City and Nature in the Work of Zadie Smith

Home , Feel Free (Smith book), NW (novel), White Teeth, Zadie Smith

Grey and Green: City and Nature in the work of Zadie Smith

Freya Graham

Introduction In her riotous novel NW (2012), Zadie Smith takes us on a walk through North London. It’s a cacophony: “sweet stink of the hookah, couscous, kebab, exhaust fumes of a bus deadlock. 98, 16, 32, standing room only—quicker to walk!”.1 The narrative continues over a page, taking in “TV screens in a TV shop”, “empty cabs” and a “casino!”.2 Plant and animal life are almost entirely absent, aside from a moment of “birdsong!” and a building surrounded by “security lights, security gates, security walls, security trees”.3 Elements that we may associate with the “natural world” have become part of the architecture of the city, indistinguishable from the man-made lights, gates and walls.

NW is so centred on city life that the title itself takes inspiration from a London postcode. The novel follows the lives of four friends—Leah, Natalie, Felix and Nathan— who grow up on the same estate in north-west London. As the friends grow older, their lives overlap in unexpected ways. Leah works in a dead-end job and still lives near her childhood estate; Natalie seemingly triumphs in becoming a successful lawyer and mother; Felix, a former drug addict, is forging a new life; Nathan is involved in organised crime. The novel’s ambitious narrative threads culminate in a tragic chance encounter.

NW expands on the themes of class, race, identity and place which Smith first explored in her debut novel, White Teeth (2000). White Teeth similarly charts the lives of three London families over several generations. The novel begins with the meeting of Archie Jones, a middle-aged and mediocre divorcee, and Clara Bowden, an awkward nineteen-year-old keen to escape her overbearing Jehovah Witness mother. They soon have a daughter, Irie, who grows up with Magid and Millat Begum, the twin sons of Archie’s best friend, Samad. As Irie, Magid, and Millat grow older, their lives become intertwined with the Chaflens, a white, middle-class family. Like NW, White Teeth is packed with sprawling, intersecting narratives that play out against a London backdrop.

London also features frequently in Smith’s 2019 essay collection, Feel Free. Indeed, the collection opens with the essay “Northwest London Blues”, in which Smith takes us on an amble through the “concrete space” of Willesden Green. Smith’s London isn’t just “concrete”, though. Several essays in Feel Free reflect upon the pockets of greenery that crop up in the urban expanse. “Elegy for a Country’s Seasons”, for instance, examines how the massive effects of climate change are felt in the tiny losses of, say, a bumblebee

1 Smith, NW, p39. 2 Ibid. 3 Ibid.

Grey and Green: City and Nature in the work of Zadie Smith

in a city garden. Likewise, “The Bathroom” recalls the houseplants that filled Smith’s childhood home in London suburbia. Finally, “Love in the Gardens” recollects a trip to Italy that Smith took with her father. They find peace in the lush public gardens enclosed within the bustling sprawls of Florence and Milan.

By examining NW alongside White Teeth and Feel Free, I want to show that Smith’s representation of the city is not one of concrete and skyrises—it’s one of parks, gardens, and tree-lined pavements, too. Previous critics have paid attention to the urbanity of Smith’s work, emphasising its busyness and diversity. Eva Ulrike Pirker argues that an ethical agenda underpins Smith’s representation of multicultural space,4 while Molly Slavin contends that Smith’s representation of northwest London contains “multiple geographies […] layered on top of and next to each other”.5 The presence of nature and greenery, however, which exist alongside Smith’s council estates and high streets, has been overlooked.

Unifying Green and Grey In classifying Smith as a city novelist, we pay more attention to the urban aspects of her writing and give less attention to the pockets of green that pop up throughout her work. While Smith’s “grey” city—the spaces depicted in NW and White Teeth, devoid of plant life and comprised of shops, vehicles and buildings—has dominated critical debate, her depiction of urban life is also full of overgrown gardens, squirrel-filled parks and foliage creeping over brick walls. In NW, White Teeth, and Feel Free, greenery and greyness exist in the city simultaneously. Smith continually explores the push-and-pull between grey and green spaces, presenting the dynamic as an integral part of city life.

