Feel Free

by Zadie Smith

  Ted and Jean never called Dad by his Indian name, Haroon Amir. He was always “Harry” to them, and they spoke of him as Harry to other people. It was bad enough his being an Indian in the first place, without having an awkward name too.

  It’s a funny idea, and familiar, now, as a comic trope—but Kureishi was the first to note it. He saw that the highest compliment a white Englishman can give himself is the assertion that he is “color-blind,” by which he means he has been able to overlook the fact of your color—to look past it—to the “you” beneath. Not content with colonizing your country, he now colonizes your self. So, anyway, ran the new dogma, in 1990, but rereading the novel you remember that Karim questions the blanket application of this liberal piety, too. Here he is considering his cousin Jamila’s relationship with a teacher at her school:

  Jamila thought Miss Cutmore really wanted to eradicate everything that was foreign in her. “She spoke to my parents as if they were peasants,” Jamila said. She drove me mad by saying Miss Cutmore had colonized her, but Jamila was the strongest-willed person I’d met: no one could turn her into a colony. Anyway, I hated ungrateful people. Without Miss Cutmore, Jamila wouldn’t have even heard the word “colony.” “Miss Cutmore started you off,” I told her.

  For Karim, what passes between black and white people is never quite black and white. In the case of Miss Cutmore and Jamila, it turns out colonization and genuine education may indeed have some overlap; in the case of his white uncle and Indian father, the essentially racist concept of “color-blindness” and real human affection are able to coexist, too. Readers who prefer their ideologies delivered straight—and straight-faced—will find Buddha a frustrating read. To Kureishi the world is weird and various, comic and tragic. If this mixed reality can’t always be fully admitted while standing on soapboxes, sitting in parliament, or marching down Whitehall, it should at least be allowed an existence in novels. There’s a sharp section of Buddha where the old argument between politics and art—the problem of “responsibility”—is dramatized. Karim is an actor in a radical drama group, and has chosen, as his subject, to play a version of his own uncle, Anwar, who is on hunger-strike, for the purpose of forcing his daughter, Jamila, into an arranged marriage. Tracey, a black female actress in the group, objects to the portrayal:

  “Two things, Karim,” she said to me. “Anwar’s hunger-strike worries me. What you want to say hurts me. It really pains me! And I’m not sure that we should show it!”

  “Really?”

  “Yes.” She spoke to me as if all I required was a little sense. “I’m afraid it shows black people –”

  “Indian people –”

  “Black and Asian people –”

  “One old Indian man –”

  “As being irrational, ridiculous, as being hysterical. And as being fanatical.”

  “Fanatical? [. . .] It’s not a fanatical hunger-strike. It’s calmly intended blackmail.”

  Such light, comic work is made here of several well-meaning debates of the eighties, battlegrounds of racial categorization and alliance, language, political responsibility. I don’t think Tracey is exactly wrong, she is trying to be responsible—but Karim is on the side of irresponsibility, and needs to be, in order to tell his story. Tracey’s arguments belong to another sphere. She may win the argument but fiction can’t be written to comply with winning arguments. Tracey continues: “Your picture is what white people already think of us. Why do you hate yourself and all black people so much, Karim?” It’s a familiar, crushing double admonition, and so many aspiring “minority” artists have crumbled before it. The first part means, basically: Don’t wash “our” dirty laundry in public. The second: “For beware, if you do, you are then a Self-hating _____” (fill in the blank). Bellow was told the same thing; Roth, too. And Zora Neale Hurston. Once upon a time they even said it to Joyce, back when the Irish were thought of as a “minority” rather than as a poetic stand-in for all humanity. Writers with a sense of humor seem to get these warnings more than most, perhaps because irresponsibility is an essential element of comic writing. Some, like Karim, try a high-minded argument against responsibility (“Truth has a higher value”) and find it knocked down easily, as Tracey rightly knocks it down here, critiquing its abstract tone and specious subjectivity (“Pah. Truth. Who defines it? What truth? It’s white truth you’re defending here”). But there is another truth, particular to writers, that in order to work with any effectiveness you will have to abandon, at least for a time, these familiar battles. If you want to create that “one old Indian man,” you will have to take liberties, you will have to feel free to write as you like, even if Tracey is right, even if it is irresponsible. All the great energy of Buddha comes from watching the liberty of creative freedom being taken, over and over again—as if it were a right—without too much concern for what that (perhaps entirely imagined) unified group called “white people” will think about it.

