Decolonize X?
Zadie Smith's 2013 story "The Embassy of Cambodia" begins with an enigma.1 A new embassy appears in the district of Willesden in North London, catching the attention of two individuals who have never met: the unnamed narrator who poses as the spokesperson for "the people of Willesden," and a migrant worker named Fatou. We learn very little about the embassy, except that a badminton game is going on uninterrupted behind its wall. It soon becomes apparent that the story is not really about Cambodia or the embassy — even the game is merely a formal conceit. The story is divided into twenty-one sections, corresponding to the twenty-one-point scoring system of badminton. Each section is headed with the result of a rally: "0-1," "0-2," "0-3," and so on. The binary structure of the score-headings mirrors the story's alternation between the narrator and Fatou, and the lopsided game reflects a rigid power hierarchy: Fatou, who works as a servant for the Derawal family, is exploited by her employer; a newcomer to Willesden, she also finds herself marginalized by the local community. This imbalance of power extends to the narrative voice: the I-narrator has a quasi-omniscient capacity to perceive and editorialize about Fatou's thoughts, while Fatou's point of view is strictly limited.
If "Embassy" takes the form of a badminton game, Fatou seems to be the loser (though one could debate who the winner is). The story ends by confirming her powerlessness: having been fired by the Derawals, she sits alone with her bags by the bus stop opposite the embassy. But midway through the story, Smith introduces an alternative form to destabilize the binary predictability of the badminton game. In section "0-9," the narrator remarks,
The fact is if we followed the history of every little country in this world — in its dramatic as well as its quiet times — we would have no space left in which to live our own lives or to apply ourselves to our necessary tasks, never mind indulge in occasional pleasures, like swimming. Surely there is something to be said for drawing a circle around our attention and remaining within that circle. But how large should this circle be?
This is a comment on Fatou's fascination with the looks and attire of a Cambodian woman exiting the embassy. If Fatou's interest seems trivial, the narrator defends her by noting that "we, the people of Willesden," are the same. The image of the malleable circle, then, redefines the relationship between Fatou and the narrator. Rather than positioned on opposite sides, as in badminton, they are now the centers of two overlapping circles. Each person is free to expand or contract their circle of attention, regardless of their social position. By aligning Fatou with the narrator, Smith seems to be gesturing toward an ethics of sympathetic connection, recalling her homage to E. M. Forster in On Beauty.
The collision of forms in "Embassy" offers a test case for recent formalist scholarship. Caroline Levine has made a powerful argument for the agency and potentiality of form, broadly defined as "all shapes and configurations, all ordering principles, all patterns of repetition and difference."2 Because art and politics share an investment in distributions and arrangements, aesthetic formalism opens up surprising affordances for political and social projects. When different forms collide, they can disrupt or reshape the status quo and thus enable social change. Building on Levine's work, Anna Kornbluh advances a formalist theory of realism. Far from being a simple mimetic portrayal, realism amounts to a speculative project that organizes and mediates collective life. Defining form as "composed relationality," Kornbluh approaches realism in terms of "its propensity to abstract social relations into their essential configurations, to fathom form as essential social infrastructure."3
According to Levine and Kornbluh, scholars have paid too much attention to formlessness and to historical explanations, and as a result have overlooked what forms can do. One of the strongest appeals of their work is the belief that forms are inherently utopian because they are infinitely reformable. That's why Levine favors formal collision over historical causation, and portability over specificity. And that's why Kornbluh is less interested in referential details than in "sustained repetitions, delimited contours, performative conjurings, and synthetic abstractions."4 But one might wonder if Levine and Kornbluh can afford to deemphasize historical particulars only because those particulars are familiar enough. The fresh insights revealed by their formalist reading of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights are premised on the fact that the historical "content" of those classic novels has been extensively studied. Yet what happens when we shift our attention from Yorkshire to Cambodia? How might formalism, while undoubtedly potent for the study of canonical literature, apply to other spaces — spaces that are inscribed and marginalized by what Anibal Quijano has memorably termed the "coloniality of power"?5
The idea that formalism can be conducive to decolonial thought might sound counter-intuitive. After all, decolonial scholarship is characterized by a longstanding suspicion of existing forms. For Walter Mignolo and others, decoloniality names a project of "delinking" and "undoing" Eurocentric ways of seeing, thinking, and knowing.6 But Levine's and Kornbluh's insight that no social or political project can do without form helps us articulate a decolonial formalism: decolonial critique benefits from extending questions of historical contingency to those of formal contingency; conversely, a decolonial perspective complements formalist inquiry by bringing otherness into view. If Kornbluh's formalism "poses an alternative way to think about infinity, as unavailable to perception but nonetheless thinkable or writable," a decolonial formalism shifts emphasis from infinity to alterity. It prompts us to ask: how does form enable or disable an ethical relation to unseen strangers?
