Zadie Smith, Doctor of Humane Letters

Novelist Zadie Smith received an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters at Grinnell College Commencement 2016 and gave the commencement address.

About Zadie Smith

Zadie Smith was born in North London in 1975 to an English father and a Jamaican mother. She read English at Cambridge, graduating in 1997. Her acclaimed first novel, White Teeth, is a vibrant portrait of contemporary multicultural London. The book won many honors, including the Guardian First Book Award, the Whitbread First Novel Award, the Commonwealth Writers Prize (Overall Winner, Best First Book), and two BT Ethnic and Multicultural Media Awards (Best Book/Novel and Best Female Media Newcomer). Smith’s The Autograph Man, a story of loss, obsession, and the nature of celebrity, received the 2003 Jewish Quarterly Wingate Literary Prize for Fiction.

In 2003 and 2013 Smith was named by Granta magazine as one of 20 “Best of Young British Novelists.” Smith’s On Beauty won the 2006 Orange Prize for Fiction. Her most recent novel, NW, was named as one of the “10 Best Books of 2012” by The New York Times. A tenured professor of creative writing at New York University, Smith writes regularly for The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books. She published one collection of essays, Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays, and is working on a book of essays titled Feel Free.

Commencement Speech

Transcript

Hello. Welcome graduating class of 2016 and congratulations. You did it. You made it. How do you feel? More importantly, what do you want? I remember what I wanted in your place back in 1997, I wanted very much to be a unique and special individual. I really thought that what's my graduation signified. I had gone from being one of the many undifferentiated people to being one of the few, one who would have choices in life. After all, my father did not have many choices and his father had none at all.

Unlike them, I had gone to a university, so I was a special individual. Looking back, it's easy to diagnose a case of self love. People are always accusing students of self love or self obsession, and this is a bit confusing because college surely encourages the habit. You concentrate on yourself in order to improve yourself. Isn't that the whole idea? Out of this process, hopefully, emerge strikingly competent individuals with high self esteem prepared for personal achievement.

When we graduate, though, things can get a little bit complicated. For how are we meant to think of this fabulous person we've taken so much care in creating? If university made me special, did that mean I was worth more than my father or more than his father before him? Did I mean I should expect more from life than they did? Did I deserve more? What does it really mean to be one of the few? Are the fruits of our education a sort of gift to be circulated generously through the world? Are we to think of ourselves as pure commodity on sale to the highest bidder?

Let's be honest, you're probably feeling pulled in several directions right now and that's perfect natural. In the late 90s, the post graduation dilemma was usually present to us a straight choice between working for banks or following our personal joy as we used to say then. The comic extremity of the choice I now see was deliberate it meant you didn't have to take it too seriously, and so peeled off from each other. Some of us, many of us, joined the banks, but those that didn't had no special cause to pat themselves on the back. With rare exceptions, we all vigorously pursued self interest more or less.

It wasn't a surprise we've been raised that way. In the the 70s, we didn't live through austerity, didn't go to war like my father or his father. For the most part, we didn't join large political or ideological movements. We simply inherited the advantages for which a previous generation had fought. The thing that so many of us feared I realize now was the idea of being subsumed back into the collective from which we'd come of being returned to the world of the many or doing any work at all in that world.

In my case, this new attitude was particularly noticeable. I had examples of people who work with and for others close at hand. My own mother was a social worker, and her mother had been a hospital orderly. In my rowdy state funded inner city school, I had teachers who had themselves been educated at Cambridge University, the elite institution I had later joined. At the time, I confess I didn't understand what they were doing in a school like mine other than undervaluing themselves. Amongst my own college friends, I know of no one who became a teacher or a social worker or did any work at all in that public sphere.

For the most part, we were uninterested in what we considered to be unglamorous pursuits. We valued individuality above all things. You can thank my generation, for example, for the invention of the word supermodel and the popularization of celebrity and lifestyle often used in conjunction with each other. Reality TV, that was us too. Also, televised talent shows, also Ugg boots. You're welcome, millennials.

When the fussy amongst us detected in this vision of prestigious individuality, perhaps something a little bit crass or commercialized, our solution was to in some ways further down the same road to out individuate those celebrated individuals and we became hipsters defined by the ways we weren't like anybody else. One amusing consequence of this, oh bye-bye, was that we all ended individuals of the same type, not one of a kind, but one of a kind.

