How great literature can change your life

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Thursday

I’m repurposing a post I wrote this past November on Zadie Smith’s novel Swing Time (2016) because it has become relevant in a new way. The novel, which I was teaching in a Postcolonial Literature class in Slovenia, has an episode featuring former African American tennis player Bryan Shelton. In recent news, Shelton’s son Ben has just been involved in a minor dust-up at the Australian Open after reaching the semi-finals.

Following his quarterfinal win over France’s Gael Monfils, Ben launched into the media, complaining, “I’ve been a little bit shocked this week with how players have been treated by the broadcasters.” After providing several examples, including a reporter who reportedly said, “Hey, Ben, how does it feel that no matter who you play in your next match, no one is going to be cheering for you?” Shelton concluded,

 I mean, may be true, but I just don’t think the comment is respectful from a guy I’ve never met before in my life. I feel like broadcasters should be helping us grow our sport and help these athletes who just won matches on the biggest stage enjoy one of their biggest moments. I feel like there’s just been a lot of negativity. I think that’s something that needs to change.”

Although Shelton’s father Bryan also gets no respect from the owner of a London pizza parlor in Zadie Smith’s novel, the staff are definitely cheering for him. In an episode featuring Shelton’s fourth-round run in the 1994 Wimbledon tournament, Smith shows how new alliances spring up in our globalized world. Those cheering include immigrants from Republic of Congo, Somalia, and Bosnia, along with narrator Fern, who is the daughter of an English father and an Afro-Jamaican mother.

That they are cheering is no surprise. Although we have become accustomed to players of color since the Williams sisters, Bryan Shelton was one of the very Black players in 1994 and was the first African American to win an ATP event since Arthur Ashe did so in 1978.

In the novel, the pizza parlor is run by Bahran, an Iranian who longs to belong to the privileged Anglo demographic. For instance, Bahran claims that polo is his favorite sport, causing his staff to explode with laughter. Fern observes in him

a flamboyant, comic rage that expressed itself in a constant obscene teasing of everyone around him—racial, sexual, political, religious teasing—and which almost every day resulted in a lost customer or employee or friend, and so came to seem to me not so much offensive as poignantly self-defeating.

Thinking at first that Fern is Persian because of her nose, Bahran is solicitous and complimentary. When he discovers her mother is from Jamaica, however, he turns on her, telling her that her people “don’t pay, or they fight, or they drug dealers. Don’t give me face! How you be offended? You know! Is truth.”

Because she needs the money, however, Fern tells the reader she “couldn’t afford to be offended.”

Tensions are turned up a notch when the restaurant television begins showing Bryan Shelton’s Wimbledon matches. Fern reports,

As it happened, I hadn’t been following Shelton had never heard of him really before [Somalian] Anwar pointed him out, but now I did follow him, along with Anwar I became his number-one fan. I brought little American flags to work on the days of his games…Together we cheered Shelton, danced around the place at each successful point, and as he won one match and then another, we began to feel like we, with our dancing and whooping, were the ones propelling him forward, and that without us he’d be done for. At times Bahram behaved as if he believed this, too, as if we were performing some ancient African voodoo rite. Yes, somehow we put a spell on Bahram just as much as Shelton, and as the days of the tournament passed and Shelton still refused to be knocked out I saw Bahram’s many other pressing worries…all slip away until his sole preoccupation was ensuring we did not cheer for Bryan Shelton, and that Shelton himself did not get to the Wimbledon final.

It all comes to a head when Shelton, in the third round, comes up Karim Alami, an Arab player from Morocco. The atmosphere in the pizza parlor becomes electric:

Their match was to start at two. Bahram arrived at one There was a great feeling of anxiety and anticipation in the place, delivery boys who were not meant to come till five came early, and the Congolese cleaner began working through the back of the kitchen at unprecedented speed in the hope she would reach front-of-house—and therefore the television—by the time the game began.

Throughout the match, Bahram chain-smokes Gauloises cigarettes and offers a running commentary that “had as much to do with eugenics as backhands and lobs and double faults.” This includes delineating the differences between Arabs and those from Sub-Saharan Africa:

The black man, he informed us, he is instinct, he is moving body, he is strong, and he is music, yes, of course, and he is rhythm, everybody know this, and he is speed, and this is beautiful, maybe, yes, but let me tell you tennis is game of the mind—the mind! The black man can be good strength, good muscle, he can hit ball hard, but Karim he is like me: he think one, two step in front. He have Arab mind. Arab mind is complicated machine, delicate. We invent mathematics. We invent astronomy. Subtle people. Two steps ahead. Your Bryan now he is lost.

