"When the music changes, so does the dance"

Zadie Smith’s most recent novel is, at heart, about racial identity. Spanning over several decades, with a focus on the un-named narrator’s friendships and travels, Swing Time explores the meanings of race and ethnicity in the contemporary world.

From the beginning, our narrator views the world through the lens of race. She makes friends with Tracey, a key character in the story who shares the narrator’s ambition to become a professional dancer, through a shared recognition of who they are – mixed-race children.

[T]here was always this natural awareness, an invisible band strung between us, connecting us and preventing us from straying too deeply into relations with others. [. . .] [I]t was almost unconscious, two iron filings drawn to a magnet. (p. 16)

Tracey and the narrator recognise their difference from others at an early age. They recognise themselves in each other, noticing that their racial identity brings them together in an ‘almost unconscious’ way.

Swing Time progresses through various periods in the narrator’s life, including young adulthood. Her close, yet strained, relationship with her mother provides the novel’s political edge. An ambitious black woman with a Caribbean heritage, the narrator’s mother is passionate about identity politics. When the narrator pursues a successful career with an international pop-star, Aimee, she reflects on her mother’s political activity.

[A friend] began quietly to list all the many causes of my mother’s stress: [including] the supposed double-dealing of the only other black woman in Parliament, an MP of twenty years’ standing, whom my mother considered, for no sensible reason, her bitter rival. (p. 151)

In terms of representing minority communities, conflict ensues over who is worthy enough to embody the role. This passage provokes interesting questions about the place of race and ethnicity in parliamentary politics, involving ideas about the role of figureheads and leaders.

During her professional travels in West Africa, the narrator embeds race in historical meanings. She comes across a heritage centre on colonial history and describes her feelings towards a current exhibition. ‘Every tribe has their blood-soaked legacy’, she says, ‘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. (p. 316)

Reflecting on her lineage, the narrator questions the authority of memorialisation. The ‘monument’, which serves to remember centuries of exploitation, fails to evoke strong ‘cathartic’ feelings. Instead, she thinks about the diasporic elements of colonial history, concluding that pain ‘was too obviously everywhere’. Thus traditional memory practices fail to reflect on the experiences of thousands of people.

Swing Time is also a novel about various other themes, such as culture, gender, class, and globalisation. But, at times, Swing Time seems to spread itself thin. These themes become muddled and it is not clear what Smith wants to get across to the reader. Whilst Swing Time provides interesting reflections on the nature of these themes, it suffers from being too long. Overall, it is a stimulating read, but could benefit from being more concise.

Swing Time. By Zadie Smith. Penguin: London, 2017. £8.99. 978-0-141-03660-1.

Zadie Smith. Photograph by Dominique Nabokov.