There was another more serious aspect about all this I now find a bit melancholic. We isolated ourselves. It took us the longest time to work out that we needed each other. You may have noticed that even now we seem a little bit stunned by quite ordinary human pursuits like having children or living in a neighborhood or getting ill. We're always writing lifestyles articles about such matters in the Sunday papers. That's because until very recently we thought we were going to get through this whole life thing purely on our own steam.

Even if we were no fans of, in my case, the ex-British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, we had unwittingly taken her most famous slogan and embedded it deep within our own lives. There is no such thing as society. We were unique individuals. What do we need with society?

Then it turned out the things that happen to everybody since the dawn of time also happened to us. Our parents grew old and ill. Our children needed schools and somewhere to play. We wanted trains that ran on time. We needed each other. It turned out that we were just human like everybody.

Now I may have this completely backward, but I get the sense that something different is going on your generation, something hopeful. You seen to be smarter sooner. Part of these smarts are surely born out of crisis. In the 90s, we had high employment, a buoyant economy. We could spend weeks wondering about the exact length and shape of our bids or where Kurt Cobain was a sellout. Your situation is more acute. You have so manner large collective tasks ahead, and you seem to know that.

We had them too, but paid little attention, and now I'm afraid it falls to you, the climate, the economy, the sick relationship between the individual prestige of the first world and the anonymity of the third. These are things that only many hands can fix working together. You're all individuals but also part of a generation, and generations are defined by the projects they take on together. Even at the level of slogan you've decide to honor the concept of the many over the few, that now famous 99%.

As far as slogans go, which in my opinion is not very far, yours still sounds more thoughtful to me than the slogans of my youth which were fatally infected by advertising. Be strong, be fast, be bold, be different, be you. That was always the takeaway, be you. When my peers grew up and went into advertising, they spread that message far and wide. Just be you screams the label on your shampoo bottle. Just be you cries your deodorant because you're worth it. You get about 50 of these commencement speeches a day and that's before you've even left the bathroom.

I didn't think you'd want anymore of that from me. Instead, I want to speak in favor of recognizing our place within the many not only as a slogan and much less a personal sacrifice, but rather as a potential source of joy in your life. Here is perhaps a silly example. It happened to me recently at my mother's birthday party. Around midnight it came time to divide up the rum cake, and I not naturally one of life's volunteers was press ganged into helping. A small circle of women surrounded me dressed in West African wraps and head scarves in imitation of their ancestors. Many hands make short work said one and passed me the stack of paper plates. It was job to take those slices through the crowd. Hardly any words passed between us as we went about this collective task, but each time we set round upon a tray I detected a hum of deep satisfaction at our many hands forming this useful human chain.

Occasionally as I gave out a slice of cake an older person would look up and murmur, "Ah, you're Yvonne's daughter," but for the most part, it was the cake that received the greeting. A little nod or a smile, for it was the duty of the daughter to hand out the cake and no further commentary was required. It was while doing what I hadn't realized was my duty that I felt what might be described as the exact opposite of the sensation I have standing in front of your now. Not puffed up with individual prestige, but immersed in the beauty of a crowd, connected if only in gesture to ancient line of practical women working in companionable silence in the service of their community. It's such a ludicrously tiny example of a collective action, and yet clearly still so rare in my own life that even this minor example of it struck me.

Anyway, my point is it was beautiful feeling and it was over too soon. When I try to look for a way to put into this speech I was surprised how difficult it is to find the right words to describe it. So many of our colloquial terms for this work of many hands are sunk in infamy. Human chain for starters, cog in the machine, link in a chain, brick in the wall. In such phrases we sense the long shadow of the 20th century with its brutal collective movements. We do not trust the collective. We've seen what submission to it can do. We believe instead in the individual, here in American especially.

