Khadeeja Khalid

The analysis is of the following passage from Zadie Smith’s NW (Penguin, 2012), pp. 80–81.

On the way back from the chain supermarket where they shop, though it closed down the local grocer and pays slave wages, with new bags though they should take old bags, leaving with broccoli from Kenya and tomatoes from Chile and unfair coffee and sugary crap and the wrong newspaper.

They are not good people. They do not even have the integrity to be the sort of people who don’t worry about being good people. They worry all the time. They are stuck in the middle again. They buy always Pinot Grigio or Chardonnay because these are the only words they know that relate to wine. They are attending a dinner party and for this you need to bring a bottle of wine. This much they have learnt. They do not purchase ethical things because they can’t afford them, Michel claims, and Leah says, no, it’s because you can’t be bothered. Privately she thinks: you want to be rich like them but you can’t be bothered with their morals, whereas I am more interested in their morals than their money, and this thought, this opposition, makes her feel good. Marriage as the art of invidious comparison. And shit that’s him in the phone box and if she had thought about it for more than a split second she would never have said:

– Shit that’s him in the phone box.
– That’s him?
– Yes, but – no, I don’t know. No. I thought. Doesn’t matter. Forget it.
– Leah, you just said it was him. Is it or isn’t it?

Very quickly Michel is out of earshot and over there, squaring up for another invidious comparison: his compact, well-proportion dancer’s frame against a tall muscled threat, who turns, and turns out not to be Nathan, who is surely the other boy she saw with Shar, though maybe not. The cap, the hooded top, the low jeans, it’s a uniform – they look the same. From where Leah stands anyway it is still all dumb show, hand gestures and primal frowns, and of course some awful potential news story that explains everything except the misery and the particulars: one youth knifed another youth, on Kilburn High Road. They had names and ages and it’s terribly sad, an indictment of something or another and also not good for house prices. Leah cannot breathe for fear. She is running to catch up, Olive clattering along beside her, and while she runs she finds herself noticing something that should not matter: she looks older than both of them. The boy is a boy and Michel is a man but they look the same age.

Zadie Smith’s use of narrative voice in this extract from NW allows the reader to delve deeper into the mind of Leah. In this reading, I explore the effects of Smith’s use of free indirect speech as a narrative device, as well as the disparity between Leah’s perceptions and reality.

Smith’s NW is split into several sections, each focalized through a different character. Throughout the novel, Smith uses different narrative forms and techniques in order to fit a specific character or create a certain tone. In this excerpt, drawn from the first section of the novel, Smith employs free indirect speech to knit together the mental machinations of Leah. This form of narration, which combines third-person and stream-of-consciousness narrative, amplifies the sense of an unreliable – or perhaps unlikeable – narrator. Leah and Michel are described as deliberately shopping at a ‘chain supermarket […] though it closed down the local grocer and pays slave wages, with new bags though they should take old bags’ (p. 80). The fragmented narrative follows the pattern of a normal third-person narrative, however Leah’s continual digressions indicate her indecision and establish her as a character with contradictory moral imperatives. This is foregrounded by the unflinching assertion: ‘They are not good people’ (p. 80). This statement may be read as either a self-deprecating observation or a subjective deduction, or both, as the reader cannot confidently ascertain the speaker’s voice.

This sense of uncertainty and fluidity of structure can also be seen in Smith’s rendering of dialogue. Eschewing conventions such as quotation marks to indicate direct speech, Smith creates a reading experience that echoes Leah’s turbulent thought-life. Consequently, the reader must become more accustomed to recognizing individual voices. Smith’s use of dashes further creates a sense of immediacy in the text, as the dialogue is propelled towards a physical clash of confusion, incited itself by confusion, as Leah misidentifies a boy on the street.

Smith’s use of free indirect speech allows the reader to witness and understand Leah’s conflicted mental state. Her distraction and confusion, which gathers a dizzying narrative momentum in the text, ultimately causes a physical altercation that has fatal consequences.

Cite this: Khalid, Khadeeja. “Close reading of NW.” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2017, [scf-post-permalink]. Accessed 6 February 2026.

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Ed Dodson

In the post-war British context, the term ‘postcolonial’ has often been applied to Black and Asian writers. General surveys of post-war or contemporary British literature frequently use ‘postcolonial’ as a euphemism for ‘non-white’, and this becomes a way of lumping all such writers under one heading.

Andrzej Gasiorek, in Post-War British Fiction (1995), restricts his discussion of ‘colonialism’ to V. S. Naipaul and George Lamming, and of ‘post-colonialism’ to Salman Rushdie. Peter Childs, in Contemporary Novelists (2005), associates ‘Britain’s imperial past and post-colonial present’ with the familiar triad of ‘Rushdie, [Hanif] Kureishi, and [Zadie] Smith’. Nick Bentley, in Contemporary British Fiction (2008), connects ‘the multiethnic nature of contemporary Britain’ to these three, as well as Monica Ali, Courttia Newland, and Caryl Phillips. Brian Finney, in English Fiction Since 1984 (2006), places all of the non-white writers he discusses (Rushdie, Kureishi, and Kazuo Ishiguro) in a section entitled ‘National Cultures and Hybrid Narrative Modes’.

