Analysis Of Zadie Smith's 'Speaking In Tongues'

Please, I beg you: drop whatever you’re doing and read “Speaking In Tongues,” Zadie Smith’s brilliant meditation on Barack Obama. The only thing that could make this wonderful essay better would be for it to be available as a podcast, too. That way, one could have the pleasure of enjoying it in both of the author’s beautiful voices, the speaking as well as the writing one. Many-voicedness is the theme of Smith’s piece, which is adapted from a lecture she delivered in December at the New York Public Library. She begins:
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.
She doesn’t mention Obama’s name until she’s a good thirteen hundred sparkling words in, and she gets there by way of a discussion of Shaw’s “Pygmalion” that is so absorbing that you almost forget to wonder, “Where’s she going with this?” And then you find out where she’s going with it, and you go with her, putting yourself in her ski
Naturally, Obama was born there. So was I. When your personal multiplicity is printed on your face, in an almost too obviously thematic manner, in your DNA, in your hair and in the neither this nor that beige of your skin—well, anyone can see you come from Dream City. In Dream City everything is doubled, everything is various. You have no choice but to cross borders and speak in tongues. That’s how you get from your mother to your father, from talking to one set of folks who think you’re not black enough to another who figure you insufficiently white. It’s the kind of town where the wise man says “I” cautiously, because “I” feels like too straight and singular a phoneme to represent the true multiplicity of his experience. Instead, citizens of Dream City prefer to use the collective pronoun