Because immigrants have always been particularly prone to repetition - it's something to do with that experience of moving from West to East or East to West or from island to island. Even when you arrive, you're still going back and forth; your children are going round and round. There's no proper term for it - original sin seems too harsh; maybe original trauma would be better.
Interpretation
The immigrant experience involves continuous movement and struggle, impacting generations.
Zadie Smith's quote reflects on the profound internal conflict and cyclical nature of the immigrant experience, highlighting the unending sense of displacement that accompanies leaving one's homeland. It emphasizes that even after settling in a new place, immigrants face a constant pull between their origins and their new environment, which can resonate through their children and descendants, creating what she terms 'original trauma' rather than 'original sin.'
In practice
During a speech about cultural diversity, one might refer to this quote to emphasize the shared challenges of immigrants.
You know, you don't expect everyone to be as educated as everyone else or have the same achievements, but you expect at least to be offered at least some of the opportunities, and libraries are the most simple and the most open way to give people access to books.
He did not consider if or how or why he loved them. They were just love: they were the first evidence he ever had of love, and they would be the last confirmation of love when everything else fell away.
We cannot be all the writers all the time. We can only be who we are. Which leads me to my second point: writers do not write what they want, they write what they can.
I think of reading like a balanced diet; if your sentences are too baggy, too baroque, cut back on fatty Foster Wallace, say, and pick up Kafka as roughage.
I never attended a creative writing class in my life. I have a horror of them.
I can't add. I don't understand basic science. Or anything else. But I can read anything. I've always been able to, and I've always liked to. Even if I didn't understand it, I liked to.
Let us be honest with each other. The threat to marriage is not the gays. It is a lack of loving commitment - whether it is found in the form of neglect, indifference, cruelty or adultery, to name just a few manifestations of the loveless desert in which too many marriages come to grief.
My mother moves so fast I do not even see it coming. But she slaps my face hard enough to make my head snap backward. She leaves a print that stains me long after it’s faded. Just so you know: shame is five-fingered.
No day is safe from news of you.
It is not healthy when a nation lives within a nation, as colored Americans are living inside America. A nation cannot live confident of its tomorrow if its refugees are among its own citizens.
The first effect marriage had on me was to increase my lack of interest in sex.... Actually our marriage was a sort of friendship with sexual privileges.
I have a very strong feeling that the opposite of love is not hate - it's apathy. It's not giving a damn.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.