Let’s zoom out for a moment. The binary between the “grey city” and “green country” is hugely simplistic, but it’s also hugely pervasive. The Oxford English Dictionary defines the city as “the built-up and densely inhabited part of a region as distinguished from the countryside” (“city, n1.”). The city is associated with the absence of greenery; it is green space that has been “built-up” and turned grey. Raymond Williams goes as far as to argue that the contrasting images of “country” and “city” are embedded in our culture.6 He suggests that the country is typically constructed as simple, innocent, unrefined and uneducated, while the city is traditionally presented as civilised and enlightened, as well as a place of vice and exploitation. Williams then contends that we imagine the past as a safer, more innocent “old England” which has only recently disappeared, destroyed by urbanisation and industrialisation.7 He traces this trope back to the 16th century, thus demonstrating that it is not a historical reality, but a “problem of perspective”, compounded by literary tropes like the pastoral mode.8 Williams concludes that the contrasting categories of country and city, and the images and associations that the

4 Ulrike Pirker, “Approaching Space”, p64 5 Slavin, “Nowhere and Northwest”, p98. 6 Williams, The Country and The City, p1 7 Williams, The Country and The City, p14 8 Williams, The Country and The City, p12, p37.

Grey and Green: City and Nature in the work of Zadie Smith

binary conception cultivates, do not reflect the “real social experience” of rural or urban life.9 Rather, the country and the city are interrelated, and exist on a spectrum.

Smith plays with this spectrum. In NW, the urban sprawl both struggles against and merges with the natural world. The narrator recalls the urbanisation of the Willesden area: “in the 1880s or thereabouts, the whole thing went up at once—houses, churches, schools, cemeteries—an optimistic view of Metroland”.10 Smith’s representation of the urban sprawl is not one of organic process, but of sudden construction, going “up at once”. The sentiment is echoed later in the novel, as the narrator reflects that “once this was all farm and field, with country villas nodding at each other along the ridge of this hill. Train stations have replaced them, at half-mile intervals”.11 The use of “once” here frames northwest London’s history as a forward-moving narrative, echoing the “once” of “once upon a time”, and thus echoing Williams’ contention that English culture frames the past, unindustrialised landscape with nostalgia and fantasy. In NW, Smith highlights this cultural trope, and then subverts it. Leah and Natalie, as adults, take an evening walk through Willesden. The walk begins on concrete roadsides, “a thin strip of pavement” that is “like walking on the hard shoulder of the motorway”.12 Clearly, this is a city scene. Then, an “ancient crenelation and spire” emerges, “just visible through the branches of a towering ash”.13 Suddenly, “a little country church, a medieval country church” appears; both Natalie and Leah are taken aback by the “full improbability” of the scene.14 Smith draws strong parallels between the church and a rural version of England. The scene is presented as “another century, another England”; the church is clearly distanced from contemporary experience. Smith draws attention to the “serenity” enclosed within the “ancient boundary”.15 This pastoral imagery, however, is juxtaposed with remnants of violence; the “family vaults have had their doors kicked in” and gravestones are “brightly tagged” with graffiti.16 The presence of this violence reminds us that the city, as conceptualised by Williams as the place of vice and exploitation, encompasses the churchyard. These disruptive details aren’t the only way Smith undermines the pastoral mode. Smith isn’t sentimental about this “little country church”: it may be different, but it is not presented as better. Rather, as something which has been transformed; Leah notes that the vicar “is the same, but his congregation is different”.17 Furthermore, the very presence of the vicar and congregation shows that this is a space which remains connected to the practices of everyday life—in this case, worship. The pastoral scene and the motions of city living are unified.

This unification, rather than demarcation, of country/city, is most evident in the figure of the Black Madonna, a statue which is displayed inside the church. The figure is based on a real statue, the Shrine of Our Lady of Willesden, in St Mary’s Church, Willesden. The

9 Williams, The Country and The City, p415. 10 Smith, NW, p47. 11Smith, NW, p54. 12 Smith, NW, p68. 13 Smith, NW, p69. 14 Ibid. 15 Ibid. 16 Ibid. 17 Smith, NW, p71.

Grey and Green: City and Nature in the work of Zadie Smith

figure was part of a pilgrimage tradition in the fifteenth century, but it was destroyed during the Reformation.18 A new Black Madonna was installed in 1972, made of “jet limewood”.19 The statue itself is an example of nature made into culture; a tree is transformed into a new cultural meaning via sculpting processes.20 The statue is made unfamiliar through comparisons to “white Madonna’s […] with blonde hair and nice blouses from M&S”.21 It holds a “mammoth baby” in “cruciform”. In a vision, the Black Madonna speaks directly to Leah, describing herself as the “spirit of these beech woods and phone boxes, hedgerows and lamp posts, freshwater springs and tube stations, ancient yews and one stop shops, grazing land and 3D multiplexes”.22 The figure unifies elements of country and city. For Smith, the urban sprawl is not an act of destruction, but one of transformation, rejuvenation and unity. Green space remains, side by side with built-up space.

