Swing Time Discussion Questions

Why does Smith choose to make the narrator nameless?

Smith chooses to make the narrator of Swing Time nameless because the book is structured as a quest for identity. For a variety of reasons, the narrator has no sense of self for most of the book. As critic Ron Charles, writing in the Washington Post, puts it, she can clearly see “her own irrelevance—she never even tells us her name.”

The narrator isn’t the only nameless character. Her mother and father are not named, either. Thus, her search for her identity begins in the previous generation, with her biracial origin and domineering mother. From childhood on, she tries to justify her rootlessness as being something positive, like the dancers she admires who seem to come from nowhere and have no obligations to anyone. These people live in the world she dreams of where Black and white music—and Black and white people—can combine. She takes pride in the fact that she is not responsible for anyone but herself. However, her determination not to be tied down ultimately fails her when she loses her job and finds herself alone and friendless. Only then can she begin to reach out, first to Fern and then to Tracey, to make a new kind of life for herself.

What is the importance of female friendship in the novel?

Female friendships are arguably the most central type of relationship in Swing Time, the ones around which the narrator’s other social and family relationships are structured. The narrator’s main friendship is with Tracey, whom she meets at dance class when both girls are 7. Tracey is like a touchstone for the narrator, who lacks a sense of identity. She provides glamor and excitement in the narrator’s otherwise dull childhood. She is also the embodiment of the narrator’s main interest, dance, with her “sharp and precise” movements. The narrator continues to admire Tracey’s ability into adulthood—when she watches Tracey dance in the chorus of Showboat, she is so jealous that she cries.

Because her friendship with Tracey is so central to her identity, Tracey’s eventual betrayal carries a special weight. At the same time, the betrayal contributes to the narrator’s personal growth by making her think more maturely about this oldest of friendships. After the narrator is fired by Aimee and sent back to London in disgrace, Tracey releases the childhood video of the two of them misbehaving at Lily Bingham’s party to the media. Tracey then puts the nail in the coffin by commenting on media coverage of the video: “Where were their mothers?” But, the narrator thinks, “none of this changes the judgment.” Tracey is letting the narrator know that her old friend has let her down. The narrator’s realization that she has an obligation to Tracey is one of the signs that she is finally beginning to claim her identity.

In what ways are motherhood and fatherhood illustrated in the text?

The mothers in Swing Time are all fierce in their own ways. The narrator’s mother dominates her in the course of trying to provide her with a better life; Tracey’s mother fights for her daughter even when she may be in the wrong. Aimee appears infrequently but memorably in her role as a mother, as when she throws a party for her son with 200 guests and violinists from the New York Philharmonic. The narrator’s and Tracey’s mothers stress the importance of education and talent, while Aimee lavishes money and attention on children Jay and Kara. In contrast, fathers are ineffective, in the case of the narrator; violent and criminalistic, in the case of Tracey; or simply absent, as in the fathers of Aimee’s children.

The narrator’s mother sees Tracey’s unreliable father as an example of a broader failure of Black fathers to parent, which she attributes to the legacy of slavery. The narrator’s father is a kind and nurturing parent but is simply outmatched by his wife, who eventually leaves him behind. In Aimee’s case, the fathers of her children are simply “dispatched” by her. None of these relationships are successful or lasting, which may help explain the narrator’s aversion to marriage and parenthood.

How does Aimee affect the narrator’s development from childhood to adulthood?

In Part 2, Chapter 1 of Swing Time, the narrator reflects that she was “still a child” when her path first crossed with Aimee’s in the form of the entertainer’s explosive first single. She and Tracey are soon fans. Aimee then plucks the narrator from her job at YTV into her own employment and essentially takes over her life for the next nine years. As the narrator’s mother puts it, Aimee is sucking out the narrator’s roots during these years and preventing her from forming real ties to people or places. The narrator can’t even date seriously, because her boyfriends inevitably only want to use her to get to Aimee.

The narrator defends her job to everyone who criticizes it and insists that she wants to be rootless, responsible to nobody but herself. However, her employment with Aimee is really a prolonged attempt to hide her lack of a sense of identity, symbolized in the book by shadows. In the prologue, she thinks of herself as a “shadow” with no light of her own. After she sleeps with Lamin for the first time, she feels the sex had happened to a “shadow body.” In Paris, she waits for the famous expatriate’s experience of feeling like a real person for the first time in the city, “no longer shadows.” But she can’t summon this feeling and instead sees her own enormous shadow. She calls her existence a “shadow life” in Part 7, Chapter 9. Ultimately and fittingly, Aimee is the one to force the narrator out of this “shadow life.” By firing her, Aimee gives the narrator a freedom she has never felt, one that she uses to make the first tentative steps in building a life of her own.

What does the Eye of Providence symbolize in the novel?

The Eye of Providence—the image of an eye in a pyramid that is found on the reverse of the U.S. dollar bill—occurs several times in Swing Time. It symbolizes the power of money to effect desired changes, one of Aimee’s strongest beliefs. The symbol itself has its origins in Christianity, where it stands for God’s benevolence. The narrator of the novel first encounters it when she sees the sleeve of Aimee’s first record, which has the “image of a pyramid with an eye hovering above it.” The sleeve’s design evokes the dollar bill, where the eye appears with the Latin words Annuit Coeptis (meaning “He [God] has approved our undertakings”). She sees the symbol again when Aimee chooses for a costume a West African cloth with a pattern of black triangles, each containing an eye.

According to a conspiracy theory popular on the internet, the Eye of Providence is linked to a secret group called the Illuminati, who want to control the world. This link is referenced explicitly in the novel. Aimee calls the school that her wealth enables her to build in a West African village the Illuminated Academy for Girls. One of the West African villagers asks if Aimee is Illuminati, seemingly alluding to the conspiracy theory. Later the village leader asks if Lamin has joined the Illuminati, and a friend of Lamin’s says the pop artist Rihanna is “Illuminati, right?” These references are consistent with Aimee’s belief in the connection between money and goodness, but they also point to a shadowy, controlling dimension of wealth that Aimee fails to recognize.