Feel Free: Essays by Zadie Smith

Abstract

Reviewed by: Feel Free: Essays by Zadie Smith Haley Crigger (bio) Zadie Smith, Feel Free: Essays (Penguin Press, 2018) 464 pp. In the forward to her new book of essays, Feel Free, Zadie Smith insists: “I have no real qualifications to write as I do.” She then offers a catalogue of the many things she is not—philosopher, sociologist, political scientist, music critic, etc. This disclaimer does not stop her, however, from venturing into these realms. Part One, titled “In the World,” examines a number of current political issues, from global warming, to Brexit, to London’s gentrification, and it’s clear that her political compass points left. Compassion and social equality are the foundations of her political ideology, though she has asserted publically that she is “not an activist.” But Smith’s humility is neither false nor forced, despite her repeated claims at a recent [End Page 151] appearance in Washington, DC, that she is “in all ways inauthentic.” Still, her statements on that occasion carried the ring of committed engagement: “What’s going on [in Washington] doesn’t deserve the term conservatism; it’s terrorism.” “‘Guns don’t kill people; people kill people.’ One of the most profoundly illogical statements I have ever heard. It’s stupid on a level that is evil.” “There are different kinds of freedoms, and the freedom to think is the only one I really have.” The range of topics she covers in Feel Free is dizzyingly vast—from Brexit, to Facebook, to puppets, to Key & Peele, to toilets—but she repeatedly approaches her subjects through a particular philosophical lens: none of us is quite who we express ourselves to be. In “Fences: a Brexit Diary,” and partly in “On Hope and Despair,” two essays that appear in the collection’s first section, Smith unapologetically criticizes the infamous 2016 referendum that has set the United Kingdom on the path of withdrawal from the European Union. Smith’s thesis is not unique: the social binary— “Us” versus “Them”—is a false and ineffective one. Released in the second year of the Trump presidency, the national polarity expressed in Feel Free is all too familiar to an American audience. As Smith says, the “profound shock” many of us experienced “suggests at the very least that we must have been living behind a veil, unable to see our own country for what it has become.” Often, this sentiment is used to further entrench the separation: How could they do such a thing? Herein lies half of the illusion: there is no Them. The idea that there is a “Them,” a homogenous, hive-minded “Other,” is utterly divorced from reality. Responding to the problem while blinded by this misconception, she suggests, is ineffectual at best, catastrophic at worst. The Leavers (like those who voted for Trump) “had a wide variety of motives for their vote, and much of the Remain camp was similarly splintered.” Smith admits that she is far removed from Leavers in her country, which is the essence of a problem. As evidence for the multitudinous reasons Leavers could have had, she resorts to citing a secondhand conversation in which a “fellow north London leftist” explained to a friend’s mother that she “had voted Leave in order ‘to get rid of that bloody health secretary!’” All of this to say, of course, not all Leavers are rabid with racism and xenophobia; their motives are more complex. And Smith, at the moment of crisis, was not close enough with any of “Them” to arrive at this understanding. What’s refreshing about Smith’s approach is that the exercise in empathy is neither overly emotional nor strictly anthropological. She maintains that the ultimate decision, the vote to leave the European Union, was a very bad one. Despite the multifarious motivations behind the decision, despite also wanting to get rid of “that bloody health secretary,” Jeremy Hunt, “a referendum turns out to be a very ineffective hammer for a thousand crooked nails.” Here is where Smith’s exercise in empathy becomes something more than an exercise, a practical yet very human deconstruction of identity politics. Each side has been equally divisive and [End Page 152] self-interested...