Foregrounding the Green The presence of green space is not mere set-dressing in Smith’s novels. It plays an active role in shaping the experience of central characters. Mr Barnes, a chatty resident of NW's fictional Caldwell estate, tells us that “a bit of green is very powerful”.23 He believes that “even us Londoners born and bred, we need it, we go up the heath, don’t we, we crave it. Even our little park here is important. Bit of green”.24 This sentiment echoes a moment in Smith’s earlier novel, White Teeth. Alsana, a Bangladeshi woman who lives in East London, considers moving to Willesden because of its parks; she believes that “living near green spaces was morally beneficial”.25 These comments reflect the grey/green binary; green is good, grey is bad. Numerous studies have linked time spent in natural spaces to improved mental health, increased opportunity to exercise, and better air quality. Critic Terry Gifford argues that being in nature reminds us of being animals. He suggests that seasonal changes help us to understand growth and decay in ourselves.

In Smith’s work, especially her novels, characters rarely have the opportunity to leave the capital; nature and its benefits are only accessed, then, through the pockets that remain interspersed throughout the urban space. Those who do leave the city are linked with social and intellectual ascension; in NW, Natalie and Leah briefly leave London to attend university; in White Teeth, Magid is sent to Bangladesh, in order to be raised traditionally. The countryside is linked with the elite. Smith emphasises this through her representation of Natalie and Felix, two Londoners who grew up on the same estate. Smith notes that “Felix never knew what to say about nature”.26 A tree canopy is likened to “standing under the bell skirts of a Disney princess”27; Felix conceives of nature in sexual and commercial terms. Likewise, Natalie is a “city animal” who doesn’t “have the

18 Hammond, “The Shrine of our Lady of Willesden”. 19 Smith, NW, p72. 20 Hammond, “The Shrine of our Lady of Willesden”. 21 Smith, NW, p72. 22 Smith, NW, p74. 23 Smith, NW, p114. 24 Ibid. 25 Smith, White Teeth, p62. 26 Smith, NW, p114. 27 Ibid.

Grey and Green: City and Nature in the work of Zadie Smith

name for anything natural”.28 For both Felix and Natalie, their relationship with nature is defined by a failure of language, rather than a failure of connection. The city does not equip them with the linguistic tools necessary to describe the natural world. According to Terry Gifford, disconnect from nature is a central reason why cities are potentially damaging; he argues that we “still need to have unmediated contact with nature”.29 Smith contests this view. Natalie and Felix’s lack of words for nature isn’t presented as a deficiency. Smith does not lament their lack of language; rather, she presents it in matter- of-fact terms. Furthermore, Natalie is still presented as an “animal”.

Elsewhere in Smith’s work, gardens are a significant means of signalling class status. In the essay “The Bathroom”, Smith recalls how the “big, square, overgrown garden” of her childhood home was a sign that the family had “risen in the world.30 The garden “appeared to be entirely ours”.31 However, in reality it is shared with an Indian family. Thus, Smith’s father proposes “splitting the shared garden in half, by way of a slightly warped wooden fence”, so that the two families “each had our little fiefdom”.32 “Fiefdom” relates to feudalism; it signals a territory controlled by a particular person or group. Ownership is presented as the most important aspect of garden space. In NW, Michel, Leah’s husband, desperately wants his own house and his own garden. He laments his communal garden, crying that “this grass it’s not my grass! This tree is not my tree!”.33 Michel’s distance from nature is in part a reflection of his immigrant status. Michel’s family come from France and Algeria—he has, in a sense, been uprooted, and his own “roots” are absent from his rented London garden. Michel sees a clear link between space and social ascension; ”In France […] there’s no opportunity, you can’t move! Here, you can move […] we’re all just trying to make that next, that next, next, step”.34 Indeed, the communal garden is “fenced in, on all sides”.35 Leah and Michel are closed off from opportunities. However, the fence is penetrable, as ivy from the neighbouring estate, where Leah grew up, “invades the gaps and smothers anything Michel tries to grow”.36 Leah cannot escape her own “roots”, so to speak. Indoor plants and garden spaces are a tool that Smith uses to unlock gender and class identity.

Park spaces, like garden spaces, present a paradox. They are spaces where elements of nature are purposefully preserved, appearing both “natural” and carefully cultivated.37 When we go to a park space, we expect to encounter greenery, but we don’t expect to encounter overgrown plants or wild animals. However, the presence of green is not the only defining element of park space. While the Oxford English Dictionary offers several definitions of “park”, it repeatedly emphasises the “enclosed” quality of the space (“park, n.”). Park boundaries are often marked by fences or hedges; there should be distinct

28 Smith, NW, p253. 29 Coupe, The Green Studies Reader, p173 30 Smith, Feel Free, p354-5. 31 Smith, Feel Free, p354. 32 Ibid. 33 Smith, NW, p29. 34 Smith, NW, p29. 35 Smith, NW, p3. 36 Smith, NW, p43. 37 Hannikainen, The Greening of London, p6.

