Paige Thomas

A Tilt Toward Meaning

Zadie Smith’s Intimations, essays about and writing during a pandemic

I am reading a collection of essays written about—written during—a global pandemic. I am reading this collection in, what I can only consider to be, the new middle of the same global pandemic that the collection is written in response to. Months separate the collection’s publication date, late July 2020, from when I sit down to read it after the sun has set again at an absurdly early hour, a few days before the end of the year. The collection begins with a foreword. It begins with the statement: “There will be many books written about the year 2020: historical, analytical, political, as well as comprehensive accounts. This is not any of those.” Less than one hundred pages long and only six essays, Intimations by Zadie Smith, is written from the middle of a moment that is still happening, a moment that has become an entire year, and stretching longer, that is becoming horribly more normal. The US death toll on July 27th, 2020, the date Smith’s collection was published: 148,076. The US death toll today, December 17th, 2020: 308,000.

To intimate, is to make something known, but it is important to remember that an intimation is not a declaration, but a hint, a tilt toward meaning, what could be meaning. It is indirect—much like how, depending on the country or even the state that you live in, most of this pandemic has been handled: indirectly. In Intimations, Smith tackles the virus—whether it be respiratory, racist, classist—in much the same way. She slides in her commentary through slick and brief moments of attention. She writes from the vantage point of the beginning of the pandemic and sinks her teeth into societal and personal pressure points that because of our circumstances, have forced all of us into “the complex and ambivalent nature of ‘submission’.”

After publishing her first novel, White Teeth, at the age of twenty-four to great critical acclaim, Zadie Smith, now in her forties, imagines writing differently, imagines that:

“There is no great difference between novels and banana bread. They are both just something to do. They are no substitute for love…Love is not something to do, but something to be experienced, and something to go through—that must be why it frightens so many of us and why we so often approach it indirectly. Here is this novel, made with love. Here is this banana bread, made with love.”

Quickly, her introductory topic, in this case writing, but in other cases either peonies, or Mel Gibson, or a walk to an ATM, turn toward a second subject that is larger, more profound, less easy to pull apart or let go of by the time Smith is finished gazing at it. In other words, every way into one of Smith’s essays is never the same way out, or if it is, the subject has changed by the end of the essay, or at least, how the reader is allowed to hold onto it has shifted.

Much like the pandemic, Smith upsets the reader’s footing until the reader must step back or step forward or even fall over. Often times, Smith turns not toward something, but someone. Throughout the collection, she dedicates passages or entire essays to character portraits of people her body collided with in the moments before her life, before life in general, was “radically interrupted.” Whether it be her masseuse, her university’s IT guy, her perfect New York neighbor, Smith holds them to attention in her writing not necessarily to understand them, but to simply examine another human in relation to her body which—months later—is still a newly impossible task.

But Smith also examines what happens—has been happening—will continue to happen—when Black and brown bodies are held up in America. They are held up with contempt:

“And likewise with contempt: in the eyes of contempt, you don’t even truly rise to the level of a hated object—that would involve a full recognition of your existence. Before contempt, you are simply not considered as others are, you are something less than a whole person, not quite a complete citizen. Say…three fifths of the whole.”

In a timely metaphor, Smith calls systemic racism, that is both new and centuries old, a virus. She writes:

“Patient zero of this particular virus stood on a slave ship four hundred years ago, looked down at the sweating, bleeding, moaning mass below deck and reverse-engineered an emotion—contempt—from a situation that he, the patient himself, had created. He looked at the human beings he had chained up and noted that they seemed to be the type of people who wore chains.”

Alongside the world’s reckoning with a global pandemic and among her own musings of what it means to live with privilege both before and after the end of the world, Smith positions not only herself but her writing, her characters, and her reader to ask an important question, one both personal and public: “Has America metabolized contempt?”