“But,” Fern reports,

he was not lost: he took the set seven-five and Anwar took the broom away from the Congolese cleaner—whose name I did not know, whose name no one ever thought to ask—and made her dance with him, to some highlife he had going on the transiter radio he carried everywhere.

The euphoria does not last, however, as Shelton loses the next set 6-1, leading to a Bahran attack on Black Africans in general. “Wherever you go in world,” he tells Anwar, “you people at bottom! Sometimes at top White man, Jew, Arab, Chinese, Japan—depends. But your people aways lose.”

Meanwhile, with the score 2-1 sets in favor of Shelton, the game goes into a fourth set, at which point

we had stopped pretending to be a pizza place. The phone rang and no one answered, the oven was empty, and everybody was crammed into the small space at the front. I sat on the counter with Anwar, our nervous legs kicking the cheap MDF panels until they rattled. We watched these two players—in truth almost perfectly matched—battling towards an elongated, excruciating tiebreak that Shelton then lost, five-seven. Anwar burst into bitter tears.

And then, in a passage that my Slovenians and one Macedonian appreciated as it features a former countryman from the Yugoslav days,

“But Anwar, little friend: he have one more set,” explained the kindly Bosnian chef, and Anwar was as grateful as the man sitting in an electric chair who’s just spotted the governor through the Plexiglas, running down the hall.

When Shelton wins the fifth and deciding set, the reaction is electric:

Anwar turned his radio up full blast and every kind of dance burst forth from me, winding, stomping, shuffling—I even did the shim-sham. Bahram accused us all of having sex with our mothers and stormed out.

He then, however, figures out a way to salvage some self-respect. Recall that, up to this point, he has been unloading on Shelton and his employees for their African heritage. Now he plays the one card he has left. Showing Fern a photo of Shelton as she is taking phone orders, he says,

“Look close. Not black. Brown. Like you.”
“I’m working.”
“Probably he is half-half, like you. So: this explains.”
I looked not at Shelton but at Bahram, very closely. He smiled.
“Half-winner,” he said.
 I put the phone down, took my apron off and walked out.

Bryan Shelton, in other words, is Black until it serves a racist agenda to categorize him as White. Bahram would be sure to make this point even more emphatically in the case of Bryan’s mixed-race son Ben, whose skin is lighter than his father’s.

These passages get at the heart of Smith’s vision, which is that citizens from the former colonies are transforming the motherland, turning it into a vibrant but bewildering new entity in which traditional distinctions are overwhelmed and new lines are drawn.

Of course, this is also leading to the rise of rightwing nationalism in many nations, along with immigrants who—like the Iranian Bahran—dream of joining those in power. Throughout American history we have seen various groups seeking to join the upper echelons of our caste system and become “White,” including the Irish, the Scots, the southern Italians, the Greeks, the Poles, and so on. Such longing may have played a deciding role in the 2024 election as it appears that certain Latinos, in spite of Donald Trump depicting them as “rapists and murders,” were willing to vote for him. Trump also drew more support than expected from South and East Asians. How many Bahrams do we have, one wonders–-which is to say, how many are willing to denigrate the descendants of Black Africa in order to become acceptable to White America? What are they willing to sell out to achieve acceptance?

For their part, Barack Obama and Kamala Harris, despite being mixed race, did not choose to become Black, despite Trump’s claims. America’s caste system is such that they were inevitably “cast” into that identity. To their credit, they embraced it and became inspirational figures. But race continues to be a major force—maybe the major force—in American political life.

Which is why Postcolonial Literature classes such as the one I was teaching in Slovenia are so vital. The entire world is experiencing cultural explosions like those described by Smith, and writers everywhere are exploring them. Teaching this class, which was made up of straight-up Slovenians, hyphenated Slovenians (Serbian-Slovenian, Sudanian-Slovenian), and Erasmus students from Germany, Belgium, Macedonia, and Turkey, made this clearer than ever to me.