Race, Religion, and Diversity in London After 9/11

by Zadie Smith @ newyorker.com

Suddenly summoned to witness some thing great and horrendous, we keep fighting not to reduce it to our own smallness,” wrote John Updike ten years ago in these pages. He watched the towers fall with “the false intimacy of television,” from a tenth-floor apartment in Brooklyn Heights. Over in North West London, we were certainly very small and distant, but we still felt that false intimacy. We are a mixed community, including many Muslims, from Bangladesh, Pakistan, India, the United Arab Emirates, Africa. I grew up with girls who wore the head scarf, a fact that seemed no more remarkable to me at the time than Jewish boys wearing yarmulkes or Hindu kids with bindis on their foreheads. Different world. What enabled it? It helped that so many of the class disparities between us had been partially obscured. United in the same primary schools, we were neither mesmerized by, nor especially frightened of, our differences. Later, that sense of equality became difficult to maintain. Teen-agers are preoccupied with status and justice—they notice difference. Why do some have so much while others have nothing? Natural superiority? Hard work? Historical luck? Or exploitation? For some, the basic political insights of adolescence arrived with an extra jolt: your people over here were hurting your people over there; your home was attacking your home. Then came the cataclysm. The end of the world for nearly three thousand innocent people. The beginning of a different sort of world for the rest of us. From the epicenter in Manhattan, shock waves rippled across Europe. In North West London, a small but significant change: the stereotype of the Muslim boy was transformed. From quiet, sexless, studious child—sitting in the back of class and destined for an engineering degree—to Public Enemy No. 1.

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/talk/2011/09/12/110912ta_talk_smith#ixzz1XL0cLP70

Zadie Smith was only 25 when her first novel, White Teeth, was published. It seems that this is sort of the Number One Fact about Zadie Smith, as it were, especially for Writing About Zadie Smith. At the New Yorker festival this past fall, Smith was questioned about what it was like to become such a remarkable success at such an incredibly young age. Her response was classically Zadie: It wasn’t that unusual at all, she said, and then she proceeded to list a host of names who had achieved similarly early and lasting success — among them John Updike, Martin Amis, and the rest of the foundation of modern Western literature. And she’s right — for a talent of her caliber, she is just right on track.