Grand Union

by Zadie Smith

  * * *

  • • •

  He was walking back from St. Mary’s. He was minutes from his door. It was just after midnight. They were “white youths.” They liked to make trouble for “spades.” They’d been drinking. They were not affiliated with Mosley’s crowd in any official capacity. They’d just left a fight at a party. Some of them became career criminals, and went to jail years later, for crimes presumably considered more serious by the state: robbery, fraud. Many stayed in the area, died in the neighborhood, unmolested by the law. The one who did it, who held the stiletto knife and did the stabbing, he was twenty at the time, a merchant sailor. He has a name, it was known to the police within half an hour of the event. But he, too, died unmolested by the law, living a long, quiet life in the suburbs, in Hillingdon. Ended up as a painter-decorator. After his death, his stepdaughter told a newspaper of how he used to smash up her Bob Marley records. If you align his witness statement to the left-hand margin, it looks like a poem:

  Fifty yards up the road

  we had sorted out our little argument

  and turned to go back to the party.

  When we reached the corner we saw this

  black man

  lying on the pavement clutching his chest.

  Two spades—that’s what we call colored men here—

  were standing beside him.

  We decided to get out of it fast.

  It was not our business.

  Then when we saw how serious it was

  we decided to come clean and tell the lot.

  I had a lot of bloodstains on my clothes.

  For that matter, all my clothes

  have blood on them.

  You know, from one fight or another.

  Old stuff.

  We fight a lot here.

  Life is like that in Notting Hill.

  The police took away my clothes but I was in the clear.

  In the poem, all our British names are used—Black, Spade, Colored—but no man appears to claim them. These are not names for Kelso. They name rather a certain kind of malignancy in the brain of Patrick Digby, the poet-murderer, whose name, like all proper names, describes him perfectly. Patrick Digby was the man capable of thinking that way and of writing this poem. But a lot of people could write it. It’s amazing how many. The possibility of its composition reoccurs, at different moments in history, in different places. The details change but the deep structure remains. A form of tragic verse in which the slaughtered man is a kind of object and only the poet keeps his proper name.

  * * *

  • • •

  Kelso’s blood spilled upon the poet Patrick Digby, he got it on his knife and his suit, and it stained, too, that pair of gentlemen from the diaspora—referred to in the poem—who, upon spotting Kelso bleeding out in the street, knelt by his still-breathing body and tried to come to his aid. A passing taxi driver took the three men to St. Mary’s, where, an hour later, Kelso died. He had no last thoughts. Last thoughts are for bourgeois Russian deathbeds, in comfortable town houses, where false friends and colleagues take tea in the next room and ponder what vacancies and opportunities your death might afford them. When you are stabbed in the street that kind of poetry is in short supply. There is what you see and what there is. You are weighed down by facticity. The last words written by the poet Francis Ponge concerned the very table he was writing them on: O Table, ma console et ma consolatrice, table qui me console, ou je me consolide.

  The blood, the cobbles, the tarmac, the curb.

  * * *

  • • •

  You can watch a Pathé newsreel of Kelso’s funeral. Over a thousand people came—they lined the streets. At some juncture, on its long journey to our digital era, the footage of this event lost its sound and became a silent funeral, without language, without commentary, open to interpretation. To be noted is the great mix of people, black and white, young and old, men and women, as if Kelso’s death concerned all these people, as if they were all somehow in relation to it. As if, contra the poet-murderer Patrick Digby, Kelso Cochrane was precisely everybody’s business. Alone, a little anxious, not knowing anyone intimately, I shake hands and make small talk with the ministers who stand at the doors of the church, and spend a long time slowly reading and rereading the Thought for the Day, which is pinned to the parish noticeboard:

  Action against racial

  Hierarchies can proceed

  More effectively when it has been purged

  Of any lingering respect for

  The idea of race.

  Reverend Paul Gilroy

  A young Marxist in dark glasses is wandering around the funeral with a newspaper. He wants to insist on relation. As he moves through the crowd he is proselytizing, he is saying:

  Brothers and Sisters and Comrades,

  Don’t you see that if you refuse

  To enter into each other’s stories—

  If you refuse to admit a relation between you—

  Why, then you hand capitalism its finest victory?

  Sweet music it is to the foreman,

  To hear that the Blacks and the Poor Whites,

  And the Irish and Navvies and Skivvies,

  Have no relation to each other!

  That they can make no common cause!

  Sweet music!

  The mourners glance shiftily at the Marxist as he moves between them, a cigarette pressed tight between his lips, his Socialist rag held front page outward upon his chest. Is it time to hit back? Time to unite? Who decides? What would either course of action look like? In silence, the mourners read the headline, and then return to their silent conversations, sometimes frowning a little or turning away with embarrassed smiles, not sure what to make of it, as ideology, but certain that a funeral is not quite the right place for whatever this is. They have come to mourn a man, a human being, member of the local community, Olivia’s fiancé, Mal’s beloved big brother, this young son of Antigua, cut down—as the vicar tells the congregation—in the prime of his life. The coffin, shouldered by five white men, files past the two black ministers, and into the hearse. The huge crowd follows on foot, headed to Kensal Rise Cemetery: a black, brown and white column of people, some stony-faced, others chatting and smiling, as if walking behind a float to carnival. The time for transforming a dead man into words, into argument and symbol and history, this moment will surely come, but the mourners think it in bad taste that this young Marxist should ever have come here this morning, to the funeral of Kelso Cochrane. They have turned from him, they leave him behind, but though I walk with them, still I am curious about the young Marxist, and stop to take a copy of his paper when he hands it to me, and stand for a moment in the street, admiring the brazen headline: ALL THE WORLD IS TEXT.

