Intimations

Zadie Smith’s new book is both slight and capacious. Intimations: six essays is just 81 pages long in small format paperback, but into these pages Smith packs an enormous amount. It is a book of the moment, written out of the intensity of the recent extraordinary months, weaving together the personal and the political (not that they can be distinguished at times). In the Foreword Smith writes that 

These are above all personal essays: small by definition, short by necessity.

But her reach is long and certainly not ‘small’: the pandemic, of course, with all the ways it has twisted our existence, and, associated with it, the George Floyd murder and Black Lives Matter.  In the ferocious ‘Postscript: Contempt as a Virus’ the ‘virus’ is racism, as she explores its apparently ineradicable manifestations in America (‘Patient zero of this particular virus stood on a slave-ship four hundred years ago’):

I used to think there would one day be a vaccine: that if enough black people named the virus, explained it, demonstrated how it operates, videoed its effects … we might finally reach some kind of herd immunity. I don’t think that any more.

The final piece is composed of 26 shards called ‘Debts and Lessons’, naming her parents, friends, writers and singers who she is indebted to, and culminating in the brilliant ‘Contingency’. But I am also drawn to Number 5, Mr Rainbow, a teacher:

Joy and rigour were the same thing: if the whole choir was to get the benefit of ‘Bali Hai’ it would be by martial attention to each part of the whole.

Joy and rigour, martial attention: what all of us who are teachers must aim for.