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.
The optimist in me wants to believe sexuality will eventually become like handwriting: there’s no right way and wrong way to do it. We’re all just wired differently. It's also worth noting that when you meet someone, you never bother to ask if he’s right or left-handed. After all: does it really matter to anyone other than the person holding the pen?
The elephant, not only the largest but the most intelligent of animals, provides us with an excellent example. It is faithful and tenderly loving to the female of its choice, mating only every third year and then for no more than five days, and so secretly as never to be seen, until, on the sixth day, it appears and goes at once to wash its whole body in the river, unwilling to return to the herd until thus purified. Such good and modest habits are an example to husband and wife.
In the days that follow, he begins to remember things about Moushumi, images that come to him without warning while he is sitting at his desk at work, or during a meeting, or drifting off to sleep, or standing in the mornings under the shower. They are scenes he has carried within him, buried but intact, scenes he has never thought about or had reason to conjure up until now.
Living under the perpetual and pervasive threat of racism seems, for black men and black women, to quite literally reduce lifespans.
It's never a good idea to organize society in a way that depletes the energy of half the population. We discovered this with women decades ago, and now it's time to realize it with introverts.
Married couples who quarrel bitterly every day may really need each other as deeply as those who appear to be desperately in love.
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