Emotional space – Zadie Smith

“I have a very messy and chaotic mind” – says Zadie Smith.

She is the vital literary voice in our messy and chaotic globalized world.

Jamaican in the Great Britain, writer, mother and female.

Zadie’s philosophy is that the past is always tense, but the future is perfect.

One of her greatest regret is not being able to live two completely different lives simultaneously.

One of her biggest passion is English language and the most treasured possession is rhetoric.

Smith’s formula of perfect happiness could be “reading quietly, in high grass, among loved ones ( who are quietly reading). Followed by a boozy lunch”.

In her childhood, her mother suggested her to read black American fiction and her best reading experiences were with Toni Morrison and Alice Walker.

 But not only …:

“Off the top of my head, I was reading a lot of Victorian fiction and everything on my mother’s shelves.

I was reading a lot of inappropriate books like Our Bodies, Ourselves and various kinds of feminist fiction that she had.

My mom had this very eclectic bookshelf, partly because she wasn’t particularly educated herself and neither was my father, but they had an idea that if they bought books with penguins on the spine this was a sign of quality, so they would go to car-boot sales, et cetera, and buy these books”

Zadie didn’t like to think of Africa as a sentimental concept or a symbol of homeland.

 She had this very strong line with herself that this was a continent of many countries with different histories and she couldn’t connect with it just because she wanted there to be one.

Her personal education was in things like Aristotle’s idea of rhetoric through Ethos, Pathos and Logos.

“Ethos appeals to ethics, Pathos appeals to emotion and Logos appeals to logic.

I realize we’re living in an age where people feel that pathos is all you need when you make an argument—as in, ‘I feel it, and so it is true.’

However, an argument is not just emotion.

You can feel something with incredible strength, but that’s not enough.

It’s not true just because I feel it to be true.

That world is chaos in my opinion.”

While she was in Cambridge, Zadie started writing her bestselling boom “White Teeth”, satirical multicultural and multigenerational story about two families.

“White Teeth” won three first novel awards: the Whitbread, the Commonwealth, and the Guardian. It was translated into more than twenty languages, and sold over a million copies.

Reading her vibrant novels ( “Swing time”,”NW”,  “On Beauty” etc.)  we are faced with the growing up in the globalized world where cross- generational and cross- cultural issues are dominant.

For her, writing 3,000 words about something you don’t really like could be a torture and real disaster.

What is the very reason for Zadie Smith to become a writer?

It’s so simple: “The very reason I write is so that I might not sleepwalk through my entire life”

Writing could be like a gas that will fill up every corner of  the life if you let it.

But Smith’s  challenge is not letting it.

“Our challenge is remembering that sometimes it’s nice to go outside or go see an exhibition or just get on the floor and build Magna-Tile towers with the children.”

You can read more interesting stories here.