Feminist rating 5.0 Okay, so when I reviewed The Handmaid’s Tale, I said you couldn’t really get a 5-star rating on feminism and the portrayal of women. But I’m giving Swing Time 5-stars because of Zadie Smith’s incredible depiction of the mother-daughter relationship in all its flaws and beauty and because her cast of wonderfully and tragically flawed women speaks as a testimony to the fullness of the female character. This novel certainly doesn’t present women as two-dimensional objects, but as fully-fleshed, strong, courageous, conniving, powerful, powerless, malicious, wonderful, normal people.
“And I became fixated, too, upon Katharine Hepburn’s famous Fred and Ginger theory: He gives her class, she gives him sex. Was this a general rule? Did all friendships—all relations—involve this discreet and mysterious exchange of qualities, this exchange of power? Did it extend to peoples and nations or was it a thing that happened only between individuals? What did my father give my mother – and vice versa? What did I give Tracey? What did Tracey give me?”
Swing Time, Zadie Smith
Swing Time takes its name from the classic movie starring Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire, a coupling in which Zadie Smith’s unnamed narrator traces the influence of West African dance traditions on through decades of dance. Simply put, it is a story about two brown girls, the narrator and Tracey, who meet at a dance class and become friends. Their relationship is full of uncomfortably comfortable displays of power and manipulation, mostly on the part of Tracey, who is the more gifted dancer of the two. But more broadly, Smith’s novel reads as a memoir, reflecting on culture, class, poverty and inherited trauma.
Tracey and the narrator both live in inter-racial and inter-cultural families growing up in council-owned flats in London. Yet as Smith reflects on themes of poverty and forging a cultural heritage in mixed race families, the magnificent ambiguity of the narrative voice allows such considerations of poverty and power, class and culture to remain relative. Within the first few chapters alone, Smith reveals much of the tumultuous relationship between the narrator and her Jamaican mother, a fierce and uncompromising autodidact with high middle-class aspirations and dreams of a real political career. And much of the difference and distance between the two friends is explored through the lens of this aspirational mother. The narrator’s mother makes no secret of her distaste for Tracey and Tracey’s mother, of whom she is highly critical. In doing so, Smith writes two very different futures for the friends even as they grow up: one remaining in poverty, the other entering into a high-flying world in which she does not feel entirely comfortable.
The novel moves between the narrator’s childhood and her later career as personal assistant to a world-famous singer, Aimee, who is taken with the idea of an NGO project in Gambia. The narrator’s reflections on the project, a school for girls, and the issues that arise from Aimee’s lack of cultural sensitivity allow for poignant revelations about the narrator’s own outsider status. There is certainly something about the project that shows Aimee’s ‘white saviour’ complex and makes for an uncomfortable read. The magnificently ambiguous narrative style allows for the reader to assume the narrator perhaps hopes to gain some sense of belonging to the people of the village as she reflects on the nature of her ‘tribe,’ her people. Yet, like so many of us in the West, the narrator too displays her own cultural insensitivity from the very first moment she joins the project – asking what the country is like, meaning ‘Africa’ as a homogenous culture.
We continue to cringe and dwell in our own discomfort as the narrative proceeds to explore the rise of diaspora tourism in West African regions – Senegal and Gambia. At one point, the narrator undertakes a guided tour of the prison where slaves were held prior to sailing to the Americas. Again, the masterful narrative style allows us to glimpse something of what the narrator hopes for – some degree of catharsis, understanding or pain – without delivering, perhaps to drive home the impact of centuries worth of structural oppression, pain and torture in the West African diaspora.
“Power had preyed on weakness here: all kinds of power—local, racial, tribal, royal, national, global, economic—on all kinds of weakness, stopping at nothing, not even at the smallest girl child. But power does that everywhere. The world is saturated in blood. Every tribe has their blood-soaked legacy: here was mine. I waited for whatever cathartic feeling people hope to experience in such places, but I couldn’t make myself believe the pain of my tribe was uniquely gathered here, in this place, the pain was too obviously everywhere, this just happened to be where they’d placed the monument.”
Swing Time, Zadie Smith
Throughout each segment of the narrator’s memoir, we meet characters that burn fiercely on the page, most of them women: Aimee, the diva popstar with her headstrong ways; the narrator’s mother with her determination not just to rise, but to take her daughter with her, and, of course, the irrepressible, talented, frustrated and often vindictive Tracey. But the remarkable feat of Swing Time is to write a narrative voice that is masterful in its ambiguity, painting the narrator as an entirely unremarkable character, one who often doesn’t act and who certainly doesn’t burn fiercely like those around her. In many ways, this is the icing on the cake for Swing Time. The weakness or core indecisiveness of the narrator makes Tracey and Aimee all the bolder by comparison.
Even so, there are moments of brilliant clarity in the narrative voice that speaks volumes to the parts of this narrator that we do not see. In particular, the passages on power and education catch the reader unawares as they are the first few glimpses of a passionate and rebellious narrator that speak clearly with her voice. Her decision to deliberately fail the entrance exam of an independent school appeals directly to the carefully crafted sense that she does not fit the same picture of struggle as her mother – the narrator cannot easily fit herself into the raging sense of injustice that her Jamaican mother uses to encourage her to rise. It is in these moments of difference and expectation that Smith gently strips away our notions of what it means to be of mixed race and to belong simultaneously to two cultures and fit wholly with neither of them.
This powerful coming-of-age story has a lot to roar about. But instead, Swing Time gently reveals the challenges and expectations of class, race, culture and poverty on a sweeping tour of West African diaspora heritage. By dwelling in masterful ambiguity, the narrative voice speaks deeper to the reader than it would with rage and horror alone, making Swing Time a captivating and compelling read.
Overall rating 5.0 I couldn’t get enough of this novel’s amazing characters – not that you necessarily like any of them! But that’s what’s remarkable about Zadie Smith’s first first-person novel, even as I cringed at the characters’ bad behaviour, their insecurities and insensitivities, I recognised them as real people and ones that, by the end, I felt that I knew intimately, whilst also knowing the scope of the parts of them that were knowable.
scribblinginthemargins 