  BLOCKED

  What nobody gets is that the conditions were unusual, basically unrepeatable. I was young, full of beans. I’d just created beans, cars, grassland, Post-it Notes, the white rhinos, everything else, created them in an immanent sense, having replaced nothing with something, which—as even my harshest critics will admit—then led to everything else, beans included. Point is, it was a “first thought, best thought” kind of a situation. And when you create something out of nothing at such a tender age it’s just a lot to take on, psychologically. It’s a lot. That’s not really why I withdrew, though. I was always going to withdraw, deep into myself. I understand that others do it differently, but for me, at the time, it was a principle. I found it self-evident that the thing should have its own engine, its own life, its own propulsion. It wasn’t a theoretical pose—it was something I felt at a gut level. I still feel that way, really. Because otherwise where’s the risk? You can’t be in every household, sitting at a person’s shoulder, asking: So, what do you think of what I did there, or here—does that work for you? Can I do any
thing to improve your experience? I mean, you can, but you’re on a hiding to nothing. No matter what anybody tells you, the underlying principle is not consumer satisfaction. There’s no feedback loop. You make it, you put it out there, you deal with the consequences. A lot of times they’re going to hate it and hate you for creating it, but if you can’t deal with hatred you’ve got no business being in the game in the first place.

  Having said that, there are a lot of things in there that I simply wouldn’t do now, or not in the same way, if I had the opportunity to do it all again, from scratch. I’d be the first to admit that. When you’re young you try to prove you can do it all, anything—you throw everything and the kitchen sink in there! You’re profligate! You’ve got this sense of unlimited potential. You think you contain multitudes, and in my experience you kind of do, at that age, because you’re still sufficiently flexible to contain multitudes, you haven’t drawn lines around your shit yet and there is still something ineffable about you, something that can make space for whatever is not you. But that crowd inside thins out. Lord, does it thin out. For example, yesterday I was mooching around in my long johns when I had a thought, I wondered: What does it feel like to be a bat? Now, that sort of thing used to be a fruitful line of imaginative inquiry for me. But I didn’t know yesterday and I still don’t know. I’ve made my peace with it: I don’t expect to know how a bat feels about anything any time soon. But I know how I feel. That’s what you get left with, in the end: a very precise and intricate sense of how you yourself feel. Which is not nothing. When I started out I had no earthly idea about that. Now I know. People talk about checking back in and maybe reworking some things and adapting others and so on and so forth but those people do not know my mind, they do not know what I can face and what I find too much to deal with at the current time. Only I can know that. It might sound a little nuts, coming from me, but a lot of people could do with being a lot less judgmental.

  Sometimes I am asked: How do you keep from getting depressed? Given the state of things. Given that it looks like the something you got started is on the brink of collapsing back into nothing? The answer has changed over time. I used to think parallel projects were the solution. Just keep on creating parallel projects and moving between them and then you never have time to get really down on any one of them. “Okay, sure, that’s a roiling mess—but this one has got something, oh, it’s really got something!” Of course, as soon as I felt one of these parallel projects was going well, a moment later I’d hate it, and want to move on to the next thing, which would then provide its own complications, and so on. And all the time some part of me understood that dropping one ball was a problem unlikely to be resolved by simply launching a whole load of other balls into the air. But for a while it worked, psychologically, for me. I can’t speak for others. To me, it was beautiful to move between these parallel projects, never getting bogged down, not feeling defined by one way of doing things, feeling light, feeling free . . . Doesn’t mean it wasn’t avoidant behavior. I’m not a fool, I know when I’m being avoidant. But some of the most sublime things emerge as vehicles of distraction. Really depends on how you look at it. These days, I love a fragment. I don’t think of a fragment as flawed or partial in any way. It’s the completist model that got me into such trouble in the first place. Now I praise the half-done, the unfinished, the broken, the shard! Who am I to turn my back on the fragment! Who am I to say the fragment is insufficient!

  At the same time, I am depressed. The difference is these days I just say it out loud:

  I AM DEPRESSED.

