Swing Time

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2016

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Prologue and Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Part 6

Part 7 and Epilogue

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Themes

Searching for Meaning Instead of Freedom

Can individuals who live in a society ever be truly free? Smith explores how freedom is limited when individuals are a part of society, arguing that people are actually often searching for meaning when they believe they’re looking for freedom. Freedom entails rejecting society’s expectations, which can isolate an individual. Finding meaning is a way of being a free individual within society.

As a young woman, the independently minded Hawa wants to reject her society’s expectations of her as a woman. Although her community believes that a woman without children is like a tree without leaves, Hawa enjoys her job as a teacher, and the freedom to dance and dress how she wants. After a couple of years, however, Hawa gives up independence, marries a conservative Muslim man, and transforms the way she dresses and socializes with others. Though this transformation is upsetting to the narrator, Fernando reminds the narrator that finding meaning can be an alternate way of finding freedom. Hawa cannot freely choose what to do with her life: While her brother has the privilege of studying in the US, Hawa’s father would never support her in the same endeavor. Hawa’s culture and socio-economic forces her to be submissive to men. Thus, her marriage is about finding meaning in a limiting social context—the best way she can give herself possibility.

Conversely, the narrator’s mother sees freedom and the search for meaning as luxuries that many people she knew in Jamaica could not take the time to seek because they were too busy scraping by and surviving. The narrator’s mother pursues her studies with relentless passion because nurturing her education is a privilege—she never forgets her history and the many ancestors lost to slavery and other forms of oppression. The narrator’s mother doesn’t take her life for granted, so she works hard to make it meaningful. For the narrator’s mother, freedom and meaning are partners.

Tracey also chooses meaning over freedom. As an adolescent, Tracey acts out to prove that she is free—Tracey would jump off the train rather than arrive at a destination someone else has decided for her. Tracey does find both meaning and freedom in her dance career, and she has an authentic connection to her art. But her pursuit of radical freedom traps her in dangerous and chaotic situations; eventually, she gives up chasing freedom and settles for meaning, something the narrator at first judges to be a failure of her potential. Tracey gives up her dance career for her children; through them, she finds the unconditional love she has always craved. Though Tracey doesn’t set herself free (she is trapped in the same cycle her mother had been), she does find meaning and joy.

The Complexity of Racial Identity

Smith’s novel demonstrates that questions about racial identity are sometimes unanswerable. Through the narrator, Smith shows that there are many ways of embodying the Black body and being true to Black identity.

The narrator intuits the complexity of her racial identity at an early age. Eager to identify with her white father or her Black mother, she finds that she cannot become like either of them because her experience is so different from theirs. Although her father is underprivileged in other ways, he will never know how it feels to be Black in a majority-white country. The narrator and her mother share a deeper bond because both identify as Black, but the narrator’s mother embraces this identity more—she has a strong sense of her family history, knowing that its roots include slavery and erasure. Because the narrator doesn’t feel drawn to her mother’s level of contemplation of Blackness, the narrator feels racially indeterminate, unable to insist on her own racial identity despite the imperative need to do so before the world decides who she is based on the color of her skin.

As a child, the narrator’s understanding of race is complicated by a lack of representation. She loves to watch dancers in movie musicals. But classic movie musicals feature mostly all-white casts. The few Black performers that exist in these worlds are relegated to bit parts that are steeped in racist imagery. There is also a great deal of blackface in these films, mocking the Black body and dehumanizing Black performance art. Because the narrator is just a child when she falls in love with these films, she doesn’t have the ability to analyze these racist tropes. Instead, she feels bad without understanding why. To make the narrator’s experience more realistic, Smith references real historical figures in the novel. One example is Jeni LeGon, a Black female dancer in the 1930s and 1940s. When the narrator finds her dance solo in a film dominated by white people, the performance is a revelation—so much so that the narrator imagines that LeGon had a flourishing secret career in Hollywood. When she eventually learns that LeGon struggled with dismissive racist attitudes, underappreciated by her white cast members and producers, the narrator is deeply disappointed to lose yet another aspirational role model.

The complexity of racial identity follows the narrator into adulthood. In her job at YTV, she experiences microaggressions from white colleagues. As one of two women of color at the office, she is often asked to work on projects for rap and hip-hop because her colleagues assume that she knows that music without asking about her tastes. Later, working for Aimee, the narrator feels like a prop proving Aimee’s woke and progressive bona fides. Aimee puts the narrator in charge of helping develop a school for girls in Gambia, possibly only because the narrator is Black. The narrator believes that she can fit in Gambia, but villagers see her as white due to her Westerner privilege. The experience helps the narrator bear witness to Aimee’s white guilt, which is just another form of white privilege, but it also reveals the narrator’s gaps of knowledge and empathy. The narrator doesn’t fit in Africa, even though she traces her roots to the continent. She learns that although her pursuit of an identity in London was complicated, projecting those anxieties onto other Black people is not only useless but dangerously close to the type of patronizing that Aimee specializes in.

The Central Role of Women

Swing Time is a novel about women. Its female narrator is shaped by other women and cares little for the men in her life.

This is evident in the narrator’s relationship with her parents. Her mother is unusual for her time, fiercely intelligent, ambitious, and individualistic, spending her days studying while her husband devotes his off-work hours to the narrator’s care. Even so, the narrator’s mother looms significantly larger in her life. The unattainability of her mother partly explains this. Her independence is so at odds with the way the narrator expects a mother to be that the narrator can’t help but admire her mother for balancing her dreams with her maternal role. The lack of affection between the narrator and her mother only makes the narrator want her more. And the mother is not a bad mother—she is playing a longer game, setting herself up as a role model to her daughter. By watching her mother aspire and win political office, become a community organizer and activist, all without ethical compromise, the narrator learns what healthy ambition and drive looks like, though the narrator will use this knowledge to despair about her own lack of direction.

In Tracey, the narrator sees a version of herself: Both girls have a white and a Black parent, both come from the same lower economic stratum, and both are passionate about dance. They know one another intimately, are exposed to one another’s family dynamics, and share their deepest fears and dreams. The narrator understands why Tracey lashes out at the world. But their relationship is not all supportive. Tracey can be distant, dishonest, and hurtful, and the narrator internalizes Tracey’s anger as indicative of the narrator’s flaws. Developing in Tracey’s shadow, the narrator can only evaluate herself in comparison to her friend. If Tracey is beautiful, the narrator finds herself “ugly.” While Tracey is a talented dancer who pursues her passions, the narrator keeps her singing talent a secret. This unhealthy dynamic echoes the narrator’s subconscious rejection of her identity and self.

The narrator’s relationships with men are nowhere near as strong as the devotion she gives to the women in her life. The narrator’s relationship with Rakim at university mimics some of her narrator’s habits with Tracey—she agrees with his opinions and goes along with his ideas even when inwardly opposed. But the narrator easily breaks up with Rakim because she readily perceives the anxiety she feels in their relationship—unlike her inability to cut herself loose from Tracey, whose anxiety-provoking friendship is much more harmful. Later, as an adult, the narrator rejects Fernando because she doesn’t want to be responsible for his feelings. Although his love is freely available, she has no interest in it—just as she had limited interest in her father’s freely offered affection. Her relationship with Lamin is based on sex and resentment towards Aimee and the world of privilege—a transactional affair that does not cause the narrator to become emotionally attached. She helps Lamin get to England, but they don’t feel a connection or loyalty to one another. The men in the narrator’s life are peripheral, having only a small influence for her character development.