Swing Time

“Oh, it’s very nice and rational and respectable to say that a woman has every right to her life, to her ambitions, to her needs, and so on—it’s what I’ve always demanded myself—but as a child, no, the truth is it’s a war of attrition, rationality doesn’t come into it, not one bit, all you want from your mother is that she once and for all admit that she is your mother and only your mother, and that her battle with the rest of life is over.”

The narrator longs for her mother’s undivided attention. The narrator’s mother is in many ways a role model—a Black woman who grew up in poverty, but doesn’t allow her past or society to limit her future as an intellectual with ambition and plans for change. But the narrator astutely points out that a child can never admire their mother for her independence because a child wants to be their mother’s only focus. Smith dedicates the novel to her own mother, highlighting the deeply personal nature of the relationships she is writing about.

“But to me a dancer was a man from nowhere, without parents or siblings, without a nation or people, without obligations of any kind, and this was exactly the quality I loved.”

The narrator values dancers for their anonymity and their lack of background. This feels liberating for the narrator, who, in Part 1, is starting to become aware of her own complex identity. Identity discovery and formation can be frightening, which explains why dance is so important to the narrator. Dance erases everything but her body and its relationship with the music, taking away obligations, nation, and familial ties. This implies that the narrator is seeking to get away from the elements that mark her identity.

“We knew that they, in their own time, had feared school, just as we did now, feared the arbitrary rules and felt shamed by them, by the new uniforms they couldn’t afford, the baffling obsession with quiet, the incessant correcting of their original patois or cockney, the sense that they could never do anything right anyway.”

Smith explores the ripple effects of generational cycles of shame. The parents of the narrator’s peers experienced embarrassment at school for their accents, their home lives, and their relative poverty; now, they pass down those feelings of shame to their children, while still too humiliated to get involved with their children’s school life. In turn, their children do not learn how to use education to better their lives.

“Something coldly objective took me over: that same instinct that allowed me to separate my voice from my throat as an object of consideration, of study, came to me now, and I looked at this boy and thought: yes, he is right and I am wrong, isn’t it interesting? I could have, I suppose, thought of myself as the true child and the boy as the counterfeit, but I didn’t do that.”

The narrator’s internalized racism runs so deep that when she meets her father’s white children, she gives her power and the influence of her father’s love. Suddenly, in comparison to white children, the narrator feels insufficient. Even though her father has devoted himself to her upbringing, she feels like she has lost a competition she didn’t even know she was participating in.

“I thought of all the kids from school who could have done my present job easily—who knew so much more than me about music, who were genuinely cool, truly “street,” as I was everywhere wrongly assumed to be—but who were as likely to turn up at these offices as go to the moon. I wondered: why me?”

As a young adult, the narrator feels like a fraud. She doesn’t believe she deserves the exciting opportunities she has had. While her white colleagues believe that her Blackness makes her hip, she sees herself as uncool and not knowledgeable about music—the antithesis of the people she grew up with. She wonders why she’s achieved this level of success, while they did not. This emphasizes that the narrator is still learning to accept herself and her identity.

“It became possible to read between the lines. Wasn’t it all a way of explaining power, in the end? The power that certainly exists in the world? Which few hold and most never get near? A power my old friend must have felt, at that point in her life, she utterly lacked?”

To be empathetic to the Tracey she no longer knows, the narrator contemplates Tracey’s desperation to gain power by adopting the teachings of gurus and conspiracy theories. The narrator can now understand that Tracey was acutely aware of her lack of power, and the fear that came with it. Tracey’s trajectory is part of the novel’s contemplation of how power is wielded and abused in society.

“And what are babies, I can remember thinking, if they can do this to women? Do they have the power to reprogram their mothers? To make their mothers into the kinds of women their younger selves would not even recognize? The idea frightened me.”

The narrator thinks of motherhood as something that will entrap her, as it did her own mother. This quote reveals a major character development. As a child, the narrator craved her mother’s undivided attention and found her mother odd for needing copious amounts of alone time for her own intellectual nourishment. As an adult, she recognizes that her mother wanted to retain her identity outside of her maternal role.

“That there might be any practical divergence between my mother’s situation and her own did not seem to occur to Aimee, and this was one of my earliest lessons in her way of viewing the differences between people, which were never structural or economic but always essentially differences of personality.”

This quote foreshadows conflict between Aimee and the narrator. Aimee’s privileged lens allows her to blame the poor for being poor; she is uninterested in considering the struggles of others as indicative of historical, structural, and cultural oppression. Because of the narrator’s upbringing and experiences as a Black woman in England, she can’t agree with Aimee’s view of the world. Through Aimee, Smith criticizes a popular conservative idea that individual responsibility can overcome systemic racial and socio-economic disparities.

“I wondered if it were possible for me, too, to become a person who revealed themselves later in life, much later, so that one day—a long time from now—it would be Tracey sitting in the front row of the Shaftesbury Theater, watching me dance, our positions reversed completely, my own superiority finally recognized by the world.”

