I'll forgive you if you don't rush to read this one (I didn't get too it until this cold and rainy weekend), but make a note of it and when you have the time settle in and enjoy a great piece of writing and an important piece of thinking from Zadie Smith.
Her piece, Speaking in Tongues, from last month's NY Review of Books is an examination of the process, power, and possibilities imbued in the ability to speak in many voices if not necessarily simultaneously than still all at once.
Smith writes primarily about President Obama's extraordinary prowess in doing so...
Throughout his campaign Obama was careful always to say we. He was noticeably wary of "I." By speaking so, he wasn't simply avoiding a singularity he didn't feel, he was also drawing us in with him. He had the audacity to suggest that, even if you can't see it stamped on their faces, most people come from Dream City, too. Most of us have complicated back stories, messy histories, multiple narratives.
It was a high-wire strategy, for Obama, this invocation of our collective human messiness. His enemies latched on to its imprecision, emphasizing the exotic, un-American nature of Dream City, this ill-defined place where you could be from Hawaii and Kenya, Kansas and Indonesia all at the same time, where you could jive talk like a street hustler and orate like a senator. What kind of a crazy place is that? But they underestimated how many people come from Dream City, how many Americans, in their daily lives, conjure contrasting voices and seek a synthesis between disparate things. Turns out, Dream City wasn't so strange to them.
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