COVER LETTER
While in the process of writing this essay about Zadie Smith’s Speaking In Tongues, I found that the earlier stages were easier for me, that is the process of brainstorming and being able to identify interesting intellectual problems I wanted to write about, even though these are usually the stages I have most trouble with. I even found myself overwhelmed by all the ways I wanted to approach this essay. As I began writing, I felt like I had a solid intellectual problem that I could go in-depth with in the essay and many ideas to approach it. However, I realized that I had trouble trying to focus my essay on just one idea, which is the intellectual problem. There were several times where I would read back through my paragraphs and think that I was taking a different direction. Although this was my biggest struggle throughout the essay, I ultimately feel like I was able to narrow down my ideas and communicate my opinions in a clear and effective way. I consider my paragraphs to be straightforward and informative in relation to the intellectual problem and Smith’s examples and explanations. When figuring out my claim, I struggled a bit; while writing the body of the essay I felt like I had it figured out, but when actually reaching the conclusion, I had trouble elaborating on it. Perhaps I faced this problem because I didn’t give much thought to the claim before writing the essay; I thought I would be able to find it along the way. It is something I will definitely try to improve for the next essays. Overall, I considered my writing process to be an interesting one, especially because this is the first essay I have done where I had to identify an intellectual problem and provide a claim for it. I felt like it was a new exercise that helped shape my way of writing, and it helped me identify several weaknesses I have that I will work on improving on for future essays, whether for this class or outside of it.
Amanda Bonet Tkacs
02/15/17
Professor Martin
ENG 2150
Speaking In Tongues: A Curse or a Blessing?
We, as human beings, have and will continue to find ourselves in ever-changing situations that force us to adapt as we are exposed to new experiences. One of the many changes we face throughout our lifetime is the adaptation of our words. As we find ourselves exposed to different settings, we meet new people, we are faced with new challenges, and, ultimately, we encounter new situations that force us to speak accordingly, even if we do so unconsciously. In Zadie Smith’s essay “Speaking In Tongues”, she recounts her own experience of how she adapted a new voice once she left her hometown for Cambridge, and how she continued to do so as time went on. However, there is a question left unclear by her recounting of events: Is the adaptation of voices a burden or a blessing? Throughout her essay we are presented with various situations that are, in a way, paradoxical since she classifies certain examples as tragic while others as admirable, although they all seem to hold close relations to one another.
As we begin reading her essay, we empathize with Smith’s situation. She tells us about how she slowly began losing the voice she grew up with as a child and creating a new one to fit in to her new life. At first she thought she was simply adding a voice to her old one, but as time went on her two voices slowly became a singular one, as if the old one was being replaced or forgotten. She continues on to give us the example of Eliza Doolittle, a fictional character from George Bernard Shaw’s musical Pygmalion. In Pygmalion, Eliza is a simple flower girl who takes speech lessons with a professor called Henry Higgins in order to pass as a lady, but Smith argues that at the end of this journey, Eliza ends up being an “awkward, in-between thing” (135), classifying her situation as an unfortunate one, just like her own. However, after speaking about Eliza’s situation in Shaw’s play, she turns our attention towards Shaw himself. Smith argues that, although Eliza’s situation was a tragic one, the effect is undercut since Shaw actually is in possession of something he was not able to give to Eliza, which is his ability to speak in tongues (135). Smith observes this about Shaw since Pygmalion is, as she says, “an orchestra of many voices, simultaneously and perfectly rendered, with no shade or color sacrificed.” (135) She is telling us how Shaw is actually able to adapt his many voices in order to approach different themes in his play without choosing one voice over another, although this is not the case of his character Eliza. But it seems that this argument is just as contradictory as her own work. Smith writes about how she lost her original voice to a new one, just like Eliza, yet we as the readers can clearly observe that she has not lost her voice, but added new ones.
Throughout her essay we observe that Smith is actually in possession of several voice as well. Even if she is simply using others’ as examples, such as Eliza, Shaw, and Obama, we notice that she is able to effortlessly speak about these people in vastly different ways, especially because it is inevitable as they are all very diverse characters/people. Throughout her work, Smith must speak about the different races, cultures, and backgrounds of these people, in addition to her own. Smith might still consider herself to only possess one voice, but in reality, a person with a singular, unified voice, as she calls it, would not be able to successfully transition from these different people so eloquently and in such a relatable fashion to the reader. It is possible that these voices are difficult to decipher by simply reading her essay, but when listening to her lecture, we can hear the shift in her voice; the diverse accents, purposes, and choice of words in order to reach the audience. By listening to her speaking, we are able to see how she actually is in possession of the same ability she admires in Shaw: the ability to speak in tongues.
