by Zadie Smith
It is easy to despise institutions, to feel irritated or constrained by them—I often do, despite a fondness for an ordered existence—but confronted with the style of Cy I felt glad he was at least tethered to an institution, like a red balloon caught in a tree, instead of floating out into the unforgiving city and finding himself deflated in the IT department of a bank or ad agency or some such. I used to see Cy (without him seeing me) from my carrel—bouncing around the library, presumably off to aid someone with an IT issue—and I’d often have the thought that an institution was, in many ways, a strange fit for both. The best we could hope for was that the university might act as a superstructure, like a Gaudí building, accommodating and supporting our curious shapes and styles, and that this institutional cover would fool people into thinking we were something like utilities—and therefore something worth retaining—rather than peculiar manifestations of the spirit, seemingly put on earth to connect one thing to another, and to make said connections smooth, visible and/or usable for others. . . .
But if we are cousins, we are twice or three times removed. Professors can be tenured. IT Guys cannot. The enviable style of the young is little protection against catastrophe. And the infinite promise of American youth—a promise elaborately articulated by movies and advertisements and university prospectuses—has been an empty lie for so long that I notice my students joking about it with a black humor more appropriate to old men, to the veterans of wars. Long before this crisis they were living with little hope of institutional or structural support, contending with perilous futures, untenable debt, fear. When, in the classroom, they insist on their personal styles, in a manner all too easy to find obnoxious—and causing the predictable generational friction—I have to remind myself to remember this: their style is all they have. They are insisting on their existence in a vacuum. A woman in her forties has lived long enough to see the dreams of childhood—hoverboards!—appear in the streets. She has lived long enough to see the social protections of her youth, which had not seemed to her dreams, but rather mundane realities—universal health care, free university education, decent public housing*—all now recast as revolutionary concepts, and thought of, in America (consistently by the right but not infrequently by the left) as badges of radical leftism. What modest dreamers we have become.
But the young man in his twenties is still in peak dreaming season: a thrilling time, an insecure time, even at the best of times. It should be a season full of possibility. Economic, romantic, technological, political, existential possibility. Yes, among all the various relativities to be considered, age is one that can’t be parsed. The style of Cy—the style of all young people—now radically interrupted.
AN ELDER AT THE 98 BUS STOP
Is that Sadie? You don’t remember me, do you? I’m _____’s mum. I don’t think she was in your year, as it goes. . . . Know your mum, tho’! Knew you when you was a baby. I seen your mum not long ago in the High Street, looking well. She didn’t say you was back. Yeah, we’re doing all right. Still Stonebridge, still in the Ends . . .
I had just got off a bus and was heading home, but when someone calls me by my name, by my real name, I listen very closely. I attend to the speaker as to an auntie, as to an elder. And here was an obvious auntie: mighty-bosomed in a V-neck T-shirt she had deliberately taken a pair of scissors to (in order to drastically deepen the décolletage) and wearing a pair of dark indigo jeans, studded with diamanté, skin-tight. “Hugging every curve,” as they say. The whole back line of her body spoke of power and youth, although, by the local coordinates she was giving me—whose cousin knew which sibling’s girlfriend at what time—I understood she must be an elder, even if she didn’t remotely look like one. I took my backpack off and sat down on the paltry four inches of plastic that long ago replaced the sturdy bus-stop benches of my childhood. I got ready to receive whatever was coming. It was a bounty:
You know where I’m headed? Doctor’s. You know why? It’s this bloody menopause.
I sympathized, but as it turned out, I had completely the wrong end of the stick:
Nah, I’m going in there to DEMAND he brings it on! I’m fifty-eight! What am I still doing with periods? This can’t go on no longer! You know when my poor mum got the menopause? Sixty-three years old. And there weren’t no one in Clarendon to bring it on for her. . . . She just had to suffer it. Not me, though, I’m done. I’m walking right in there and DEMANDING he brings it on, right now, because this is just silly business at this point. I got the fear I’m going be one of dem miracle mums on the news! Nah, I’m only teasing you . . . but for real: enough is enough. . . . I want that menopause TODAY. Say hello to your mum for me, yeah? This is me—you not getting on? Oh, OK. I’m heading Cricklewood way. Good to see you. All right, then. Wish me luck!
