by Zadie Smith September 12, 2011
The New Yorker
The Talk of the Town
"Suddenly summoned to witness some thing great and horrendous, we keep
fighting not to reduce it to our own smallness," wrote John Updike ten
years ago in these pages. He watched the towers fall with "the false
intimacy of television," from a tenth-floor apartment in Brooklyn
Heights. Over in North West London, we were certainly very small and
distant, but we still felt that false intimacy. We are a mixed
community, including many Muslims, from Bangladesh, Pakistan, India,
the United Arab Emirates, Africa. I grew up with girls who wore the
head scarf, a fact that seemed no more remarkable to me at the time
than Jewish boys wearing yarmulkes or Hindu kids with bindis on their
foreheads. Different world. What enabled it? It helped that so many of
the class disparities between us had been partially obscured. United
in the same primary schools, we were neither mesmerized by, nor
especially frightened of, our differences. Later, that sense of
equality became difficult to maintain. Teen-agers are preoccupied with
status and justice—they notice difference. Why do some have so much
while others have nothing? Natural superiority? Hard work? Historical
luck? Or exploitation? For some, the basic political insights of
adolescence arrived with an extra jolt: your people over here were
hurting your people over there; your home was attacking your home.
Then came the cataclysm. The end of the world for nearly three
thousand innocent people. The beginning of a different sort of world
for the rest of us. From the epicenter in Manhattan, shock waves
rippled across Europe. In North West London, a small but significant
change: the stereotype of the Muslim boy was transformed. From quiet,
sexless, studious child—sitting in the back of class and destined for
an engineering degree—to Public Enemy No. 1.
In the ten years that followed, communities like mine became the focus
of debate. In 2005, Shadow Home Secretary David Davis called for the
end of a multicultural "policy" that permits "people of different
cultures to settle without expecting them to integrate into society."
For Nick Griffin, the leader of the British National Party, the
problem was not the segregation but the mix: "The whole world faces a
big problem with people, so many different people from different
ethnic groups mixing that we are losing all our separate cultures and
identities, and I think that is a real problem." We were urged to
unite, yet the state continued to fund faith schools. We were urged to
separate, but in the 2010 general election (despite a significant
increase in their vote) the B.N.P. was unable to get a single M.P. in
Parliament. When our own copycat outrage arrived, on 7/7, the
"failures of multiculturalism" was again the focus, although a strong
feeling of national identity is no obstacle to killing people in your
nation, and the British-born bombers' own stated target was not home
affairs but foreign policy. A head scarf became a contested,
subversive thing. Invested with this fresh power, the hijab enjoyed
new levels of popularity, as much a symbol of cultural solidarity as a
religious practice. If a few people placed SHARIA CONTROLLED ZONE
posters around Newham, Muslims throughout the country had to suffer
the consequences—a local version of asymmetrical warfare. Two months
ago, as an unknown individual shot teen-agers on a Norwegian island,
commentary converged on the central issue: Muslim fundamentalists or
lone maniac?
"We're monsters, I fear. What monsters we're"—it's a line from a
recent Frederick Seidel poem, "Downtown," about the Fourth of July,
and the sadness of fireworks over the Hudson ("the flavorful floating
shroud") and the casual brutality of eating shad roe ("What a joy to
eat the unborn"). It reminds me of this whole, unlovely decade, which
started downtown, and made us all monstrous, me as much as anybody. I
was for the war, at first. Later, I was pleased when President Obama
promised to commit more troops to Afghanistan, not because I thought
it would end that war but because I hoped it would win him the
election. I sat at dinner parties and felt envious of people who had
not supported the war, as if whether or not a lot of armchair
intellectuals did or did not support a war was what the war was
actually about. For a few Google-eyed hours, I thought that Sarah
Palin was not Trig's mother. The rise of the Internet dovetailed with
this tribalism. You could pass a decade online without ever hearing
from the "other."
About one thing, though, we could all agree: everything had changed.
Or had it? The 9/11 perpetrators wanted a world in which (their
version of) religious belief trumped all other concerns. But in the
real world our concerns are necessarily diverse: we must attend school
and find work, provide for children, look after parents. And in these
matters we cannot avoid one another for long. Of course, mixed
communities are not without tensions—no such community exists.
(Relative racial and cultural homogeneity—as Northern Ireland knows—is
no guarantee of peace.) But we have many common causes and priorities.
It's to be noted that class meant little to the terrorists: they saw
only two human categories, believer and heathen. Here on earth,
poverty and privilege cross the religious and the cultural divide.
Look a little closer at the recent CCTV footage, in London: we riot
together, and together we clean the streets.
Last Christmas, standing in an apartment building in New York, I was
struck by a hallway where papier-mâché Stars of David and holy crosses
came together in a decorative seasonal theme. Here these "people of
the book" (whose religious texts overlap and divide as deeply as
either text with the Koran) lived peaceably in the same space, finding
one another's religions by turns amusing, irrational, beautiful,
banal. What enabled it? It took generations; it passed through periods
of unspeakable horror; sometimes people forgot, sometimes they
forgave, and they did both these things imperfectly. Practical matters
helped. General economic parity, difficult acts of good will on both
sides, and a democratic country in which the apparently impossible has
the freedom to happen. It is not a perfect relationship—there's no
such thing—and it took two thousand years to get this far. We forget:
these things take time. "Let us realize the arc of the moral universe
is long but it bends toward justice," said Martin Luther King, Jr.,
who presided over another meeting of supposedly irreconcilable
peoples. Not everyone is a monster.
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