As a child, the narrator wants to know if her future self will be different and better, a common desire for young kids and pre-teens. She wishes to be glorious, believing in the glamour and confidence that a metamorphosis can bring. This wish highlights the rivalry between the narrator and Tracey: She is simultaneously in awe of Tracey and also eager to claim superiority over her—the result of the power differential in their friendship.

“Was this a general rule? Did all friendships—all relations—involve this discreet and mysterious exchange of qualities, this exchange of power? Did it extend to peoples and nations or was it a thing that happened only between individuals? What did my father give my mother—and vice versa? What did Mr. Booth and I give each other? What did I give Tracey? What did Tracey give me?”

Thinking about the dynamics that inform friendships, the narrator sees all relationships—both between individuals and between societies—as exchanges of power. No one is free of this influence system: One is either the person who holds the power, or the person who cedes power to a more powerful friend. Furthermore, if relationships are reciprocal, the narrator wonders what she provides Tracey and what Tracey provides her. This foreshadows conflict in their relationship.

“I even had a sentimental vision of myself as one in a long line of gutsy brothers and sisters, music-makers, singers, musicians, dancers, for didn’t I, too, have the gift so often ascribed to my people?”

Singing is a source of power and strength for the narrator, a transcendent experience that helps her feel connected to her Black culture and identity. She acknowledges the stereotype of Black entertainers, but subverts it by recreating the stereotype as something to be proud of in the presence of Black music. This is an important moment of character development because the narrator so rarely embraces moments of self-empowerment.

“But isn’t there also a deep expectation of sameness between parent and child? I think I was strange to my mother and to my father, a changeling belonging to neither one of them, and although this is of course true of all children, in the end—we are not our parents and they are not us—my father’s children would have come to this knowledge with a certain slowness, over years, were perhaps only learning it fully at this very moment, as the flames ate the pinewood, whereas I was born knowing it, I have always known it, it is a truth stamped all over my face.”

As an adult, the narrator still struggles with her identity in context of her family. Having Black and white parents separates her from them—being half of each, she is not fully either, and her skin color is a constant reminder of living within a halfway identity. Even as an adult, she has not resolved these issues, which are heightened by her parents’ divorce and her nomadic lifestyle, which doesn’t allow her the time to figure out who she is. Despite this, she cannot easily ignore her race in favor of other elements of her identity.

“And of Tracey, so determined to jump off, exactly because she’d rather walk than be told which stop was hers or how far she was allowed to go. Well, wasn’t there something noble in that? Wasn’t there some fight in it, at least—some defiance?”

Smith uses the symbol of a train to represent the rapidity of life. Tracey is on a metaphorical train that she wants to jump from because she can’t control where the train stops or goes. The narrator admires this about Tracey, despite all of Tracey’s flaws, because the narrator also feels a loss of control over life. Tracey is radical: In her world, an insecure but exciting life is better than getting stuck on her metaphorical train.

“I didn’t know what to do with all the sadness. A hundred and fifty years! Do you have any idea how long a hundred and fifty years is in the family of man? She clicked her fingers, and I thought of Miss Isabel, counting children in for the beats of a dance. That long, she said.”

This quote is a sobering reminder of the burdens of history the narrator’s mother carries, a history that the narrator doesn’t have to deal with directly. One-hundred-and-fifty years of pain and loss has made enormous ripple effects on the descendants of enslaved people, taking an enormous psychological toll via racism and oppression. This quote also emphasizes how much dance has developed the narrator’s psyche. The clicking of her mother’s fingers reminds her of dance lessons, revealing that dance is still a part of the way the narrator interprets the world around her even though she is no longer a dancer herself.

“Tracey turned my way, and smiled, a melancholy but affectionate smile, or maybe it only carried the memory of affection. I saw the seven-, eight-, nine- and ten-year-old in her, the teenager, the little woman. All of these versions of Tracey were reaching across the years of the church hall to ask me a question: What are you going to do? To which we both already knew the answer. Nothing.”

Tracey is a symbol of the narrator’s growth and ambitions. The narrator experiences herself through Tracey’s gaze, which exposes the narrator’s vulnerabilities and flaws. This is not based on what Tracey says or does. Rather, the narrator gives this power to Tracey, projecting her insecurities onto her seemingly more assured friend. While the narrator knows Tracey feels affection for her, she also believes that Tracey judges the narrator with a critical eye and has already given up on her potential. The narrator’s perception of Tracey’s gaze and smile highlights the narrator’s reliance on Tracey, her admiration of Tracey, and her own low self-esteem.

“I thought of my mother’s intuition—‘Something serious happened to that girl!’—and I felt now that she was right as usual, and that if we had only asked Tracey the proper questions at the right moment and in a more delicate way we might have got the truth. Instead our timing was bad, we backed her and her mother into a corner, to which they both reacted predictably, with wildfire, tearing through whatever was in its path—in this case poor old Mr. Booth. And so we got something like the truth, quite like it, but not exactly.”