It’s not often you meet a fertility goddess at the 98 bus stop so she stayed in my mind, as a symbol of a certain uncontained and uncontainable fecundity, a natural abundance, which I suppose I sheepishly connect in my mind with Jamaica, with its residents, its diaspora, bougainvillea, hills, gullies, music, stories. A typical second-generation question to ask yourself: how did all that prior abundance fit into this new habitat? Into these boxy rooms in drab estates, these flats, these flower-free high streets, these narrow, rumbling buses. When you were a child, you looked up at your mother wrapped in gloves and scarf, shivering on the top deck, and tried to conceive of her earlier incarnation: barefoot in a pristine brown-and-yellow uniform, walking towards the one-room schoolhouse—but not too quickly, because of the heat—and stopping every now and then to smell huge, purple flowers. It sounded like impossible nonsense. Yet somehow it was true. Containment is terrible anyway, but how much more frustrating it must be if somewhere in the memory—even if it is only the epigenetic memory—wide-open spaces remain, now utterly out of reach.
When lockdown arrived in England, I thought of this fertility goddess, and of the small flat on the Stonebridge Estate (routinely described, in English news stories, as “the notorious Stonebridge Estate”) that now contained her more tightly than usual, and of course of the larger Willesden maisonette that contained my mother. The strange storytelling of videoconferencing began between my mother and me, where two or three storylines run concurrently—you catch up on the latest every few days—while you simultaneously stare at your own face, a surreal new advance in human conversation that leads to the self-conscious adaptation of one’s own emotional responses in direct response to how you feel they look aesthetically.
My mother’s three stories were:
The PPE situation in her workplace, which, at that moment, was a ward for schizophrenic mothers. (The situation was that there was none.)
Updates on the rest of her family, and
The progress of her half of the garden, which was going splendidly.
Pansies and clematis and magnolia in vibrant array, abundant. Flowersome, as she puts it. And so it went for a few weeks—no PPE, all family still fine, ever more abundant, flowersome garden—until one day, when I asked about my little brother, and my mother began one of those long, confusing chains of local lineage, just as the fertility goddess had six months earlier, about so-and-so who knows oh-you-remember-whatshername, who is the cousin of whosit —
—and anyway, your brother knew her, she was in his year, and her boyfriend killed her last night, in her flat in Stonebridge, poor, poor thing—what? No, no, no, this girl was YOUNG—she was in Luke’s year, you’re not listening to me, you never listen properly. Anyway, this lockdown is driving people crazy, maybe, I don’t know. . . . It’s just so sad. And then he set the flat on fire and it’s been burning all night.
A PROVOCATION IN THE PARK
He was holding up a sign. People hold signs up in the park every day. Sometimes they say FREE HUGS. (Note to pretty Swedish backpackers: they’re not free.) Sometimes they offer a service: tarot reading, personalized poems, a discussion about Palestine,
as in COME ASK ME ABOUT PALESTINE. (Don’t ask him about Palestine.) They can feature existential queries: IS WEALTH THE KEY TO HAPPINESS? OR IS THERE ANOTHER WAY? When it comes to the existential queries, there is a temptation to walk up and engage with the sign and the sign holder, but the sensible park crosser, who doesn’t want to lose hours of their day, forces their curiosity back down and takes the long way around, past the burning questions, onwards to one of the sign-free, non-philosophical exits on the other side of Washington Square. Sometimes, the signs are for the purpose of professional identification: this person works with sand, or bubbles; these four people form a jazz quartet; this is the piano guy. Sometimes they are mass produced and simply feature an arrow pointing this way or that, towards dim sum or cheap photocopies.
