Zadie Smith Speaking In Tongues Summary

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An Orchestra of Voices:
Zadie Smith’s use and explanation of voice in “Speaking in Tongues”.
Every language, every culture, and every person has their own voice. Some people may have multiple voices, some people may have one. But we all have a voice. Our voice changes with us as we grow, experience new things, and essentially just move throughout our lives. Our voices don’t have to stay strictly the same forever, and these experiences are also ways we can develop new and additional voices. In the article (based on a lecture given at the New York Public Library in December 2008) “Speaking in Tongues”, Zadie Smith explains how sometimes we as people will change our voice as time goes on based on who we associate ourselves with, and in Smith’s …show more content…

I had read the article multiple times before I listened to it, and while I did catch on to a lot of Smith’s tone and voice, listening to it made a huge difference for me. Smith stated, “to be honest I’m not sure that it is a lecture, it’s more like an orchestra of voices that I’ll try to conduct the best I can.” She defines the “orchestra of voices” as her using examples of voice from Eliza Doolitle, her own brothers, President Barack Obama, Joyce the Tragic Mullato, Macbeth, Stephen Greenblatt, Lord Thomas Macaulay, and Frank O’Hara. Each of these crucial instruments to her lecture, she explained what voice meant to her, and how to find your voice, and how to use your voice to define who you …show more content…

This lecture was given one month into his first term in office as the President of the United States, and she uses a lot of examples of how he used his voice during his campaign and how he would shift his language and vocabulary in a very non-manipulative way. He wasn’t changing his opinion on his political stances, only in a way that he could connect to his current audience. As you read on into the lecture, it gives an example of President Obama on 60 Minutes shortly after he had won the 2008 election. President Obama said, “Hey, I’m not stupid, man, that’s why I’m president,” and we saw him shift into the voice of his childhood. Smith speaks of a Dream City and describes it as “a place of many voices, were the unified singular self is an illusion”, a place that Obama was naturally born into. She explains that Dream City citizens rarely use the pronoun “I”, but rather focus more on using “we”. She notes how Obama used this throughout his campaign, and he used it to draw his audiences together. He never wanted to them to feel as though he was singling them out and away from him, but instead that they were working together for his goals of his hopeful presidency of the United States of

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