Reflections on the beauty of Zadie Smith

Tonight is the last night of the night shift, yeah! During the week, I managed to finish Bill Bryson’s book and this one by Zadie Smith. It was a very nice read.

I was wondering why it was called “On Beauty”. I thought about “beauty” from various angles.

More superficially, beauty in appearance and size. It was interesting how Smith mentioned the size of each woman, her own view of women’s beauty, as well as making some comments about what society calls beauty. I thought it was intriguing how African/Black women had different views on size and beauty depending on, so to speak, how white they are on the inside. That is, the more ethnically connected, the less inclined that woman was to value being skinny, having large breasts, and a round butt as beautiful. Kiki, the main female character, was obese, but she was constantly described as beautiful, even by other women. The beauties in the paintings referenced in the book would be judged obese by today’s society. However, these paintings are the lifetime works of men, yet more men devote a life time to study. They are valued by today’s society, in the millions. How contradictory and incongruous. What is the standard of beauty that society would have us believe?

There is the idea that “beauty” is innocence. In the story, Levi was captivated by the plight of Haitians and poverty in general. Despite being a middle-class suburban teenager, he found himself fighting, even, in the end, potentially sacrificing his own future, for a town with whom, on the surface, he has nothing in common. It was simply recognizing that those in poverty were made of the same essence as him. That was enough “glue” to stick it to them. He has no other redeeming quality, yet I thought his naivete was beautiful. How many of us can give up so much, for something so distant.

Next I come to the beauty of strength. If I had written this book and called it On Beauty, it would be for Kiki. Obese. Black. Menopausal. How can a woman be beautiful, whose belly hangs over the elastics of her leggings, which extends beyond the handles of a seat? Being kind, generous, genuine. She is the mother-to her children, her husband and her friends. Putting the needs of others before her own, she is the “care-after”. Maybe that’s why she forgave her husband’s infidelities. However, a genuine right to be herself led her to both feel and express the betrayal and disappointment she felt. Yes, “right to be oneself”. I really liked that expression. One needs to be taught that we all have the right to be ourselves. It is a God-given right. Otherwise, he would not have made us the way we are. Because we are allowed to be ourselves, we are allowed to be possessive of the love of our lives and to feel pain and jealousy. It is something I have yet to learn myself. I live in the shadow of what others consider beautiful. It is the root of my problem. Maybe that’s why I know, at least on an intellectual level, that I’m not beautiful.

So the natural question would be, how does one feel beautiful? How does one find the right to be oneself? From the book he would suggest “belonging”: the sense of belonging that one is not alone, one is validated by others in that group. Perhaps it’s just a reflection of my own lack of belonging that I find the book poses this problem. In many ways, I think all the characters in the book are looking for their belonging, their identity. Clearly, family is a place where one can feel accepted. After all, blood is thicker than water, the saying goes. This indescribable bond sometimes only emerges when the storm of life rages. But what interested me was Levi’s sense of friendship in suffering in the book. It is perhaps through the lens of youth that the beauty of humanity comes into sharper focus.

It leads to a less prominent idea of ​​beauty: the beauty of justice. I guess I shouldn’t say exactly what happened because it’s kind of the climax of the book. How is poverty fixed? If a poor man steals to feed his family, despite everything, he is despised by society. Would voting for Hilary or Obama fix it? One finds that answer through history, I would have thought. Perhaps social justice is as elusive as beauty, seductive but unattainable. However, I am not for one minute advocating complacency. Like my theory about suffering, I think that perhaps its enigma, its unattainability, impels us to constantly fight for justice, for beauty. Because, perhaps, beauty knows no limits.