Zadie Smith on discovering the secret history of Black England: ‘Into my ignorance poured these remarkable facts’

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Zadie Smith on discovering the secret history of Black England: ‘Into my ignorance poured these remarkable facts’
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When the novelist first read Gretchen Gerzina’s 1995 book Black England, she discovered the complex and unexpected lives of black people in England before the abolition of slavery. Two decades on, the stories still have the power to astonish

When she arrived in London, she stayed in the Adelaide hotel where “for the first time in my life I was in a place where I was treated according to my deportment, without reference to my complexion. I felt as if a great millstone had been lifted from my breast. Ensconced in a pleasant room, with my dear little charge, I laid my head on my pillow, for the first time, with the delightful consciousness of pure, unadulterated freedom.

The past is not to be played with – but who can resist using it as a tool? We bend history to our will, for purposes as much personal as political. In 1999, for example, I wanted to know – for reasons of my own self-esteem – that the history of the African diaspora was not solely one of invisible, silent suffering. I wanted to hear about agency, heroism, revolt.

Truly revolutionary individuals, like Douglass, are always rare. They are at least as hard to find in the 21st century as they were in the 18th or 19th. One role of the historian is surely to keep the names and memories of such anomalous individuals as a present concern, to remind us of what is possible, politically and personally, on this benighted planet. But I confess I am also moved and inspired by less perfected lives. By half-baked pressure groups and misguided ladies’ societies.

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