Smith Family Christmas Analysis

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Postcolonial author Zadie Smith offers “a new rhythm of life” in her fiction (Fanon 1442). Born in London, England to a Jamaican mother and British father, Smith’s stories of multicultural families and the-search-for-self narrative examine the postcolonial world with humor. Her novels and essays, including White Teeth, The Autograph Man, and NW, invoke the existence of a new type of character, the displaced but hopeful hybrid. Psychiatrist and philosopher Frantz Fanon describes postcolonial writers as those who “reply to the expectant people by successive approximations, and makes his way, apparently alone but in fact helped on by his public, toward the seeking out of new patterns, that is to say national patterns” (1443). Smith’s essay …show more content…
“The Smith family lived in London,” the author writes, “in a half-English, half-Irish council estate called Athelstan Gardens, one black family squished between two tribes at war” (Smith 226). Smith describes her mother as usually wearing an “exotic shift dress and cornrows” in her hair (226). She also describes her mother as a Jamaican “outdoor child” meaning one of many siblings (“certainly more than twenty”) who come from one father but many mothers. Smith’s mother controls the Christmas traditions. “Smith Family Christmas” not only provides intimate detail about the craziness that almost all families experience over the Christmas holiday, but her essay reflects on the craziness experienced when a child is born into a mixed-race family. Smith alludes to rules and traditions that must be followed lest a child go against mother. “On this most sacred of days,” Smith recollects, uncle Denzil wanted to do “the things we do not do because we’d always done them another way, our way—a way we’d all hated, to be sure, …show more content…
“The storyteller once more gives free reign to his imagination,” says Fanon, “He makes innovations and he creates a work of art” (1443). Smith’s novels and essays maintain a certain amount of homogeny, telling stories of multicultural families during times of extreme cultural difficulty. She writes about the consequences of colonialism, mainly about failed attempts to pass on traditions and culture, and of ethnic identity. Smith’s realism and dedication to letting her characters speak for themselves in their native voices place her near the top of the most important postcolonial writers of the twenty-first

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