Such literary categorisations are often tied to authors’ biographies. This is true for gender and sexuality as much as for race. Most of the writers above, who are sometimes called ‘Black British’ writers, have their roots in British colonies, past and present. As a result, they are perceived to have a particular investment in ‘postcolonial’ questions of race and empire. This is a perception that is often, but by no means always, true.

Numerous contemporary writers and critics have complained about the ghettoisation of Black and Asian literature within Britain. In Bernardine Evaristo’s words, ‘If you are a black writer you are deemed to be writing about black subjects and that is generally perceived to be for a black audience’. According to Aminatta Forna:

I have never met a writer who wishes to be described as a female writer, gay writer, black writer, Asian writer or African writer. We hyphenated writers complain about the privilege accorded to the white male writer, he who dominates the western canon and is the only one called simply ‘writer’.

There are a number of ways to tackle this question of naming. One is to expand the definition of ‘postcolonial’ beyond the confines of race: to read white writers as postcolonial, too. Several critics have argued that white writers from Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland (Irvine Welsh or Bernard MacLaverty, for instance) might also be considered postcolonial, or at least brought into postcolonial conversations. A parallel is suggested here between the ‘peripheries’ of the empire and the ‘peripheries’ of the UK, especially in the era of devolution.

An alternative and complementary solution would be, as Timothy Ogene argues, ‘to momentarily de-postcolonize’ the work of writers like Evaristo and Forna by discussing their writing outside of the frames of race and empire.

Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds brings together Black and Asian writers in and around the UK but without foregrounding their racial identities or imposing postcolonial themes on their work. At the same time, as the project title suggests, the term ‘postcolonial’ is not being discarded entirely.

The question we are left with is: what is the role of ‘postcolonial’ as a label today? It is, after all, fifty or so years after the major processes of decolonisation. Is postcolonialism still an effective tool for addressing contemporary writing in Britain produced by a range of writers from many different cultural backgrounds?

Cite this: Dodson, Ed. “The Postcolonial ‘Ghetto’?” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2017, [scf-post-permalink]. Accessed 6 February 2026.

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Biography

Writing

Zadie Smith announcing the five 2010 National Book Critics Circle finalists in fiction, 2011, David Shankbone (CC BY 3.0) via Wikimedia Commons

White Teeth sees Smith intricately weave together an array of characters and storylines, in an attempt to make sense of the tangle of cultural diversity that is North-West London. She leaves nothing unaddressed in her whirlwind of a novel, as she interrogates issues of race, religion, and true ‘Britishness’ amidst pressures of cultural assimilation, however refuses to hand answers to the reader in a neatly packaged box. She says that this is partly because she herself is witness to the ‘movability of identity’, as a biracial woman. Smith is sensitive to this fluidity throughout her writing process:

I guess when I’m writing, part of what I’m insisting on is that whatever we’re living in at the moment is not, in some way, fundamental. Things are constantly open to change.

Smith’s most recent novel, Swing Time (2016), by no means shies away from this complexity, as although she explores the friendship of ‘two brown girls’, the author deftly handles issues of social hierarchies, societal expectations, and identity. As the first of her novels to use first-person narrative, Smith departs somewhat from the traditions of her previous works. However the memoir-esque novel lends itself well to the nuances of the protagonist’s coming of age, as well as the historical nostalgia inherent in the novel.

In 2002, Smith was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and is currently a professor at New York University, where she teaches as part of the prestigious Creative Writing Program.

—Khadeeja Khalid, 2017

Cite this: Khalid, Khadeeja. “[scf-post-title].” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2017, [scf-post-permalink]. Accessed 6 February 2026.

Image credit: David Shankbone (CC Attribution 3.0 Unported) via Wikimedia Commons

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This extract comes from p. 182 of Zadie Smith’s NW. We’re interested in your reading experience. The text is fully annotatable: highlight any portion of the text to add your own thoughts.

17. GCSE

In the office of Keisha Blake’s Head of Year baseball caps and inappropriate jewellery were confiscated and hung from the wall on hooks. Keisha Blake had not been called in for a reprimand, she had come to discuss her options for a set of exams still three years in the future. She did not really want to discuss these exams, she simply wanted it to be noted that she was the kind of person who thought three years ahead about the important things in life. As she got up to leave she spotted a silver chain from which drooped a tiny pistol picked out in diamanté crystals. ‘That’s my sister’s,’ she said. ‘Oh, is it?’ said the teacher, and looked out of the window. Keisha persisted: ‘She doesn’t go here any more. She got expelled.’ The teacher frowned. He took the necklace from the wall and passed it to Keisha. He said: ‘It’s hard to believe that you and Cheryl Blake are even related.’

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NW (2012), Zadie Smith’s fourth novel, documents the lives and experiences of four people who come from the same area in north-west London: Leah Hanwell, Felix Cooper, Natalie (née Keisha) Blake and Nathan Bogle. The narrative is divided into five sections, each told through the perspective of a different character. Their various life experiences and personalities are represented not only through the content, but also in the structures, of their narration. What emerges is a complex portrait of NW6 and how it has shaped, and continues to shape, the intersecting lives of those who have grown up in it.

Cite this: “[scf-post-title].” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2017, [scf-post-permalink]. Accessed 6 February 2026.

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