I don’t often look at the signs in the park anymore, they are too familiar to bother with, like the rats swarming out of the trash cans the minute the sun goes down. But I have to admit this guy had my attention. He was Asian, his sign was giant, and his message read:
I AM A SELF-HATING ASIAN. LET’S TALK!
Did I read that right? I went out of my way a good ten yards to check it from another angle, as he walked around the fountain. I read that right. Lacking a camera, I laboriously reported this sighting to a few friends through the late-nineties T9 texting system, so that I did not have to be the only witness to it. And I played that pointless city game of tic-tac-diag-no-sis: Mental illness? Irony? TV show? Provocation? Ideology? I go round and round. I can be very dumb about things that seem to others straightforward and obvious. I know, for example, that I am meant to see very clearly that the man who mowed people down in a van on the West Side was an ideological terrorist while the man who mowed people down at the Las Vegas country music festival was “crazy.” But instead I see a category called “the imposition of toxic narrative over phenomena”—the thickness and complexity of which can vary while the fundamental character of the crime remains the same. I have similar questions about murder as “hate crime” and murder as murder. I find it hard to distinguish between forms of hate that have the same consequence. The hatred of women versus the hatred of this particular woman. The statement, The police are investigating this as a hate crime always prompts in me the query: when it comes to murder, what other kind of crime is there? I realize that’s banal but I can’t help it. I think what I resent is not the recognition of a murderer’s motivation—which should never be obscured—but an elevation of importance in what strikes me as the wrong direction. To think of a hate crime as the most uniquely heinous of crimes seems to lend it, in my mind, an undeserved aura of power. I’d rather something else. The police are investigating this crime as an acute abjection. The police are investigating this as a crime pitiful as it is appalling, pathetic as it is monstrous. The hatred of a group qua group is, after all, the most debased and irrational of hatreds, the weakest, the most banal. It shouldn’t radiate a special aura, lifting it into a separate epistemological category. For this is exactly what the killer believes. He believes he did not walk into the church and murder a circle of innocent people, like a murderer, no, he went in there to express his “ideology” through the medium of violence, to commit his “act,” girded by what he flatters himself is a comprehensive philosophy.
Why do we take him at his word? We reprint his self-aggrandizing “ideas” and only as an afterthought wonder whether his brutality is not, at base, the result of a hopeless inadequacy, both personal and social, even despite the fact that we keep on learning of the peculiar coalescence, particularly in young men, of the thought I hate _____ people with thoughts like I can’t get anyone to sleep with me and I feel ugly. But I understand the instinct. The crime is so monstrous it seems impossible the motivation wouldn’t have an equal weight to the lives it took. Yet the philosophy is no such a thing. The special category has no weight. The manifesto is written in blood, and the “ideas” that motivated the killer barely deserve the term. No, the killer took a base urge—hate—and robed it in clichés. The police are investigating a hate robed in clichés, projected outwards. Admittedly, it’s a mouthful.
But I have wandered too far around the park to a strange exit. The Asian man with the sign was not projecting his hate outwards—as his sign made clear. His hatred was all for himself, and yet his sign was by definition low-level aggressive, because it forced all of us passing by to engage with his miserable thought process—as far as we could ascertain it from his sign—making it almost inevitable that we would try to interrogate it and diagnosis it, although none of us had asked for our attention to be thus directed. It was in bad taste, let’s say; it was a bad vibe, and almost everybody who walked past him rolled their eyes, myself included. But he stuck in my mind. Something about the way he walked, the way he moved through the world, suggested that this was no comedy sketch, no ironic comment, but rather a deeply felt provocation, meant to express a genuine thought process. A toxic narrative (to me) but one I had no trouble believing. As I understand it, it is usually considered a form of mental illness to hate oneself disproportionately, but unlike other forms of mental illness—I believe the devil speaks to me, I believe the government is controlled by aliens—we believe the man who tells us he hates himself. Whatever else he is doing, he is telling an awful kind of truth.
