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The Feminine Voice of Zadie Smith 125 PASCAL NICKLAS , Mainz The Feminine Voice of Zadie Smith I always go on about not writing political dogma in books, but I don't mind feminist fiction. I don't mind banging on a bit when I'm feeling pissed off. It's not the worst thing in the world. People are too sensitive about that shit.1 Zadie Smith Introduction Looking for a female voice in contemporary British literature, Zadie Smith is one of the more obvious choices though she is not at all a feminist author. She has, however, become an instant celebrity due to the miraculously advantageous contract for her then as yet unfinished first novel: something that would not have happened in a similar way to a balding middle-aged, slightly overweight male accountant from Milton Keynes. Age, race and gender have all played together to create this continuing celebrity status. Zadie Smith has received so many prizes and honours for her first novel alone that it fills a whole page just to list them all in Claire Squires's "Reader's Guide" to White Teeth (2000). After her first novel, Zadie Smith began to take part in all sorts of events of the literary and cultural establishment. What started as a reaction to the hype surrounding a young and beautiful woman writer has now become the professional routine and involvement of a soundly established author. Zadie Smith as a woman author is an immensely interesting phenomenon of the literary marketplace because she is the icon of the more recent developments in mar- keting strategies and changes in the social, political and aesthetic status of literature: even serious literature has become part of the entertainment industry. There are ef- fects and manifestations of media convergence which make the written word on the page only one spark in the medial fireworks forming the halo of a celebrated author. What used to be the hallmark of exclusive phenomena like European Byronism, is now the standard fare of any bestselling author. Authors are just the nucleus around which the media persona grows. There are websites and innumerable documents in the net: interviews, pictures, youtube videos of readings or lectures, blogs, fan sites and so on. Together with the printed product there usually is the audio book and the e- book. The filming of the novels for the cinema or TV is only a question of time. The amount of attention a book receives – in Smith's case even before it was finished – depends on strategic decisions of the marketing management and not on the readers. Rarely is a commercial success produced by the customers: exceptions like Stieg Larsson only confirm the rule. The marketing strategies are not always successful, but without them success is usually absent. The start of Zadie Smith's career is a textbook example for such procedures and it is to be wondered if her resistance to the market forces, her at times rather rude and 'unfeminine' behaviour at marketing events and 1 Zadie Smith in an interview with Jessica Murphy Moo (2005). Anglistik: International Journal of English Studies 24.1 (March 2013): 125-135. Anglistik, Jahrgang 24 (2013), Ausgabe 1 © 2013 Universitätsverlag WINTER GmbH Heidelberg Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org) 126 PASCAL NICKLAS , Mainz her later criticism of the system of literary prizes from which she has benefitted so bountifully are not also fuelling her success by making her even more "authentic." Zadie Smith's novels, particularly White Teeth (2000), are easily put into the tradition of Dickens's social novels. 2 They take the family as the nucleus of society and topicalise social, racial, religious, cultural, and gender politics at a grass roots level. Great political controversies are shown through the prism of everyday life and language. On this battlefield, Zadie Smith does not fly the colours of feminism or political correctness. Quite on the contrary, she gives gender stereotypes and political incorrectness a lot of scope and creates a space of ambivalent and contradicting voices making it difficult to identify a reliable author/narrator position. Quite aptly, in view of the ambivalence of the narrators' rôles in her novels, her 2009 collection of essays is entitled Changing my Mind : there, Smith is, "forced to recognize that ideological inconsistency is, for me, practically an article of faith" (Smith 2009, n.p.). This explicit statement about her characteristic lack of a dogmatic ideology corroborates the impression from the novels. Her writings are not devoid of positions but they function rather as starting points for possible debates than as concluding statements. In this way, her feminine voice might be identified as a negotiation of positions and an undermining of patriarchal positions. Neither her fictional work nor her essays give occasion to place her in any theoretical feminist camp. It is rather a Winter Journals kind