The Art of the Impersonal Essay, by Zadie Smith
If it did not stand for me, for example, I would very happily change this shared term, always poorly adjusted “humanism” with something wider, more spacious. A brilliant and brilliant neologism that would always place human development at the center of our social and political processes, but which also included the supremacy of all living beings, including the natural world. As a philosophy, he would remain in the pointed opposition of the current faith in the supremacy of machines and capital. Philoanimism? But the name is not good. (I would be happy to hear alternative options!) We have managed to locate them before, and not so long ago, using language as a compass. For example, the most inspiring political slogan (for me) of the last twenty years has managed to create a common space in a single sentence: “the eighty-nine percent”.
Sometimes, the very act of solidarity research is characterized simply as the pursuit of the “common ground”, an easily denigrated destination as an intermediate apolitical place, nowhere. At other times, he is suspected of being a joyful magic thought area, where people must pretend to be the same and have experienced identical things to work together. I prefer to consider it as “the municipalities”. And when I sit to try, I find it useful to remember the radical historical roots of this concept. I imagine the explosive heath of the 19th century, an open ground which is about to be closed by the forces of the capital, but on which a large crowd gathered, precisely to protest against the future enclosure. But not only that. A variety of overlapping causes are represented in this space, although they are all fundamentally affected by freedom. Abolitionists, suffragists, trade unionists, workers and poor are present in abundance, alongside certain radicals of land reform that you could call socialist Christians and, yes, ok, some old chartists. Plus some anti-Vaxxers, a handful of Jacobites and a few millennia. (This is the problem without fence: anyone can arise.) Today, in the municipalities, all these people have gathered to oppose a common enemy – the landowner – but the argument and the debate are always everywhere, and you, the next speaker to be climbed on the platform, must now decide how to address this huge crowd. You may have a very specific objective in mind: a particular argument, a singular cause, a deep desire to convert or swing. But you are not in your living room, your church, your meeting room or your internet corner. You are on a soap box in the municipalities; Everyone could stand in front of you. Will you be so open and wide to say not much at all? Or so targeted that you speak practically, to talk to yourself? It’s complicated. Rhetoric will certainly be necessary. You will need to warm them before lengthening them. And you can never forget that everything around you is an explosion of otherness: people with their own stories, trauma, memories, hopes, fears. But this multiplicity does not need to change your commitments – it can even intensify them.
Imagine, for example, an abolitionist woman from the beginning of the 19th century, standing in cold weather, listening to a work activist. He pleads to extend the deductible of an property elite – Male, of course – to all the workers, but not once, he does not mention the vote for women. My imaginary abolitionist becomes colder and more angry. But the flashing position of the gentleman could also provoke it in a new form of solidarity, pushing it to become aware for the simple “freedom” of slaves, as it does, is insufficient: its call, too, must include a request for their full exchange. The next time this abolitionist lady rises in the communes, she can find herself more willing to stand on her rectangular box and to establish the link between many forms of privilege, which, although they may seem different, have their crucial points of continuity. After all, one thing of workers, women and almost all slaves had in common, in the commons, was the fact that none of them could vote. (A point of convergence that Robert Wedderburn – Esayist and preacher, and the son of a Jamaican woman in slavery – frequently established.)
What type of discourse can draw such analogies while recognizing and preserving the difference? (A enslaved man is not in the same situation as a laborious peasant.) What type of language will model and leave the possibility of solidarity open, even if it is solidarity of the most pragmatic and most temporal type? The speaker will have to be open, clear, somewhat clever. They will have to be relatively succinct, which makes their argument in more than six sections. Their speech will be passionate but expansive, and I think that it helps a little elegance, allowing the arguments to slip directly in front of the usual defenses of the listener, although this shift – like a duck crossing a pond – generally implies a lot of frantic paddling at the bottom, right next to the view. A complex performance, then. Because the crowd is complicated. Because life is complicated. Any test that understands the line “it’s really very simple” will never be the test for me. Nothing on human life is simple. Not aesthetic, not politics, not sex, not race, not history, not memory, not on love.
“Essay” is, of course, trying. My version of trying involves expressing ideas in a fairly open mode, I hope that readers feel that they are trying them next to me. While I try, I also try to remain committed (and engaging) but impersonal, because although the staff is certainly interesting and human and lively, it also seems to me somewhat narrow and private and partial. Therefore, the word “we” appears in my trials quite frequently. It is not because I imagine that I speak for many, or that I expect my opinions to be applied to all, but because I am looking for the field of field where this “us” is applicable. Because once you have found this ideal place, you can build there. It is the existentialist of my office which is best placed to find this place. She says to herself: Almost All the people I know (and myself) felt pain. And absolutely All the people I know (and myself) will die.
These two facts, one almost total and the other universal, represent the firmer “we” that I know, and I have occupied my imagination since I was a teenager. It was the moment when the fact that we were all first, which was the subject of pain, and seemed to be perfectly obvious, for example, that the death penalty was a monstrosity, and a prison generally a conceptual error, in which the most common crime was poverty. It was only when I arrived at the university that I met people who, confronted with the same fundamental facts – death, death – had come to what they considered as perfectly reasonable but very different conclusions. I met people who believed in such a thing that “criminal mentality”. I met people who thought that poverty was mainly a sign of laziness or a lack of ambition. What appeared once it has become simple, which has become complex. My beliefs remained, but the idea they were or should be “perfectly obvious” for everyone – this is what was evaporated.
Aside from the fact that I never wanted to be essayist in the first place, a detail that surprised me the most in the past twenty years is that I actually written more personally in the form of a test than what I expected or I thought. However, looking at my “I”, through so many tests, I notice that the person who hits this “I” remains very difficult to define, even for me. To start, it is never quite the same “I” that type the word “I”, because of the time that works. Because of the way life is. I was, for example, very single and very married. I was poor, middle class and rich. I loved women, I loved men, but I didn’t like anyone for their genre specifically – it has always been a consequence of who they were. Sometimes I sat at my office dressed like Joan Crawford. Other times, like someone who came to repair your sink. I sat there completely without children, then very full of children, or with a child in a Moses basket at my feet. I was the mother of a British citizen and then the mother of an American. As a semi-public person, I was the subject of various projections and I looked at the unrecognizable versions of “me” circulating in the digital sphere, far beyond my will. But I also remain who and what I have always been: a black biracial woman, born in the northwest corner of London, with a Jamaican mother and an English father. Personally, I feel like a stranger who does not belong anywhere – and I never really believed in this fact – but in the municipalities of my tests, I understand that many or even most of my readers feel the opposite of this thorny question of “belonging”, so I often try to write the types of sentences that also remember this key fact.
If my own “I” remains a diverse thing – as I wrote too often – it is its very variety that forces me to recognize the points of continuity: the fundamentals. What I honestly believe as a human being. Each version of me is a pacifist. Each version believes that human life is sacred – despite the fact that the word “sacred” is most often used as a weapon in the arguments of the conservatives, and remains fundamentally inadmissible in the four ismes that have done the most to train me. (But it is a novelist for you. We cannot work alone on the Ismes.) Each version of me knows that education, health care, housing, drinking water and sufficient foods are rights and not privileges, and should be provided within a common which is itself assured beyond the whims of the market. However, to say these things is (in my opinion) really say the bare minimum: he says almost nothing at all. The only meaning of these beliefs, for me, when I try, is that they are almost irremovable, and that I review a film, describing a painting, arguing an point or considering an idea, they represent the solid sides of my fucking rectangle, regardless of the title in the center. ♦