  In the memory Buddha is a lot about race. In the rereading it’s actually far more concerned with what Karim’s director, Pyke, calls “the only subject there is in England”—class. Again right and left get an equal satirical poke. To his fellow actor—and committed Marxist—Terry, Karim has this to say: “I wanted to tell him that the proletariat of the suburbs did have a strong class feeling. It was virulent and hate-filled and directed entirely at the people beneath them.” On a posh girl called Eleanor, also from the group: “She always did whatever occurred to her, which was, admittedly, not difficult for someone in her position, coming from a background where the risk of failure was minimal; in fact, you had to work hard to fail in her world.” My favorite example is when Boyd, another white actor in the group, who has watched Karim’s rise through the ranks, falls into a well of self-pity and spite: “If I weren’t white and middle class I’d have been in Pyke’s show now. Obviously mere talent gets you nowhere these days. Only the disadvantaged are going to succeed in seventies England.” When I first read this, in 1990, it seemed to be absurdist parody. Twenty-five years later we can read similar sentiments all day long on the Internet, as armies of Boyds gather under any article online concerning brown-skinned artists and their works. Here—as in so many matters of English life—Kureishi has proved a kind of seer. And hugely influential for a generation of writers, me included, of course. What he gave us most of all was a sense of irresponsibility, of freedom, in the smallest things as well as the biggest:

  Auntie Jean really knew how to give you frightening looks, so much so that I found myself struggling to suppress a fart that needed to be free [. . .] But it was no use. The naughty fart bubbled gaily out of me.

  This is a naughty, bubbly book. It says things frankly and with delight. Nothing is agonizing to Karim, really—not race, class or sex—it’s all interesting, it’s all worth talking about, without shame, and without making heavy weather of it either:

  It was unusual, I knew, the way I wanted to sleep with boys as well as girls. I liked strong bodies and the backs of boys’ necks. I liked being handled by men, their fists pulling me; and I liked objects—the end of brushes, pens, fingers—up my arse. But I liked cunts and breasts, all of women’s softness, long smooth legs and the way women dressed. I felt it would be heart-breaking to have to choose one or the other, like having to decide between The Beatles and The Rolling Stones.

  It’s all a little naughty—but is it nice? The novel itself is preoccupied with the question. “I thought about the difference between the interesting people and the nice people,” writes Karim, “and how they can’t always be identical.” When it comes to writing and acting Karim is concerned not only with the political risk (which might, as Jamila puts it, “expose our culture as being ridiculous and our people as old-fashioned, extreme and narrow-minded”) but of the personal risk, which—as every novelist knows—involves hurting the people you love. The Buddha of Suburbia is, among other things, a first novel and a Bildungsroman, and that form usuall
y plays fast and loose with authorial experience. Real uncles and aunts are combined into one paper person, siblings change sex, living parents die, and so on. For his part, Karim stridently defends his right to base a dramatic character on his brother-in-law, Changez, but he also—perhaps not entirely consciously—reveals the deep psychological peculiarity that compels him to do so:

  There were few jobs I relished as much as the invention of Changez/Tariq [. . .] I uncovered notions, connections, initiatives I didn’t even know were present in my mind. I became more energetic and alive as I brushed in new colours and shades. I worked regularly and kept a journal; I saw that creation was an accretive process which couldn’t be hurried, and which involved patience and, primarily, love. I felt more solid myself, and not as if my mind were just a kind of cinema for myriad impressions and emotions to flicker through. [my italics]

  It’s what I believe actors and writers have in common: this personal sense of immateriality that becomes, perversely, more solid when they pretend to be someone else. Karim notices this tendency himself early on, long before he is an actor, in his sexual passion for his stepbrother, Charlie:

  My love for him was unusual as love goes: it was not generous. I admired him more than anyone but I didn’t wish him well. It was that I preferred him to me and wanted to be him. I coveted his talents, face, style. I wanted to wake up with them all transferred to me.

  It’s not nice. But it is interesting. And funny. In Buddha cruelty, humor and affection work hand in hand to make character, and even the smallest walk-on part is brought to sharp, momentary life by means of this potent mixture. I love Karim’s poor uncle Ted, DIY genius and clinical depressive, and the way Kureishi makes us both care for and laugh at him, in the space of a paragraph:

  “He can talk and work at the same time, can’t he?” said Dad as Ted, sometimes in tears, inserted rawl-plugs into brick as he made a shelf for Dad’s Oriental books, or sanded a door, or tiled the bathroom in exchange for Dad listening to him from an aluminum garden chair. “Don’t commit suicide until you’ve finished that floor, Ted,” he’d say.

  At the time Kureishi’s first novel was celebrated for possessing the same punk spirit that the novel itself documents, but there are many quieter moments, too, of elegant and beautiful prose, which rereading reveals. Here is Karim on his mother, whose one outlet from domestic drudgery is her sketching: “Her mind had turned to glass, and all life slid from its sheer aspect. I asked her to draw me.” That could be Woolf. And this could be Forster: “So this was London at last, and nothing gave me more pleasure than strolling around my new possession all day. London seemed like a house with five thousand rooms, all different; the kick was to work out how they connected, and eventually walk through all of them.” Karim is making the new out of the old. Keats and Shelley and Donne are nestled in these pages, and the shadow of Kipling, and the even longer shadow of Dickens. Karim’s own new angle is that he’s, well, Karim: he’s got a different walk, a different talk, a fresh sensibility. He knows perfectly well he’s the kind of kid never before seen between the covers of an English novel, and like any smart-arse kid from the suburbs he’s going to use that and everything else. When he finds himself cast as Mowgli in his first big role, he knows it’s ludicrous—but it’s still a break. “I’ve found my little Mowgli at last,” says the director:

  “An unknown actor, just right and ready to break through [. . .] Isn’t he terrific?” The two women examined me. I was just perfect. I’d done it. I’d got the job.

