Zadie Smith is a novelist from North London. Her first novel, "White Teeth" was published in 2000 to high acclaim. Aside from novels ("NW" and "On Beauty"), Smith has published three collections of essays ("Changing my Mind: Occasional Essays," "Feel Free," "Intimations") and a collection of shorts stories ("Grand Union"). Smith received the 2021 St. Louis Literary Award in recognition of her accomplishments in literature and enrichment of insight into the human condition. She is currently a tenured professor of creative writing at New York University.
The following interview is between Zadie Smith (ZS) and the 2022 Head Editors of Kiln: Alyssa Cook (AC), Amanda VanNierop (AV), and Grace Wang (GW).
AC: We’ve recently selected our theme, and it’s called “We Need to Talk…” You can interpret that however you’d like; it’s meant to be really vague and interpretable. For us, it kind of conveys a sense of urgency and importance in whatever field or discipline you’re writing in. What do you think of when you hear the phrase, “We need to talk”?
ZS: To be honest, marital arguments. A slow afternoon where I’m not going to get much work done because I have to talk about my relationship.
AC: That’s exactly where it kind of started for us.
AV: The phrase that precedes a break-up…
ZS: Yeah, yeah. It’s never good.
GW: How do you begin to hold a conversation through writing?
ZS: I think the key thing is to leave space for the reader. I find myself saying that to my students all the time. If you’re writing for children, you fill in the gaps—you explain for them, you hold their hand. But we’re adults. Adults are able to think for themselves—and want to. So, when I’m writing, I’m trying to leave space and not to be so authoritarian. It sounds like a metaphor but it’s like a real practice. I don’t need to explain everything, I don’t need to be right all the time… I don’t need to force the reader into a corner. I don’t need to shout, hopefully. It’s more like hospitality. You know, when you invite somebody in, you should have some food and drinks. You don’t just invite them in and say, “Hey. Here’s my house.” There’s a structure, but it’s not overwhelming. You don’t sit right next to your guest and force them to sit here, look at this… It’s a mixture between a welcoming structure and freedom. That’s how I think of it when I’m writing, like I’m inviting someone in. Even though writing is very manipulative, because I am basically replacing your thoughts with my thoughts. That can be a more or less aggressive process. Particularly when my competition now is not other writers but software. I really don’t want to behave like software in somebody’s head. I’m not trying to get anything out of you. I don’t want your money, apart from the cover price of the book. I don’t want your soul. I want to be in conversation.
AV: In your book Intimations, you discuss the relationship between art and time—most notably how art seems to be merely a way of passing time, especially through the pandemic. Do you feel there is ever an urgency to creating art? And if so, when?
ZS: There’s a massive urgency for me—there’s a certain amount of things I want to make before I die. So, for me it’s an endless… emergency. During the pandemic—but longer, like during the crisis from 2016 to this moment, I felt… You know, it’s so vanglorious, it’s so ridiculous because I’m just one writer, what is the purpose? Everyone is on their phones, day and night. What could you possibly hope to bring to people’s consciousness when it’s so filled? I know it’s ridiculous for a middle-aged woman to go around the world saying, “Put down your phone, pick up a-” but I do feel an urgency about it. I really think it’s the mass capture of consciousness and it really stresses me out. So even though it’s pointless—I know it’s pointless. It’s not like I’m delusional and everyone’s going to throw their phone into a bin. I know the ship has sailed and this is over. But for some reason I can’t let it go.
AC: That’s something we talked about in the early stages of developing the theme… “Talking” as a conversational or dialogue piece of existence. What kind of issues do you think artists, writers, or researchers should be talking about right now?
ZS: I don’t think any writer should be instructed as to the urgency of anything. It’s an individual matter, and there are different urgencies. The thing about an emergency is that there’s usually a lot of crises going on simultaneously. The one I’m concerned with is existentialist—like, the crisis of consciousness. There’s plenty of other writers for whom the fundamental principle is the planet, or economic inequality, or racial strife. The good news is, there’s a lot of writers. No one has to carry this burden alone. It is my feeling that in all those other emergencies, the thing you will need to counter them is a brain partially free of colonization.
GW: Do you think there’s a difference between what people want to talk about and what they need to talk about?
AC: Or what they do talk about?
ZS: There’s this old Jamaican proverb which says, “Finger never say look here, him say look yonder.” Which means people always like to point out the problems with other people but are very very uninterested in thinking about the problems with themselves. And so I guess that is something I always notice—there’s a great desire to blame somebody else. And it’s completely addictive and thrilling when somebody can be found who is evidently worse than you. That doesn’t seem, to me, a very useful way of thinking. Self-reflection would be a more useful activity for a lot of people.
AV: You’ve written a wide range of books—from longer prose to short stories to essays, and even children’s books. What form do you find yourself drawn to the most, and why?
ZS: It just depends. I’m very aware that there are people who don’t like my novels but prefer my essays, and people who prefer the novels to the essays… The one thing I’ve noticed is that everybody at the moment prefers essays. The question is why? And it’s because they are fundamentally less challenging. I understand why people like them because they’re direct, they’re monological, they speak in one way, you get to have an opinion… Novels are very messy, they make you feel strange, they’re sometimes overwhelming… I was reading Elizabeth Strout on the plane yesterday (Oh, William!) and I found myself really crying. No one wants that feeling—it’s not pleasant. No essay could have done that to me in a million years! Who wants to feel like that on a Wednesday afternoon? So I completely get why people prefer essays—because they’re clear. Novels tell you something that you don’t want to know, which is open-ended and ambivalent and frustrating. Messy. They’re not elegant. But, I kind of keep faith with them. I think they do something more important than essays. Essays are just part of the commentaria. Everybody likes to comment. Novels are something different.
AC: It’s almost like the difference between a piece of art on the wall of a gallery and then seeing something performative, like "The Artist is Here," where you just had to sit across and stare at [Marina Abramovic's] face…
AV: I love her.
ZS: Yeah, amazing.
AC: I completely agree to an extent, but I also love the catharsis that comes with feeling big things.
AV: Maybe there’s something to be said, too, about the post-pandemic or intra-pandemic state… people avoiding feeling vulnerable at any cost. ZS: When I was on that plane I looked around and every single person… It was Southwest Airlines (no one’s favorite airline) and what you’re told to do is take your phone and sign up to the wifi, order a coke and some peanuts, and watch their lineup of entertainment, and there wasn’t a single person… I don’t mean it as a virtuous sort of, “I was reading a novel!” but I really did notice what they were doing… It was pacifying. I was looking out at this insane landscape of endless, infinite desert and mountains and reading this book… And it was the definition of “too much.” And I completely get why people would rather not.