Let us return to Zadie Smith's elastic circle. The question "how large should this circle be?" is as much a diegetic concern for the narrator as an aesthetic one for Smith, a prominent writer in the emerging genre of the "global novel."7 How large should a writer's circle be when it is as impossible to shed light on every corner of the world as it is to focus exclusively on local affairs? That same question applies to the consumer of global fiction. How much historical knowledge is required for a proper understanding of "Embassy"? How much do we need to know about Cambodia's colonial and post-independence history? And what about the trans-continental route that brought Fatou from Ivory Coast to London?
"How large should this circle be?" — If Smith does not offer a direct answer to this question, we nevertheless see her characters' repeated attempts to enlarge their circles. In the next section, Fatou puts "a version of this question" to her friend Andrew during a conversation about the Holocaust, Hiroshima, and Rwanda. She gets some basic facts wrong, but it becomes clear that she has only a superficial interest in history: what she is really doing is comparing her own suffering with other people's suffering. Andrew shows "superior knowledge" by explaining what happened in Hiroshima, but Fatou only feels "the same vague impatience with it as she did with all accounts of suffering in the distant past." As for Cambodia, such terms as "Old People" and "New People" mean nothing to her at all. The narrator seems more knowledgeable, as she mentions the genocide and other atrocities committed by the Khmer Rouge. But her musings quickly shift to her neighbors in Willesden: "In Willesden, we are almost all New People, though some of us, like Fatou, were, until quite recently, Old People, working the land in our various countries of origin." Later, when Andrew explains the Khmer Rouge's forced evacuation of Phnom Penh, Fatou only gives a confused response: "But sometimes it's true that things are simpler in the country."
Smith imagines the broadening of attention to distant others while recognizing the essentially local basis of all perception. At the same time, she cautions against the all-too-common tendency to project one's own pain onto others' and to turn specific histories of violence into general metaphors of human suffering. One might argue that "Embassy" is charged with dramatic irony. Surely Smith's readers — especially the readers of The New Yorker where "Embassy" first appeared — would know better than Fatou. Yet I want to suggest that it is not a question of "superior knowledge." We can always historicize the embassy's presence or situate Cambodia within today's geopolitical matrix. But Smith's point is that most of us are like Fatou, for whom Cambodia is just some vague impressions or a name that lends itself to an empty form, which shapes our perception of the world by virtue of its emptiness. Smith's story might send us to Wikipedia, but it more powerfully foregrounds our mundane formalism by delving into the familiar impulse to translate distant realities into flat, impenetrable forms.
