Intro of "Speaking in Tongues” by Zadie Smith

Assignment 2


Zadie Smith book “Speaking in Tongues” looked at how American biracial community faces a dual commitment to both heritages. She goes further to point out the bias or intolerance of un-simular cultures. Smith expressed this issue by characterizing it as voice. Ones voice represents skin tone, dialect, accent, and other attributes of one’s heritage. Her question to the reader was “how to combine biracialism” in America Society.

Living in a multiple culture society such as America there are so many ethnic groups and culture. Each culture is unique and diverse. For centuries, the differences of each unique culture have prevented the gathering of society as a whole. In Smith’s book there are those who live in Dream City have learned how to break down the communication bearer and speak in tongues.

The quotes that standout for me is the followings:

“Shakespeare’s negative capability is sociopolitical at root. Will had seen too many wild-eyed martyrs, too many executed terrorists, too many wars on the Catholic terror. He had watched men rage absurdly at rood screens and write treatises in praise of tables. He had seen men disemboweled while still alive, their entrails burned before their eyes, and all for the preference of a Latin Mass over a common prayer or vice versa. He understood what fierce, singular certainty creates and what it destroys. In response, he made himself a diffuse, uncertain thing, a mass of contradictory, irresolvable voices that speak truth plurally. Through the glass of 2009, “negative capability” looks like the perfect antidote to “ideological heroism”.

“Shakespeare was an artist and so had an outlet his father didn’t have – the many voiced theater. Shakespeare’s art, the very medium of it allowed him to do what civic officers and politicians can’t seem to: speak simultaneous truths”.

“You have no choice but to cross borders and speak in tongues”.