Zadie Smith: ‘It’s now natural to look left and think: Who the f*** are you?’

Literary titan Zadie Smith has said London life is harder now and it has become “very, very natural to look to your left and think: ‘Who the f*** are you?'”.

Smith was arguing that the erosion of Britain’s once “incredible” welfare system has created inequality and made differences between neighbours “existential”, during an interview with pop megastar Dua Lipa at the capital’s Southbank Centre on Saturday.

The artists were discussing Smith’s debut novel White Teeth, published in 2000 when she was 24 years old, which follows the Iqbal and Jones families living in north-west London from 1975 to the turn of the century.

The parents are friends, and also immigrants, and “trying to kind of work out how to live in this country”, Smith told the crowd, gathered for Lipa’s London Literature Festival Programme marking the venue’s 75th anniversary.

Grammy winner Lipa, 31, put to her that immigration is “still such a big dividing line in UK politics right now with Brexit and Reform and protests about small boats”, and asked how London today compares to the 80s and 90s.

Smith explained that White Teeth’s characters live in the falling apart “dreg ends” of north-west London, but in the context of an “incredible, historic welfare system” with free education, subsidised housing and free healthcare.

Zadie Smith published White Teeth in 2000 (Michael Crabtree/PA)

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“It is one of the most progressive moments of human history, certainly in the history of this country,” she said, telling Lipa how her father – born in 1925 – had to leave school at 13 because he could not afford the uniform.

“So we made it, it was a revolution, a revolution for the poor, a revolution for the working class, for the lower middle class.

“It doesn’t mean that all the lives of White Teeth are perfect – they have their arguments but they’re not existential.

“When the person next to you is in the same classroom, when you’re living in basically decent housing, when you hurt yourself and then you can go to hospital and be treated just like the rich kid down the road – then the differences become interesting, sometimes annoying, but not existential.

“Now they’re existential, that’s a different matter.

“When you can’t get a job, when there’s no housing, when your schools are falling apart, when the hospitals are falling apart, now it feels existential.

“It’s not that there is such an extraordinary traumatic difference between these faiths – it’s that people have no expectation of an equal experience with their neighbour.”

Smith is the author of a number of novels, including On Beauty (Steve Parsons/PA)

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Royal Society of Literature fellow Smith, who grew up and now lives in the area, said she was not jealous of the private school pupils nearby.

She praised her state education as something “meaningful” that “held me in incredibly good stead throughout my life – I can talk to anyone – the posh kids up the hill, not so much.

“I think now when you look at my neighbourhood – the same schools, the same situations – everything is harder, everybody is poorer, everybody is struggling more.

“It becomes very, very natural to look to your left and think: ‘Who the f*** are you?’

“That is an economic and structural question”.

Dua Lipa interviewed the author (Doug Peters/PA)

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The novelist and essayist referenced the North African symbol Sankofa which she said means “take back what it needs”.

Smith added: “You’re not going to take back everything, right? You don’t want the LGBTQ politics of the 80s – no, you don’t want that.

“You don’t want the racial prejudice you find in this book back, you don’t want that. But do you want the healthcare and the schools and the education? I think you do.

“So it’s about looking back and seeing what was a value, and what was value to me was a social democracy that basically functioned, and might function again if people cared about it, wanted it, and believed it could happen again.”

White Teeth propelled her to fame and her response was to keep on writing, she told the audience, speaking the day before her birthday.

Reflecting how she handled the early stardom, she said: “My reaction was kind of defensive, I felt like people envied me and I didn’t want them to envy me.”

The author of NW and Swing Time added: “I got an email, I think, saying: ‘Do you want to be the the judge at Cannes?’ And I was like, no.

“And that started out the whole decade where like people would ask me to do things and I’d be like, no.

Smith addressed finding fame at a relatively young age for an author (Joe Giddens/PA)

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“And now I’m 51 and I think oh that might have been fun to be a judge at Cannes, you didn’t have to be such a bluestocking.”

Lipa put it to Smith that “it must have been crazy for you that your youth was just as much a topic as the work itself”.

Smith responded: “This was the thing, and it was also the era of, like, you know, people like Lily Allen, Amy Winehouse, like people also from the ends who I would see around, and you could see what was going on with young women and British papers and how bad it could get.

“Certainly not for a writer to the same degree, but it was just unpleasant and I just didn’t really want any of that.”

An interviewer at an English paper once asked for her favourite writers, she said, telling the crowd: “I think as one of them I said Toni Morrison, and the journalist laughed.

“And it’s really hard to put yourself back in that mindset where it was like comically woke to mention, you know, an African American female writer who, by the way, won the Nobel, but in England was still nothing apart from I guess to other black women who were reading them.

“Those kind of attitudes were pretty exhausting, I think, for me.”

She added: “I think there was a kind of sense that in that late 90s, early noughties, what people really wanted to be was famous, so if you’d written the book you must have only written it for that purpose – so… ‘wouldn’t you also like to go on Dancing With The Stars… or Big Brother?’

“And occasionally I think about if I said yes to all those things, what would my life look like now? What if I’d gone on Big Brother in, like, 2001? Jesus.”