  At a certain point, given the way things are, it’s a fair and rational response. The fact that I even have to defend the emotion tells you all you need to know about how large the distance has become between my mind and all other minds. It’s really an issue. Mostly, when people talk to me about what they think and feel about it all, and their own relation to me or all of it, I willingly participate—as in, I will and do listen—but I remain keenly aware that in practical terms nine times out of ten we are not discussing or thinking about the same entity in any way, shape or form. On the one hand, I feel totally alienated by their interpretations; on the other, they find my perspective impossible even to identify never mind actually engage with. We’re talking straight past each other. Have been for the longest time. Which is legitimately depressing, a word by the way that is not mine and which I hate to use, and only sound out now so as to be able to know you all better, and to share in your reality. Contrary to reports, naming things was not and never will be my bag. I myself never put things in bags. I barely recognize the existence of “bags,” at least not as a collective noun. Nor would I ever, for example, have thought up the separate denomination “animal”—and then treated it as if it were a license!—no more than I would ever have presumed to describe a category called “emotions” or consider them as something you “have”—like a stone or a stereo—and then go on to define them morally, depending on what they did to my face muscles or tear ducts. That shit is not on me. Yet I still have to deal with people speaking to me as if all of that is reality—I have to at least appear to take it seriously. And I’m sure that behaving in this false way, in such bad faith, day in and day out, is what has inhibited me somewhat, and contributed to this sense of blockage. It doesn’t make me want to take new risks, that’s for damn sure, or start afresh with something big. To what end? Everything gets twisted. Control is an illusion. I certainly have never personally drawn a line around “France,” but at a certain point, when you’ve got this critical mass of belief in “France”—on the part of those who believe they are “citizens of France” and indeed separate entities each from the other—well, what are you going to do about it? Tell them to take another look? Pardon, monsieur, madame—le monde n’est pas ce que vous pensez! Please. “People” see what they want to see.

  Instead of self-medicating, I recently got involved with a dog. Judge that however you may wish but I’ll tell you right now I’ve never been happier. I no longer feel any anxiety as I pass by what I don’t want to go back to, because each day I have a purpose, a direction, I really know what I’m doing. I’ve got to take dear old Butler for a walk and let him sniff all the things he likes to sniff without hurrying him or chivying him along in any way at all. That takes up half the day. And when me and Butler are done there’s even a little time to flit through the parallel projects, never finishing any one of them, never raising any to the level of perfection, but feeling okay about all of them, neither delighted nor desperate. It’s a life. I’ll take it. There aren’t many who do what I do but whenever I happen to come across a significant colleague—not any of the hacks, but one of the few I admire and more importantly whom I like—whenever I happen to run into one of these esteemed colleagues, maybe at the deli on Mercer, and we stop and greet each other, and they see me with Butler, I know very well what they’re thinking. Me who used to be so high and mighty, shuffling round the neighborhood with this dumb-looking coonhound. What the hell happened? Well, they can think what they like. I’m just very, very happy waiting patiently for this old dog to sniff the many things it likes to sniff, while my colleague smiles at me in that certain way, like there’s something satirical about me now. I actually have a sense of humor, and I understand how funny it must look: me, with a dog! It’s really a bad joke on myself, given that I once thought—when dogs initially appeared on the scene—that this time I had really managed to (inadvertently) offer, to the “people,” a revelatory illumination, a deep and renewing insight into the true nature of reality, when of course the exact opposite lesson is what they all seem to have taken from it. “That’s my dog,” you hear them announcing, pulling their leashes tight, with that smug look of ownership on their stupid faces. “Yeah, sure, you can pet my dog.” There’s no control, none whatsoever. I don’t worry: I’ve let it all go. I’m happy, I get to spend my days with a fantastic dog, I am no longer concerned whether or not I am the only soul left in existence wh
o knows what a dog means and what it is for.

  THE CANKER

  At the time of the Usurper, Esorik and her people lived beyond the mountains and had done for some time. Their island fell like a teardrop from the northeast side of the land, into that broad sea that was at once their livelihood, their conceptual foundation, and their best argument for independence—physical and spiritual—from the mainland, of which, in truth, they were an integral part. On her Labor days, Esorik was a fish-salter. She greeted the Ekalbia on the docks, and showed them where to hang their huge silk nets. Stronger women than she emptied the nets; cannier women negotiated with those bloody-minded, green-eyed nomads over the price. Esorik’s task was to heave the little gray fish by the spadeful onto her pallet of squat rectangular tubs, then pack them in salt. Sometimes, as she did this, the sun set in pink and purple bands across the horizon, and on those occasions, she felt almost grateful for Labor days and understood their purpose. The rest of the time she smelled of fish. Salt got into any little cut on her hands. She looked forward to her final cycle.

  On Praxis days, she was a teacher: she taught the children of her district how to tell stories and more importantly the names of the various forms. The Snake with the Tail in Its Mouth. The Resurgence. The Straight Arrow. The Sinking Ship. As Praxis, it was rather pathetic, being so close to Esorik’s own Anima—which was storytelling itself—but she was good at it and besides she had little choice: her Anima was almost all of her. She possessed no hidden talents. She could not add, build, invent anything real, configure, organize or lead. She knew brilliant women on the island, many, friends of hers, whose lives were the soul of variety, who, on their Labor days, built bridges, and when their Praxis came, designed civic systems or sat on justice committees. She knew women who did all of this and then, to display their Anima, danced through the streets with colored ribbons streaming from their joints, singing founding songs at least as old as the paving beneath their feet. But Esorik was a storyteller pure and simple. Who had learned—though not without some struggle—as much as anyone can know about the packing of fish in salt.