Smith does not end her argument with Eliza and Shaw’s situations; she moves on to speak about Barack Obama’s. She admires Obama’s ability, similar to Shaw’s, to possess many voices rather than just one. “The conclusions Obama draws from his Pygmalion experience, however, are subtler than Shaw’s”, says Smith, “The tale he tells is not the tragedy of gaining a new, false voice at the expense of a true one. The tale he tells is all about addition.” (136) We, as the reader, understand Smith’s admiration towards Obama’s so called ability, however when we continue to the second part of her essay, we encounter her explanation of Dream City, which she describes as a place where people are in possession of many voices rather than a singular self (137). The interesting part about her explanation of Dream City is that she does not just consider Obama to be born there, but herself too. Thus, we find ourselves again with the contradiction of her words, unsure of why she now considers herself to possess several voices, just like Obama, when at the beginning of her essay she suggests that she does not have more than one voice, just a new one that steadily replaced her old one. Has she, as a writer, realized that she is in possession of many voices as well? If so, why does she continue to categorize her Pygmalion experience a failed one?
Lastly, Smith goes on to talk about Shakespeare. Like Obama, Smith admires Shakespeare’s ability to adapt his many voices. She goes on to say, “…Shakespeare: even more than for his wordplay we cherish him for his lack of allegiance. Our Shakespeare sees always both sides of a thing; he is black and white, male and female – he is everyman.” (142) She views Shakespeare as a man who was able to adapt to every situation and person, a man who does not latch on to just a singular persona, but an ever changing idea of all of them. He was not just able to relate to his audience through his art, but, in a way, also be them. Not only are we presented with a similar contradiction as the one when she speaks about Obama, but we can also observe a new one. She opens her talk on Shakespeare by saying, “For reasons obscure to me, those qualities we cherish in our artists we condemn in our politicians. In our artists we look for the many-colored voice, the multiple sensibility.” (142) Now we might wonder why Smith doesn’t consider herself to possess this same quality of having multiple voices when she is an artist herself.
Although we encounter these contradictions throughout her work, at the end of it, it seems that we are able to get a sense of why Smith chose to do this. She ends her essay by telling us about her night during the election. As Smith herself recounts, she was at a party in New York City when one of her friends called to invite her to another gathering in Harlem. She tells us how she was hesitant at first because, according to her, she was having a lovely time at this party. But she soon realized there was something more to her hesitation than just that. “It’s amazing how many of our cross-cultural and cross-class encounters are limited not by hate or pride or shade, but by another equally insidious, less-discussed, emotion: embarrassment,” says Smith. With this we can infer that maybe Smith feels that her adoption of a new voice has made her far too different from those around her, especially the people her friend invited her to spend the night with. Like she explained, it is not a matter of feeling superior next to others or making judgments based on the different dialects spoken, it is a matter of feeling out of place. Of not being able to relate anymore like she used to because, after all, she now considers herself to speak a different voice that is not truly her own, and maybe for all the wrong reasons.
Perhaps Smith actually considers her Pygmalion experience a tragic one since, as she implies at the beginning of her essay, changing your native way of speaking is, in a way, considered a loss of identity. “Voice adaptation is still the original British sin,” Smith says, “Monitoring and exposing such citizens is a national pastime, as popular as sex scandals and libel cases.” (Smith 133) It is not simply a matter of being able to adjust to your surroundings, but it is almost like a betrayal to who you are and where you come from; it is almost considered as heinous as committing an actual crime. Thus, we might find ourselves confused with the contradictions Smith presents throughout her essay, but, in the end, there is a much deeper dilemma behind it. While being able to adapt your voice according to the people you are surrounded by, the places you find yourself in, and the situations you are exposed to might have many benefits, there will always be a certain feeling of guilt behind it due to the pressures of the societies we live in. It is possible that, in the end, we all are in possession of this so-called ability of having adaptable voices for a wide variety of situations, but the way we got t to achieve them are what determine whether or not they are a curse or a blessing, or a little bit of both. It seems that we can conclude that Smith constantly diminishes her supposedly new, borrowed voice and categorizes it as a curse since, unlike Shaw, Obama, and Shakespeare, she was not born with it. She achieved it by changing her old voice in order to fit in to her new life at the moment, which is the true crime of her actions.
Works Cited
Smith, Zadie. “Speaking In Tongues.” Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays. The Penguin Press, 2009. 133-148.