Zadie Polonius And Franz Poem by gershon hepner

“Each man must be true to his selves, in the plural, ”
declares Zadie Smith. The problem is neural.
The brain on the left side must speak to the right,
in the same way that right-minded people don’t fight
with those who are wrong, except when it’s time
to vote or to pray. I have two selves that rhyme,
There’s one that is always correct: when dissected,
it views never need to be changed or corrected,
and another that always is wrong, which the one
that’s always correct doesn’t mind, since it’s fun
to have someone to play with and tease as a brother
and sister will do all the time. Do not smother
one self with another, but let them be plural,
remaining, long after they’ve grown up, more puerile
than my two granddaughters. It isn’t erroneous
to one’s selves being true, thus updating Polonius.
Since this may involves often changing your mind,
do this, with one self leaving one self behind.
“What have I in common, ” asked Kafka, “with Jews? ”
The answer’s, “One self plus another. Both choose! ”

Dedicated to my two twin granddaughters, Eve and and Ada, who are far from puerile and always true to themselves. Inspired by Pankaj Mishra’s review of Zadie Smith’s “Changing My Mind” (“Other Voices, Other Selves: Zadie Smith looks at books, movies and her own history, ” NYT, January 17,2010) :

There is little hint of Smith’s culturally diverse background in her essays on (mostly Hollywood) movies and stars; they belong recognizably to an Anglo-American tradition of writing about cinema that alternates between masochistic reverence and slash-and-burn japery. And Smith resembles a French avant-gardist of the 1950s and ’60s rather than a postcolonial writer in her most ambitious essay, “Two Directions for the Novel, ” which attacks the metaphysical pretensions of the “lyrical-realist” tradition that evidently dominates “Anglophone” fiction. In this essay (which compares Joseph O’Neill’s “Netherland” with Tom McCar¬thy’s “Remainder”) , Smith passes over the many novels from outside the West that have helped expand traditional bourgeois notions of self and identity. Yet her essay on Barack Obama is replete with the postcolonial-cum-postmodernist themes — hybridity, mimicry and ambivalence — that professors of literature and cultural studies commonly employ in American and British universities. Smith’s hope that Obama’s “flexibility of voice” may lead to “flexibility in all things” derives not so much from hardheaded political analysis as from academic high theory, which assumes that those who live between cultures best represent and articulate the human condition today. According to Smith, the moral of Obama’s story is that “each man must be true to his selves, plural.” On this point, at least, Smith is ideologically consistent. In fact, the idea that “the unified singular self is an illusion” could be the leitmotif of this collection. It allows Smith to revisit her own early assumptions and to question such essentialist notions as “black woman-ness.” Reflecting on Kafka’s ambivalence about his ethnic background, she writes: “There is a sense in which Kafka’s Jewish question (‘What have I in common with Jews? ’) has become everybody’s question, Jewish alienation the template for all our doubts. What is Muslimness? What is femaleness? What is Polishness? What is Englishness? These days we all find our anterior legs flailing before us. We’re all insects, all Ungeziefer, now.”


1/18/10