Tracey’s life is marked by trauma. The narrator has spent many years putting Tracey on a pedestal and assuming that Tracey was destined for greatness because of her style, confidence, and dance talent. But the narrator has a limited and biased view of Tracey, whereas the narrator’s mother sees Tracey with the clarity of adulthood. Here, Smith encourages her reader to think of Tracey as someone who needs help, but also implies that Mr. Booth didn’t do anything but stand in Tracey’s way. Still, the truth of the situation comes in layers: The narrator feels she’s closer to the truth about Tracey, though it is difficult to truly know everything about another person.

“The boys I’d known had had no passions, not really, they couldn’t afford them: it was the act of not caring that was important to them. They were in a lifelong contest with each other—and with the world—exactly to demonstrate who cared less, who among them gave less of a fuck. It was a form of defense against loss, which seemed to them inevitable anyway.”

The socio-economic status of the narrator’s neighborhood has made not caring a significant part of its male residents’ psyche. This effect is a defense mechanism against a world they subconsciously know doesn’t care about them: By proving that they care less, they can avoid the disappointment of their society’s abandonment. Notably, the narrator identifies that these boys can’t afford to have passions or interests—their self-defensive mode prevents them from experiencing the world in multi-layered ways.

“But don’t you realize how incredibly lucky you are, she said, to be alive, at this moment? People like us, we can’t be nostalgic. We’ve no home in the past. Nostalgia is a luxury. For our people, the time is now!”

Smith emphasizes that people from nonwhite communities must often find gratitude for their lives where they can. While people who are not from historically oppressed communities can afford to take happiness for granted, “people like us” must live in the present and for the future because their ancestors could not. It is both freeing and oppressing to have “no home in the past.” In not having the luxury of nostalgia, the narrator’s mother is robbed of an inherently human emotion. Still, she refuses to let this hold her back from loving her life with resilience and fortitude.

“It was very difficult for me, at the time, to understand a person who spoke like that. It was alien to me, as an idea—I hadn’t been raised that way. What response could such a man—the type who gives up all power—possibly expect from a woman like me?”

This quote reveals both the depth of the narrator’s issues with power and the sexism she sees as unavoidable in her society. She has not experienced men wanting to give up their power for her, although her father gave up much to take care of her when she was a child. As an adult, she has become accustomed to repressing any hint of her own power in relationships with women.

“She had now what she’d wanted and most needed all of her life: respect. Maybe it didn’t even matter to her any more what I did with my life. She didn’t have to take it as a judgment upon her any longer, or on the way she raised me.”

The narrator’s mother achieved the respect she always wanted—a goal so uncontroversial that we see just how little the narrator’s mother had in her life before politics. This quote also demonstrates the development of the narrator’s relationship with her mother. As two adults, they get along better. The narrator’s mother no longer needs to see her daughter as part of the equation for respect, so they can get to know each other as people rather than as combatants vying for the mother’s identity.

“I was twelve years behind her but I, too, felt my age among all those scandalously young girls whom we met in every compound, too beautiful, confronting us both, that hot afternoon, with the one thing no amount of power or money can return to you once it’s gone.”

Women are under constant pressure to look and be a certain way. The social capital of a woman often recedes as she gets older because society tends to value youth and beauty over experience and wisdom. Though the narrator sees the absurdity in this, she has internalized these aesthetics. Though Aimee is older than she is, she feels a kinship with Aimee; money can buy Aimee the appearance of youth, but she can never truly become young again.

“Finally, shame. A suspicious emotion, so ancient. We were always advising the girls in the academy not to feel it, because it was antiquated and unhelpful and led to practices of which we didn’t approve. But I felt it at last.”

Feminist movements and female empowerment ideals encourage women to rid themselves of shame. But shame is an “ancient,” if “unhelpful,” human emotion—a powerful and almost unavoidable motivator of low self-esteem. Though she preaches trying to get rid of feelings of shame, the narrator cannot help but succumb to it. Human nature cannot be so individualistic that shame disappears.

“She was worried about under-representation, she often was, which meant really that she was worried about what others might perceive as an under-representation, and whenever we had these conversations I had the eerie sensation of viewing myself as really being one of these things, not a person at all but a sort of object—without which a certain mathematical series of other objects is not complete—or not even an object but a kind of conceptual veil, a moral fig-leaf, protecting such-and-such a person from such-and-such a critique, and rarely thought of except when in this role.”

Smith criticizes the white guilt that characterizes white society’s concern about under-representation. Attempts to right the wrong of under-representation can be performative and therefore unproductive. For example, Aimee is a powerful white person who cares more about her image as an altruist than actually helping others. The narrator’s analysis of Aimee echoes her own concerns about race. Here, the narrator reflects that for Aimee, the narrator is just another Black body. The narrator feels objectified and therefore cannot trust her professional or personal relationship with Aimee.