Grey and Green: City and Nature in the work of Zadie Smith

delineation between city space and park space. Finally, we should think about the purposes of parks. Henri Lefebvre argues that space is produced by social practices.38 A Walk in the Park Several social practices shape park space; people exercise, take leisurely walks, meet with others, and take their children to play. This section will focus on the act of walking in the park in particular. Michel de Certeau theorises that city walkers are writers of an “urban “text”“ that “they write without being able to read it”.39 These walkers are the “ordinary practitioners of the city”, moving in a way which is never fully determined by rules or organising bodies.40 Let’s transpose this argument onto park space; what kind of “manifold story” is composed by walking in the park?41

Adam W. Sweeting argues that parks “tell a sentimental tale wherein the concerns of city life [are] temporarily put aside while one walked through an idyll of greenery”.42 His use of “sentimental”, “temporary” and “idyll” draws parallels between parks and the pastoral mode. His argument echoes widely held societal conceptions of park space, especially in the early twentieth century; in 1912, an article in The Builder, an architecture magazine, claimed that the public wanted parks to be “a little piece of Nature preserved in all its sylvan beauty amidst the formality of its surroundings”.43 Indeed, it could be said that parks are a spatial representation of the pastoral; arguably, walking in the park fulfils the same imaginative need that is achieved by reading a pastoral text. Thus, with de Certeau's framework in mind, one important narrative that is told when we walk in the park is a pastoral one.

The public park movement in England began in the 1830s, driven by a desire to improve moral and physical health.44 There are two main categories of public parks in Britain: royal parks and municipal parks. Royal parks, previously reserved for the recreational use of the monarchy, were gradually opened for public use throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.45 They are prestigious spaces. Municipal parks, on the other hand, were specifically created by urban planners for everyday use by the local population.46 Features of municipal parks include sports fields and playgrounds. Smith often writes about these municipal parks in suburban areas; her park space is shaped by everyday practices of suburban inhabitants.

Smith’s representation of parks combines freedom and artifice. She repeatedly emphasises the accessibility of parks. In the essay “Love in the Gardens”, she explains that she enjoys public gardens because “no money had to be spent in a garden, and no awkward foreign conversation need be made, and no one thinks you odd or provincial if

38 Thacker, Moving through Modernity, p17. 39 Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, p93. 40 Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, p93. 41 Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, p93. 42 Bennett and Teague, The Nature of Cities, p93. 43 Jordan, "Public Parks, 1885-1914." p90. 44 Jordan, "Public Parks, 1885-1914." p85. 45 Jordan, "Public Parks, 1885-1914." p85. 46 Hannikainen, The Greening of London, p36.

Grey and Green: City and Nature in the work of Zadie Smith

you consult your guidebook in front of a statue or a lake”.47 In NW, Natalie meets with her wealthier boyfriend, Frank, in Green Park, because it’s “affordable for both parties”.48 Smith’s parks are meeting places in which social interactions can freely occur, enabling the reader to further understand the histories and social positions of various characters. This freedom manifests itself in the way walkers move in the park. In “Love in the Gardens”, Smith visits the Borghese Gardens, which are “shaped like a cartoon heart, though only a map reveals this”.49 Smith presents discrepancy between the mapped park and the walked park, noting that “when inside, you walk its winding arterial paths without any sense of a formal plan, surprised here by a café, there by a lake, here by a museum or a film festival, by the head of Savonarola or a carousel or a wild splash of lavender”.50 The park is “always so full of random temptations and opportunities that it will always thwart your ambition to get from A to B”.51 The park walkers compose the park with their own autonomy.

The freedom of the park, however, comes with caveats. Again, in the essay “Love in the Gardens”, Smith suggests that “it takes a while for immigrants to believe a park is truly public and open to them”.52 She remembers how her “mother always used to complain, exaggerating somewhat (and not without a little pride), that she was the only black woman to be seen pushing a stroller through St James” Park in 1975”.53 St James’ Park is a royal park, and therefore is more rigidly tied to class boundaries than municipal parks. It’s similar to the Italian public gardens that Smith recalls visiting in “Love in the Gardens”, which are “manicured and overdesigned”.54 The park is bounded by “diametric hedges”.55 The “manifold story” that is composed in Smith’s park space is defined by boundaries. The park is a bounded space, and the figure of the walker—especially, in the work of Smith, the figure of the immigrant—is a bounded individual.

