hazard to guess that this second kind of freedom talk has dwindled during the pandemic. It’s hard to be the best version of yourself when all the people whose noses you’d love to rub in it are huddling in lockdown.
There are moments when Zadie Smith skirts dangerously close to this version of freedom discourse. We fear a whiff of it in what later proves to be a sadly funny and self-deprecating story. She and her husband went to live for a time in Rome, which was easy enough to do in the days before Brexit and children. However, as she puts it, she burned down an entire square. It wasn’t her fault and the square wasn’t that big, but she’s a writer so she’s entitled to a certain license. The upshot is that she loses everything. As she watches their apartment burn to the ground, and all their possessions with it, she realizes that she is the first person in the history of her family who could shrug her shoulders and say: “Everything will be okay.” The extraordinary financial success of her first novel, and the momentum that produced, placed her in a position no one else in the family had ever known. It would be easy to read her as saying: Look everyone! See how well I’m doing. Until we remember that her mother was descended from slavery in the Caribbean, and her father, from England’s working classes (who probably could trace his ancestry to indentured servitude).
Although Smith is never explicit about what she means by freedom (she’s too good a writer to be explicit about anything), she offers a clue with her occasional mention of the English Romantic poet, John Keats, and his notion of “negative capability”. This is an idea he set out in a letter dated December, 1817 to his brothers George and Thomas and it has taken on a life all its own:
I had not a dispute but a disquisition with Dilke, upon various subjects; several things dove-tailed in my mind, and at once it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously—I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason—Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge. This pursued through volumes would perhaps take us no further than this, that with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.
Although Smith takes umbrage with his application (she thinks it’s equally plausible that Shakespeare’s capacity to breathe life into so many characters was a function of his arrogance and sense of entitlement), she never calls into question the idea itself or the values Keats is reaching for when he applies it. To Keats, expressions of certainty and masculine self-assuredness sound the death knell of all that is fine in human feeling. At the risk of making him sound like Jacques Derrida 170 years before his time, Keats is willing to suspend clear resolutions (différence?), embrace ambiguity and paradox, and refrain from placing his ego at the centre of his words. It strikes me that Smith is reaching for something similar. She is incapable of the taut logical disquisition that might tumble its way into a second rate academic journal. Instead, her writing is aleatory and associative in nature. And there is about it a generosity that invites us to repay her in kind. The freedom she writes about isn’t there in a precise definition; it’s there in her example.
When we turn to face the year before us, we are inclined to ask: how then are we to feel free? Following Zadie Smith’s example, we feel free as we nurture our negative capability. In its broadest terms, this means we avoid the polarizing conversations that proliferate across social media. This means we maintain our skepticism of simple explanations and the promise of easy solutions. And it means we never shy away from complexity and confusion. Although these states may frustrate us and make us feel uncomfortable, in the long run they will serve us well.
See other Nouspique posts on Zadie Smith:
Zadie Smith and Intimations of “Real Suffering” – July 30, 2020
Swing Time, by Zadie Smith – June 3, 2020