Extra Credit: Zadie Smith

Tonight I attended a reading and Q&A session for writer Zadie Smith. I actually knew nothing about Zadie or her work before attending the event, so I went in with no expectations. I found it be a very enjoyable evening, even though the lecture hall was overflowing with people and I had to set up a chair in the very back of the room. Zadie herself also said a lot of things throughout the event that inspired me and stuck with me.

She started out the evening by doing a reading of her newest short story, “Two Men Arrive in a Village.” I found this story to be very thought-provoking and open to interpretation. The story started out very broad, so it was a little difficult for me to visualize it at first with Zadie just reading it. However, as she went on, I was able to get more of a taste for the story. The story explored cross-cultural lines and the act of one culture, in a way, barging in and invading another. It was interesting to me that while the story drew very hard lines between different cultures, like when the two men were reacting to the food that the villagers prepared for them, at other times it blurred those lines of difference, like when one of the men was telling the young girl in the village that he was an orphan too. It was a dark and at times uncomfortable story. However, I found that it was very eloquent and started a train of thought in my mind about race and class.

Zadie Smith herself also seems to be such an intelligent and cool woman and writer. In the Q&A portion, she talked about how conversations surrounding race nowadays always seem so negative. However, the “communality” of race across the globe is something that she believes should be acknowledged and appreciated as well.

She had such a free-spirited, free-thinking, open vibe to her, which I could feel even from my spot all the way in the back. As a writer, I was really inspired by what she said about being a relatively “normal” person writing about extraordinary things. “You don’t have to go shoot an elephant,” she said. “There are things right in front of you that are worth writing about.”

            

This truly inspired me because I do often feel like maybe my life hasn’t been filled with enough outrageous stories or crazy twists for me to write about. I have feared that it makes me a boring writer. I realize now that writing is all about taking what you have in front of you and seeing all the creative things you can do with it. “I get a lot out of a little,” Zadie said. I think that is a lesson that we can all learn for ourselves.