The profound misapprehension of reality is what, more or less, constitutes the mental state we used to call “madness,” and when the world itself turns unrecognizable, appears to go “mad,” I find myself wondering what the effect is on those who never in the first place experienced a smooth relation between the phenomena of the world and their own minds. Who have always felt an explanatory gap. The schizophrenic. The disassociated. Does it feel like the world has finally, effectively, “come to you”? That what you have been previously told were solely your own personal pathologies and conspiracies have now become general? What is it like to have always seen, in your mind’s eye, apocalypse in the streets of New York, and then one day walk out into those streets and find—just as it is in your personal hellscape—that they are now desolate, empty and silent?
About a month into lockdown, the man I had seen in the park sent an email to the entire faculty of the university, in which he expanded on his sign, explaining his condition as “ethno-racial dysphoria,” in a lengthy manifesto which, to give it credit, did have some of the aspects of a philosophy, and was full of ideas, albeit very strange ones. That made sense to me: when we are hating ourselves, far more thought is likely to be involved than in the casual hatreds we are prepared to project outwards, towards strangers. In the flurry of panicked administrative institutional emails that followed it was clear that there would be one set of consequences if this was determined to be merely an “ironic” or hate-filled email, and another set of consequences if this was to be considered the product of a mental illness. I was glad it was not my task to decide between these options. Instead of the complex judgment such a decision requires, I was left with the useless thoughts of a novelist: what is it like to have a mind-on-fire at such a moment? Do you feel ever more distant from the world? Or has the world, in its new extremity, finally come to you?
POSTSCRIPT: CONTEMPT AS A VIRUS
You start to think of contempt as a virus. Infecting individuals first, but spreading rapidly through families, communities, peoples, power structures, nations. Less flashy than hate. More deadly. When contempt kills you, it doesn’t have to be a vendetta or even entirely conscious. It can be a passing whim. It’s far more common, and therefore more lethal. “The virus doesn’t care about you.” And likewise with contempt: in the eyes of contempt, you don’t even truly rise to the level of a hated object—that would involve a full recognition of your existence. Before contempt, you are simply not considered as others are, you are something less than a whole person, not quite a complete citizen. Say . . . three fifths of the whole. You are statistical. You are worked around. You are a calculated loss. You have no recourse. You do not represent capital, and the
refore you do not represent power. You are of no consequence. No well-dressed fancy lawyer will come running to the scene to defend you, carrying a slim attaché case, crying, “That’s my client!” You are easily jailed and easily forgotten. The stakes are low. And so: contempt.
In England, we were offered an infuriating but comparatively comic rendering of this virus, in the form of the prime minister’s “ideas man,” Dominic, whose most fundamental idea is that the categorical imperative doesn’t exist. Instead there is one rule for men like him, men with ideas, and another for the “people.” This is an especially British strain of the virus. Class contempt. Technocratic contempt. Philosopher king contempt. When you catch the British strain, you believe the people are there to be ruled. They are to be handled, played, withstood, tolerated—up to a point—ridiculed (behind closed doors), sentimentalized, bowdlerized, nudged, kept under surveillance, directed, used and closely listened to, but only for the purposes of data collection, through which means you harvest the raw material required to manipulate them further. At the press conference, you could see Dominic was riddled with the virus—had been for months. Only his mouth went through the motions. His mouth said that he had driven thirty miles from Durham to Barnard Castle to test his eyesight. The rest of his face was overwhelmed with the usual symptoms, visible to all. Boredom, annoyance, impatience, incredulity. His eyes, refreshed by the driving test, spoke volumes: Why are you bothering me with this nonsense? Contempt. Back in February, “herd immunity” had been a new concept for the people—or that broad cross section of the people who are neither epidemiologists nor regular readers of the New Scientist. But for an ideas man, the phrase must already have felt profoundly familiar, being a seamless continuation of a long-held personal credo. Immunity. From the herd.