I wrote ‘White Teeth’ in the late nineties. I didn’t really feel trepidatious about it. It was a different time.
I think I was strange to my mother and to my father, a changeling belonging to neither one of them, and although this is of course true of all children, in the end – we are not our parents and they are not us – my father’s children would have come to this knowledge with a certain slowness, over years... whereas I was born knowing it, I have always known it, it is a truth stamped all over my face.
She was that age. Whatever she said burst like genius into centuries of silence. Whatever she touched was the first stroke of its kind. Whatever she believed was not formed by faith but carved from certainty. Whatever she thought was the first time such a thought had ever been thunk.
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.
But like a lot of people whose vocation it is to change the world he proved to be, in person, outrageously petty.
To the suffering person, suffering is solely suffering. It is only for others, as a symbol, that suffering takes on any meaning or purpose. No one ever got lynched and thought, Well, at least this will lead inexorably to the civil rights movement. They just shook, suffered, screamed, and died. Pain is the least symbolic thing there is.
The Social Network is not a cruel portrait of any particular real world person called Mark Zuckerberg. It’s a cruel portrait of us: 500 million sentient people entrapped in the recent careless thoughts of a Harvard sophomore.
The way he understood the world was so genuinely alien to me that it felt as if he occupied a parallel reality, which I didn’t doubt was the real one, but which I couldn’t ‘speak to,’ to use a favorite phrase of his.
Here’s the funny thing about literary criticism: it hates its own times, only realizing their worth twenty years later. And then, twenty years after that, it wildly sentimentalizes them, out of nostalgia for a collective youth. Condemned cliques become halcyon “movements” annoying young men, august geniuses.
Race. Land. Ownership. Faith. Theft. Blood. And more blood. And more. And.
She was motivated by something else: impatience. To Aimee poverty was one of the world’s sloppy errors, one among many, which might be easily corrected if only people would bring to the problem the focus she brought to everything.
It was like tag, but a girl was never “It,” only boys were “It,” girls simply ran and ran until we found ourselves cornered in some quiet spot, away from the eyes of dinner ladies and playground monitors, at which point our knickers were pulled aside and a little hand shot into our vaginas, we were roughly, frantically tickled, and then the boy ran away, and the whole thing started up again from the top.
What was amazing about the apartments of long-standing adults was the accumulation of incidental texture. Not: I went and bought this lamp and this poster so I would have a lamp and a poster to furnish my life. But just stuff, so much stuff everywhere, somehow the consequence of a certain amount of time on earth.
Yet a world in which no one, from policymakers to adolescents, can imagine themselves as abject corpses – a world consisting only of thrusting, vigorous men walking boldly out of frame – will surely prove a demented and difficult place in which to live. A world of illusion.
Yes, yes, many months ago. But your mother is someone who will always be in my life. She’s not the kind of person who leaves your life when she’s in it. Anyway, when someone you care about gets ill, all the other business... it just goes.
But it’s my sense that no matter how many rooms you have, and however many books and movies and songs declaim the wholesome beauty of family life, the truth is “the family” is always an event of some violence. It’s only years later, in that retrospective swirl, that you work out who was hurt, in what way, and how badly.
A tap runs fast the first time you switch it on.
Poor Zora – she lived through footnotes.
I am fascinated to presume, as a reader, that many types of people, strange to me in life, might be revealed, through the intimate space of fiction, to have griefs not unlike my own. And so I read.
She was never home. Irie was stuck between a rock and a hard place, like Ireland, like Israel, like India.
It’s a shadow life and after a while it gets to you. Nannies, assistants, agents, secretaries, mothers – women are used to it. Men have a lower tolerance.