Smith even tries to represent this mundane formalism with yet another form: the embassy of Cambodia. This building, as we have seen, produces order in the story — as a recurring image, as the site of the badminton game, as a point of connection between Fatou and the narrator. Embassies, of course, are institutions facilitating diplomacy and travel, but that is the one function not performed in the story. Instead, the embassy building exists as a sort of bare form: it is eye-catching but impenetrable. The mystery of the badminton game is deepened by the fact that the players remain unseen. Who are those people? Why are they there? The story at once invites and forestalls these questions through the back-and-forth movement of the shuttlecock and the rhythmic "Pock, smash. Pock, smash." Far from frustrating us, however, the lack of answers encourages our contemplation of these enigmatic forms. The embassy building, then, gives an uncanny representation of how form operates throughout the story: by attraction and blockage. If Fatou and the narrator are preoccupied with distant strangers, they are only interested in them as abstract forms. Those strangers, one might say, are the perennial losers of the game, who register their presence through erasure and whose silence spurs the protagonists' curiosity and introspection.
One lesson of Smith's story is that we are better formalists than historians. The second lesson — or rather, a provocation — is that forms, in all their multiplicity and vivacity, are embedded with ethical questions. If, as Smith's narrator says, it is impossible to "follow the history of every little country of this world," then what do we do with the compulsive formalization of distant others? The problem with the narrator and Fatou is not their limited knowledge but their self-absorption, which reduces alterity to a multitude of forms. The story ends with the local residents walking past Fatou. "We worried for her," but no one does anything to help her. Instead, "We watched her watching the shuttlecock. Pock, smash. Pock, smash. As if one player could imagine only a violent conclusion and the other only a hopeful return." By foregrounding the act of watching, Smith foregrounds our contemplation of the narrator and Fatou, reminding us that they — as well as the loyal friend Andrew and the villainous Derawals — are merely literary forms drawn from various archetypes and conventions. Yet one could also say: Fatou, the narrator, and the reader are all spectators, watching a game without seeing its players. If Fatou is only watching a game (as opposed to participating in it), then the final line conveys an unsettling sense of alterity. The "violent conclusion" is not hers, but someone else's. The power imbalance depicted in the story is thus defamiliarized: the lopsided game is not the story's structuring form but points to an inequality that fails to enter — let alone disrupt — Fatou's or the narrator's circle of attention.
I want to conclude by briefly turning to another story: Joseph O'Neill's "The First World" (2018).8 Smith's critique of O'Neill's lyrical style is well-known, but a comparison of "Embassy" and "The First World" reveals surprising similarities. Both writers play with the mundane formalism relatable to every reader of contemporary global fiction. Where they differ is in the effects produced by their abstraction of otherness.
"The First World" contains a frame narrative: the narrator, a recently divorced man living in New York, runs into an old friend named Arty. They go to a bar, and Arty starts telling the story of Gladys, the former nanny of his children. Gladys is in her sixties and has returned to her hometown in Trinidad. Though Arty is no longer her employer, he sends her money whenever she needs help and buys plane tickets for her yearly visits to her son in the US. Later, Arty would even host her in his apartment, much to the dismay of his children. Growing impatient with Arty's story, the narrator leaves the bar before his friend finishes. But he is inspired by Arty's generosity, which renews his hope that some "strangers of good faith" would mail back the wallet he lost three weeks ago. He still has not cancelled his credit cards or bought a new wallet because, as Arty's selflessness makes him believe, "The world would return it."
Compared with the ominous ending of "Embassy," O'Neill's story strikes an optimistic note. But what is of interest here is not so much the idea of the benevolent stranger as how that idea is consolidated through geometric forms. Walking home from the bar, the narrator has an epiphany:
At Forty-second Street, snow began to fall in large handsome flakes, each one conveying a small white light to the earth. The falling from the sky of ice crystals is the product of natural rules; but numinous causes and compossibilities now suggested themselves. When the wind forced me to bow my head toward the whitening sidewalk, I fell into an entranced contemplation of the footprints people had trodden into the new snow. I had never been conscious of the remarkable patterns that a shod human makes. I saw that each set of feet left an idiosyncratic, treasurable trace, my own feet included: with every step I took, a boot stamped into snow densely grouped oblongs and polygons, fragments of spirals, and, at the center of all these figures, seemingly exerting an orchestrating or centripetal force, a star.
