COVER LETTER
The purpose for writing a critique is to evaluate somebody’s work (a book, an essay, a movie, a painting…) in order to increase the reader’s understanding of it. A critical analysis is subjective writing because it expresses the writer’s opinion or evaluation of a text. Analysis means to break down and study the parts. Writing a critical paper requires two steps: critical reading and critical writing. Analyzing Smith’s essay, I found out the intellectual problem about her essay.
The intellectual problem in this essay is Smith’s claim to only possess one voice, but that she in fact possesses several. The way that I descried the intellectual problem of this article is about Smith’s problem itself not the arguments that she described at her essay. Giving a clear summary and main claim on my introduction I continued describing the main points and examples on my body paragraphs. To make clear my points I used several examples and close reading strategy directly linking to the Smith’s article. Also, as a main claim of my essay I explained to the readers about that the text is clearly about X, but it’s also about Y. Which means this sort of argument might show how the essay’s style or rhetorical strategy adds an additional layer to its overt argument.
Azimdjon Gaziev
English 2150
Prof. Kristen Martin
Essay 1 “Speaking in Tongues”
March 3, 2017
INDISTINCT IDENTITY
In our contemporary era where the world has become a global village, it would not be a surprise to know that our society faces today more and more problems of social and racial issue. Particularly, in the essay “Speaking In Tongues”, Zadie Smith points out about the degree to which our voices can mark us as either standing in one camp or the other, or as straddling a discomforting middle ground. Even one’s accent carries with it a world of implications, mostly cultural, that act as the most immediate identification card one could possess. We hear someone speak with a bourgeois accent in the United States, and instantly assume they are of a lower or working class. In ‘Speaking in Tongues,” Zadie Smith begins by describing how she changed her voice from ‘working class’ to ‘high class Cambridge’. The intellectual problem in Smith’s essay is that she tells us on thing – that she is single voiced but yet demonstrates another that she has multiple voices throughout her essay.
Zadie Smith is a biracial Englishwoman, born to a white father and black mother. She took on her new voice when she went to University in Cambridge, because she believed that she could only become a serious writer and become one of the erudite people, if she spoke the way that they did. She believed that changing her voice would be a way to climb the social stairway. In her essay, “Speaking in Tongues,” Zadie Smith explores the distinction between those who possess and exercise a single voice and those who utilize a multiplicity of voices. Actually, Smith introduces herself with a voice that she acquired via her classy education at Cambridge and vocation in the literary world. However, she feels that she gained this voice at the expense of the voice from her childhood spent in the working-class London district of Willesden:
Hello. This voice I speak with these days, this English voice with its rounded vowels and consonants in more or less the right place—this is not the voice of my childhood. I picked it up in college, along with the unabridged Clarissa and a taste for port. Maybe this fact is only what it seems to be—a case of bald social climbing—but at the time I genuinely thought this was the voice of lettered people . . . This voice I picked up along the way is no longer an exotic garment I put on like a college gown whenever I choose—now it is my only voice, whether I want it or not. I regret it; I should have kept both voices alive in my mouth. (132)
In her personal introduction Smith presents her voice somewhat superficially. She begins the essay with the word “hello,” a rather generic salutation that publicizes little of Smith’s character. That is until her next sentence implies that the reader should have absorbed every detail of her identity from “this voice” that said “hello.” Smith then continues to define her voice simply by her pronunciation: as an “English voice with its rounded vowels and consonants in more or less the right place.” (140). Smith describes what people first hear in her voice, but gives nothing more than this most superficial classification. Furthermore, Smith categorizes her voice as “English,” as if there is only one accent and one identity to define some 50 million people. The most that the reader can absorb from this introduction is the properness of the grammar, suggesting the education she proceeds to describe. Thus, in this introduction, Smith mimics what people hear superficially upon first meeting her; she is simulating the way others receive and categorize her. The unwritten challenge to the reader is to not catalog her, but to continue to get to know her through her essay.