of post-feminist sensitivity which runs through her writings: Smith is aware of gender questions and politics but she does not treat them as the most important points on her artistic agenda. In her books there are many strong and wise women who, however, never aspire to the heroic. It is rather in the form than in the content or the outspoken opinions that the feminine voice of Zadie Smith can be heard. There seems to be a late echo of Hélène Cixous's idea of écriture féminine in the looseness of the 3 4 for personal use only / no unauthorized distribution narrative thread. Despite all the formal scaffolding, the narrative of Smith's novels is often rather flowing, growing rhizomatically in all directions – resisting all the pruning that is, admittedly, also done by the author. This overgrowth has often and explicitly been criticised by the author herself in the case of White Teeth . So, there seem to be two sides to this 'organic growth' of words: itPowered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org) resembles the structure suggested for feminine writing by poststructuralist feminism and it provokes ambivalent feelings concerning an alleged lack of structure. Gender Aspects of Zadie Smith as Media Persona Zadie Smith in a sense is a self-fashioned persona . She changed her name from "Sadie" to "Zadie" at the age of fourteen, accentuating her strangeness in the British context. Her family background is mixed English and Jamaican – which is reflected in the character of Irie in White Teeth – and Smith sees herself as black but not as an 2 See, e.g., Matt Hill (2011) in his politics blog: "I could write a thesis on how Smith is updating the Dickensian social novel for our times." 3 "She [woman] doesn't revolve around a sun that is more star than the stars. That doesn't mean that she is undifferentiated magma; it means that she doesn't create a monarchy of her body or her desire. Let masculine sexuality gravitate around the penis, […]. Woman does not perform on herself this region- alization […]. Her libido is cosmic, just as her unconsciousness is worldwide: her writing also can only go on and on, without ever inscribing or distinguishing contours […]" (Sellers, ed., 1994, 44, ori- ginally in Cixous, The Newly Born Woman ). 4 "Each time I've written a long piece of fiction I've felt the need for an enormous amount of scaffolding. With me scaffolding comes in many forms" ("That Crafty Feeling," Smith 2009, 105). Anglistik, Jahrgang 24 (2013), Ausgabe 1 © 2013 Universitätsverlag WINTER GmbH Heidelberg Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org) THE FEMININE VOICE OF ZADIE SMITH 127 immigrant. In one of the perhaps superfluous and certainly very loquacious digres- sions in White Teeth , the narrator explains: This has been the century of strangers, brown, yellow and white. This has been the cen- tury of the great immigrant experiment. It is only late in the day that you can walk into a playground and find Isaac Leung by the fish pond, Danny Rahman in the football cage, Quang O'Rourke bouncing a basketball, and Irie Jones humming a tune. Children with first and last names on a direct collision course. Names that secrete within them mass exodus, cramped boats and planes, cold arrivals, medical checks. It is only this late in the day, and possibly only in Willesden, that you can find best friends Sita and Sharon, constantly mistaken for each other because Sita is white (her mother liked the name) and Sharon is Pakistani (her mother thought it best – less trouble). Yet, despite all this mixing up, despite the fact that we have finally slipped into each other's lives with reasonable comfort (like a man returning to his lover's bed after a midnight walk), despite all this, it is still hard to admit that there is no one more English than the Indian, no one more Indian than the English. (327) "Zadie," a variant of "Zaida," is originally an Arabic name, meaning "prosperous," whereas "Sadie," as a diminutive of "Sara," has become popular in the 20 th century in Britain and the United States. 5 Thus, the combination of "Zadie" and "Smith" is comparable to the names in White Teeth and creates an identity which has, however, nothing to do with the Jamaican roots of the author but destabilises the Englishness of "Smith" in a way which "Sadie" did not. "Zadie Smith" as author and media persona , thus, represents in nuce what the writer stands for, particularly in the early reception: a female immigrant, hybrid identity in a postcolonial context. Interestingly, this invented identity has begun to have its own peculiar influence: on a website specialising in baby names, Zadie Smith's change of name is commented on: "When aspiring writer Sadie Smith decided to change her name to Zadie at the age of fourteen, this attention-magnet name was born." 6 So, today, babies are apparently named after the author Zadie Smith.
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