This passage exemplifies the way O'Neill builds his trademark lyrical style on a sublime vagueness. In the narrator's "entranced contemplation," the natural forms of snow and the random patterns of footprints are pregnant with meaning, suggesting "numinous causes and compossibilities." The intersection of the narrator's and unknown strangers' journeys hints at some universal connectedness, but that connectedness can only be made legible through disembodied forms — as "densely grouped oblongs and polygons" and "fragments of spirals." This passage, one might say, is not about anything at all; rather, it affords a pure experience of form.
If this epiphany is prompted by Arty's benevolence, it is equally significant that the recipient of that benevolence is a distant stranger whom the narrator has never met. "Where is Trinidad, exactly?" asks the narrator. This question is ignored: perhaps because Arty is so absorbed in his own story, or perhaps because he doesn't know the answer either. But it doesn't matter where Trinidad is — just as it doesn't matter where Cambodia is. Their unmappability is precisely the point. In Smith's and O'Neill's stories, Trinidad and Cambodia are portable forms par excellence. Both writers acknowledge the everyday experience of abstracting otherness. The difference between them is this: where forms crystalize into a singular experience in O'Neill, they remain nothing other than repeated patterns in Smith. For the narrator of "The First World," an unmappable world fuels his contemplation of exquisite yet banal forms, which transcend the burdensome details of other people's lives. In "The Embassy of Cambodia," forms are enigmatic rather than epiphanic. Far from replenishing us with meaning and renewing our connection with the world, they confront us with their hollow repetitiveness. Occupying our proliferating — yet also ever-narrowing — circles of attention, these restless forms have the potential to finally reject our abiding formalism and make palpable, however fleetingly, the denied presence of the other.
Philip Tsang teaches at Colorado State University. His book The Obsolete Empire: Untimely Belonging in Twentieth-Century British Literature is forthcoming from Johns Hopkins University Press. His articles have appeared in Twentieth-Century Literature, Modernism/modernity, NOVEL, and The Henry James Review.
References
- Zadie Smith, "The Embassy of Cambodia," The New Yorker, February 11, 2013.[⤒]
- Caroline Levine, Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), 3.[⤒]
- Anna Kornbluh, The Order of Forms: Realism, Formalism, and Social Space (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2019), 4, 16.[⤒]
- Kornbluh, 4-5.[⤒]
- Anibal Quijano, "Coloniality of Power and Eurocentrism in Latin America," International Sociology 15, no. 2 (2000): 215-232.[⤒]
- In their important book On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, Praxis (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018), Walter Mignolo and Catherine Walsh set out a broad program to "advance the undoing of Eurocentrism's totalizing claim and frame, including the Eurocentric legacies incarnated in U.S.-centrism and perpetuated in the Western geopolitics of knowledge" (2). The keyword here is "totalizing": nothing can escape the coloniality of power that, for Mignolo and Walsh, is constitutive of global modernity. "Decolonial thinking and doing," then, "aim to delink from the epistemic assumptions common to all the areas of knowledge established in the Western world since the European Renaissance and through the European Enlightenment" (106). Mignolo goes on to identify four "spheres of coloniality" that govern academia and beyond: "Racism and sexism," "Political and economic imperial designs," "Knowledge and understanding," and "Life in all its aspects" (126-7). The omnipresence of coloniality means that decolonial work must not be any less thorough and trenchant.[⤒]
- For an affirmative account of the "global novel," see Adam Kirsch, The Global Novel (New York: Columbia Global Reports, 2016). For a critique of the genre, see Tim Parks, "The Dull New Global Novel," in Where I'm Reading from: The Changing World of Books (New York: New York Review of Books, 2015), 25-28.[⤒]
- Joseph O'Neill, "The First World," The New Yorker, June 25, 2018. [⤒]