Moreover, the author of this article points out Obama’s “multiple voices”. She says that Obama has a special talent which is to be able to associate himself with any race and therefore is loved by all. He is able to adjust his speech according to the crowd he is speaking in front of. There have been many concerns that Obama lacks a “clear and unified voice.” The author even goes on to say that “it could be argued that he succeeded because he rarely misspoke, carefully tailoring his intonations to suit the sensibility of his listeners” (139). If this is the case then shouldn’t more people be aware of this issue or is this just the speech of the common angry citizen. Another thing that’s described in this article is the idea of “Joyce”. This is a girl who is bi racial and will do anything and everything in her power to let people know of her white heritage; so people don’t mistake her for being black. As the article continues however, she seems to come to terms with her two identities. She says she deliberately skips the box marked biracial and checks off the box marked black, she doesn’t want to fall into the category of the biracial people who want to deny their black race and take every opportunity to let it be known that they are also white. She considers herself to be “an unequivocal black writer” not a biracial one, just as she considers President Obama to be the first black president, not the first biracial one. Yet at the same time she also knows that they both have ’a double consciousness’, they both are black and white at the same time and that’s a good thing. Obama can speak in many voices, he can change his voice according to his audience and that is why he is so successful.
Consequently, in seeming contrast to Smith, she praises those writers particularly, George Bernard Shaw, President Obama, and Shakespeare for their ability to absorb and utilize so many different voices. Smith believes that multiplicity of voice is even a power when fully embraced by the individual. In Shakespeare’s plays “he is woman, man, black, white, believer, heretic, Catholic, Protestant, Muslim, Jew” (143). Smith’s choice of omitting the indefinite article before each adjective further emphasizes Shakespeare’s universality. He is no woman or man in particular, but instead omnipotent, creating characters who themselves speak in a multitude of voices and possess countless identities. Smith argues that such adaptability of voice is the ultimate freedom, freedom from a “single identity which would be an obvious diminishment” (143). Perhaps as a writer, Smith feels that she has limited her ability to share her experiences when she sought to take on the singular voice ascribed to the literary elite. Indeed, Shakespeare’s ability to assume the identities of so many different people gives him the power to relate to a majority of people who “have complicated back stories, messy histories and multiple narratives” (144).
However, Smith herself arguably has multiple narratives as a black woman from a working-class background trying to gain entry to the exclusively posh communities of Cambridge and the literary world, and her subsequent life in the United States. Given this history, is it possible that Smith has, as she says, only one voice? Perhaps on the shallowest level Smith’s use of language would suggest that she is, as she says, able to communicate with only one voice, that of the posh, literary elite. Yet, as we read her essay and encounter the multitude of examples she provides—of all classes, vocations, genders, and nationalities, from Eliza Doolittle and President Obama to Shakespeare and Thomas Macaulay—we come to realize that Smith is in fact possessed of a veritable symphony of voices. She is as comfortable referencing American culture as she is referencing her native British culture and she passes between both with incredible ease. Her ease with such material is the result of her multitude of experiences as a British-born woman, in the posh literary world, and in the United States. Thus, the reader must conclude that Smith is not, as she initially identifies, “single-voiced,” but in fact multi-voiced. Although she tempts the reader to categorize her, the variety of evidence she uses in her essay ensures that any such attempt fails. This multiplicity renders her essay more interesting and accessible to a greater number of people.
The tension in Smith’s essay is that she tells us one thing—that she is single voiced—yet demonstrates another—that she has multiple voices—throughout her essay. With this rhetorical strategy, Smith forces the reader to be more conscious of the societal predilection for categorizing people so as to lackadaisically understand them. Unsurprisingly, such cataloging provides nothing but the most superficial and even flawed understanding of a person. For example, if the reader is not aware of Smith’s rhetorical strategy they run the risk of leaving her essay with the embarrassing conviction that she is, just as she introduces herself, single-voiced. However, if the reader is more perceptive and questioning of the lacuna in Smith’s argument, then they see the multi-textured fabric of her identity. Thus the reader has not conformed to the societal obsession with classifying people. Perhaps this more conscientious reader will proceed through life either superficially categorizing others or allowing others to superficially categorize them. Smith’s essay, and in particular her rhetorical strategy, leads the reader to become more aware of the great variety of stories and conflicting identities that show us human.
WORK CITED
Smith, Zadie. “Speaking in Tongues.” The New York Review of Books 26 Feb. 2009.
30 Sept. 2012.