These park spaces are not permanent. In NW, Leah becomes involved with an environmental activist group which attempts to stop the council building a by-road. Rodney, Natalie’s first boyfriend, derides the activist group, retorting that “that’s your luxury. We haven’t got time to care about trees”.56 There’s an important detail to consider in this scene: Leah is a white woman, and Rodney is a black man. For Rodney, caring about the natural world is a “luxury”, rather than a need. His disconnect from nature—illustrated by his reluctance to protect it—stems from weariness. Climate crisis is threaded throughout Smith’s work. Most pertinently, in White Teeth, Alsana maintains that the real difference between people is their vulnerability to natural disaster; she claims “it was the earth. It was the sky”.57 Likewise, Smith’s essay “Elegy for a Country’s

47 Smith, Feel Free, p95. 48 Smith, NW, p227. 49 Smith, Feel Free, p400. 50 Smith, Feel Free, p400. 51 Smith, Feel Free, p401. 52 Smith, Feel Free, p403. 53 Smith, Feel Free, p403. 54 Smith, Feel Free, p398. 55 Ibid. 56 Smith, NW, p204. 57 Smith, White Teeth, p210-211.

Grey and Green: City and Nature in the work of Zadie Smith

Seasons” takes environmental catastrophe as its subject, suggesting that there is more to climate crisis than a “vision of apocalypse”.58 She encourages the reader to consider the everyday, local, “minor losses” resulted from changing weather; no more winter frost, no more bumblebees or hedgehogs. Smith’s sentiment in the essay echoes a comment she made in a recent interview; on the subject of non-fiction environmental writers David Wallace-Wells and Nathaniel Rich, Smith lament, “imagine waking up every morning and writing those books! I’m completely defeated by it, mentally and personally”.59 In a speech given at an Extinction Rebellion protest in 2020, Smith made her most explicit rallying cry for environmental action yet. Her message clearly considered the relationship between humanity and nature: nature does not belong to us, but rather, in Smith’s words, ”we belong to it”. Bibliography Primary Texts Smith, Zadie. 2019a. Feel Free: Essays. London: Penguin Books. Smith, Zadie. 2019b. Grand Union: Stories. London: Hamish Hamilton/Penguin Random House. Smith, Zadie. 2013. NW. London: Penguin. Smith, Zadie. 2001. White Teeth. London: Penguin. Secondary BBC News, 17 Feb 2020. "Cambridge’s Trinity College Lawn Dug Up by Extinction Rebellion.” Accessible from: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-cambridgeshire- 51534446. Bennett, Michael, & Teague, David W. 1999. The Nature of Cities: Ecocriticism and Urban Environments. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Bracke, Astrid. 2017. Climate Crisis and the 21st-Century British Novel. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Certeau, Michel d., & Steven Rendall. 1988. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley, California: University of California Press. Clark, Timothy. 2011. The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and the Environment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Coupe, Laurence. 2000. The Green Studies Reader: From Romanticism to Ecocriticism. London: Routledge. Gifford, Terry. 2001. Pastoral. London: Routledge. Glotfelty, Cheryll, & Fromm, Harold. 1996. The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology. London: University of Georgia Press. Hammond, Andrew. 2013. "The Shrine of our Lady of Willesden: Reviving the Cult." Accessible at: https://www.shrineofmary.org/shrine.

58 Smith, Feel Free, p15. 59 Sullivan, "Zadie Smith Dismisses the Latest Literary “Fad” para.23

Grey and Green: City and Nature in the work of Zadie Smith

Hannikainen, Matti. 2016. The Greening of London, 1920-2000. Ashgate, Farnham, Surrey, England. Jordan, Harriet. 1994. "Public Parks, 1885-1914." Garden History, vol. 22, no. 1, pp. 85. Slavin, Molly. 2015. "Nowhere and Northwest, Brent and Britain: Geographies of Elsewhere in Zadie Smith’s "NW"." The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association, vol. 48, no. 1, pp. 97-119. Sullivan, Jane. 2019. "Zadie Smith Dismisses the Latest Literary “Fad”." The Sydney Herald. Accessible at: https://www.smh.com.au/culture/books/zadie-smith-dismisses-the-latest- literary-fad-20190925-p52ut7.html. Ulrike Pirker, Eva. 2016. "Approaching Space: Zadie Smith’s North London Fiction." Journal of Postcolonial Writing, vol. 52, no. 1, pp. 64-76. Williams, Raymond & Hunt, Tristram. 2016. The Country and the City. London: Vintage.