Now I also believe in the individual. I'm so grateful for the three years of college that helped me make more or less an individual, teaching me how to think and write. You may well ask who am I to praise the work of many hands when I myself chose the work of one pair of hands the most isolated there is. I can't escape the accusation. I can only look at my own habit of self love and ask what is the best use I can make of this utterly human habit. Can I make a gift of myself in some other way? I know for sure I haven't done it half as much as I should or could have. I look at the fine example of my friend, the writer and activist, Dave Eggers, and see a many who took his own individual prestige and parlayed it into an extraordinary collective action, 826 National, in which many hands work to create educational opportunities for disadvantaged children all over this country.

When you go to one of Dave's not for profit tutoring centers, you don't find selfless young people grimly sacrificing themselves for others. What you see is joy. Dave's achievement is neither quite charity nor simple individual philanthropy. It's a collective effort that gets people involved in each other's lives.

I don't mean to speak meanly of philanthropy. Generally speaking, philanthropy is always better than no help at all, but it is also in itself a privilege of the few. I think none of us want communities to rise or fall on the whims of the very rich. I think we would rather be involved in each other's lives and that what stops us most often is fear. We fear that the work of many hands will obscure the beloved outline of our individual selves.

Perhaps this self you've been treasuring for so long is itself the work of many hands. Speaking personally, I owe so much to the hard work of my parents, to the educational and healthcare systems in my country, the love and care of my friends. Even if one's individual prestige such as it is represents an entirely solo effort, the result of sheer hard work, does that everywhere and always mean you deserve the largest possible slice of pie?

These are big questions and it's collectively you'll have to decide them. Everything from the remuneration of executives to the idea of the commons itself depends upon them. At the core is the question of what it really means to be the few and the many. Throughout your adult life, you're going to have to have a daily choice to throw your lot in with one of the other. A lot of people, most people, even people without the luxury of your choices are going to suggest to you over and over that only an idiot chooses to join the many when he could be one of the few. Only an idiot chooses public over private, shared over gated, communal over unique.

Mrs. Thatcher who was such a genius at witty aphorism once said, "A man who beyond the age of 26 finds himself on a bus can count himself a failure." I've always been fascinated by that quote, by its dark assumption that even something as natural as sharing a journey with other people represents a form of personal denigration.

The best reply to it I know is that famous line of Terrence, the Roman playwright, Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto. I am a human being. I consider nothing that is human alien to me. Montagne liked that so much he had it carved into the beams of his ceiling. Some people interpret it as a call to toleration. I find it stronger than that. I think it's a call to love.

Full disclosure. Most of the time, I'm sure like you I do not find it easy to love my fellow humans. I am still that solipsistic 21-year-old. The times I have been able to get over myself and get involved at whatever level, what I'm trying to say is those approve the most valuable moments of my life. I never would've guessed that back in 1997. I would've paid lip service to it as a noble idea, but I wouldn't have believed it.

The thing is, it's not even a question of ethics or self sacrifice or moral high ground. It's actually totally selfish. Being with people, doing for people, it will bring you joy. Unexpectedly, it feels better. It feels good to give your unique and prestigious selves a slip every now and then and confess your membership in this unworldly collective called the human race. For one thing, it's far less lonely, and for another, contrary to Mrs. Thatcher some of the best conversations we'll ever hear will be on public transport. If it weren't for the New York and London subway systems mind levels would be books of blank pages.

I hope, I think, I'm preaching to the converted. I see you gazing into your phones as you walk through the world, and I know solipsism must be a constant danger as it for me, as it has been for every human since the dawn of time. You also have this tremendous contrapuntal force pulling you into the world. For art, you're connecting to each other, forever communicating, rarely scared of strangers, widely open, ready to tell anyone anything. Doesn't online anonymity tear at the very idea of being a prestige individual? Aren't young artists collapsing the border between themselves and their audience? Aren't young coders determined on an all access world in which everybody's an equal participant? Are the young activists content just to raise the money and run? No. They want to be local, grassroots, and involved.

Those are all good instincts. I'm so excited to think of you pursuing them. Hold on to that desire for human connection. Don't let anyone scare you out of it. Don't let your fellow humans be alien to you. As you get older and perhaps a little less open than you are now, don't assume that exclusive always and everywhere means better. It may only mean lonelier. There will always be folks hard selling you the life of the few, the private schools, private planes, private islands, private life. They're trying to convince you that hell is other people. Don't believe it. We are more frequently each other's shelter and correction, the antidote to solipsism and so many windows on the world.

Thank you.