  The job, of course, is the job of the exotic. But like Bellow, Roth, Hurston and Joyce before him, Kureishi sees, in this role, more comedy—and opportunity—than tragedy. Karim is nobody’s victim. And though it is certainly often tiring and usually offensive when people mistake you for such cultural types as the “Comical Urban Jew” or the “Soulful Black Woman” or the “Mystic Indian,” Kureishi’s point in Buddha is that it can also be very amusing. From the point of view of our twenty-first-century world where the only possible reaction to anything seems to be outraged offense, I find it a relief to go back to that more innocent, hardier time, when we were not all such delicate flowers that every man’s casual idiocy had the awesome power to offend us to our very cores. “To be truly free,” argues Karim, “we had to free ourselves of all bitterness and resentment, too. How was this possible when bitterness and resentment were generated afresh every day?” In Buddha this remains an open and unanswered question, for Karim is both free and not free at the same time. For him England is, in so many ways, impossible—but it is also his playground. Both versions of his experience are true. That is the great discomfort and irresponsible charm of this lovely, funny, honest novel.

  NOTES ON NW

  What’s this novel about?* My books don’t seem to me to be about anything other than the people in them and the sentences used to construct them. Which makes NW sound like an “exercise in style,” a phrase you generally hear people using as an insult of one kind or another. But to me, an “exercise in style” is not a superficial matter—our lives are also an exercise in style. The hidden content of people’s lives proves a very hard thing to discern: all we really have to go on are these outward, manifest signs, the way people speak, move, dress, treat each other. And that’s what I try to concern myself with in fiction: the way of things in reality, as far as I am able to see and interpret them, which may not be especially far.

  When I was writing this novel what I really wanted to do was create people in language. To do that you must try to do justice simultaneously to the unruly, subjective qualities of language, and to what I want to call the concrete “thingyness” of people. Which was Virginia Woolf’s way of being a modernist—she loved language and people simultaneously—and her model is important to me. I admire Beckett and respect Joyce. I love Woolf. Whenever the going gets tough I reread her journals and it helps me through.

  What inspired this novel? Two seeds seem important, one involving thingyness and the other, language. Sometime in 2004 a girl in distress came to my door, a stranger, and asked me for help. Said she needed money—so I gave it to her. Later I found out that it was probably a scam of some sort. A lot of questions followed from this in my mind. Was the girl really desperate? Was I a fool to give her the money? But wouldn’t you have to be really desperate to come up with such a scam? The episode, tiny as it was, stayed with me. It became a fruitful sort of problem—connecting with ideas I’d had for a long time about class and desperation and ethics—and eight years later a whole novel sprung from it.

  The other inspiration was textual, and subconscious: Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure. I’ve always loved the “problem play” as a form, which I think of as a situation in which not everyone ends up happy and married, nor everyone bleeding or dead. Problem plays seem closest to the mixed reality of our lives. “Some rise by sin, and some by virtue fall”—that line is embedded deep in NW. I’d almost finished the book before I realized it. And with this realization came the submerged memory that years ago, as a teenager, I was taken by my school to see an unusual performance of Measure for Measure in which the actor playing Claudio was a young black man and the woman playing his sister, Isabella, the nun, was white. And when Isabella tried to convince Claudio that he should let himself be executed rather than ask her to give up her precious virginity, I was more struck by that scene than anything I’ve seen onstage either before or since. I’ve never forgotten it, neither the words, nor its staging. There was poor Claudio alone, at the back of the stage, in prison for much of the play, while the rest of the characters were busy downstage, seeking their happy endings. I can remember thinking: Yes, that’s right. The happy ending is never universal. Someone is always left behind. And in the London I grew up in—as it is today—that someone is more often than not a young black man.

  One last thing: writing this novel reminded me that a writer should not undervalue any tool of her trade just because she finds it easier to use th
an the others. As you get older you learn not to look a gift horse in the mouth. If I have any gift at all it’s for dialogue—that trick of breathing what-looks-like-life into a collection of written sentences. Voices that come from nowhere and live on in our consciousness, independent of real people . . . It’s this magic, first learned in the playroom, that we can never quite shake off, and which any true lover of fiction carries within him or her somewhere. Isn’t it better to die than to live in shame? asks the voice called Isabella of the voice called Claudio. And the voice called Claudio replies: “Ay, but to die, and go we know not where;/To lie in cold obstruction and to rot . . .” Over four hundred years after these words were written they are still my first thought whenever I hear of anyone dying or when I consider the inevitable event for myself. It really is a sort of magic. I like writing that makes you hear voices. In this case, for this author, the very different voices of Leah, Felix, Natalie and Nathan.