Swing Time Major and Minor Quotes

“I had always tried to attach myself to the light of other people.” (Prologue)

—Narrator

Analysis: This quotation from the prologue is a turning point for the narrator, though at such an early point in the story readers don’t understand its significance. In admitting that she has allowed herself to live through others—first through Tracey and then through Aimee—the narrator realizes that the roots of her downfall lie in her lack of an identity. Having admitted this lack to herself, she is able to begin the process of examining her life that unfolds in the subsequent chapters, looking from past to present and back again. Writing in the New Yorker, critic Alexandra Schwartz described this process as the “struggle to weave disparate threads of experience into a coherent story of a self.”

Another critic, Annalisa Quinn, writing for NPR.org, ties the narrator’s quest for identity to the way in which Zadie Smith presents most of the novel’s relationships as supremely complicated struggles for power. “Identity,” writes Quinn, is “an exchange between people, a shifting topography, where the ground can collapse at any moment.” The narrator looks to others for identity, so if she can’t wield any power in her relationships—and she does not, as when she tells Fernando she doesn’t want to be responsible for anyone but herself—she has no sense of self.

“Our shade of brown was exactly the same.” (Part 1, Chapter 1)

—Narrator

Analysis: The narrator and Tracey are initially drawn to each other by the fact that they are the only girls of color in their dance class. Both are biracial, and their skin tones are identical. But it is their differences that draw them together: each is curious about the other. In early childhood scenes, the narrator points out that Tracey has an absentee Jamaican father and a white mother while the narrator has an attentive white father and a Jamaican mother. Tracey’s room is loaded with toys; the narrator has very few, and so the girls write melodramatic stories about ballerinas together there. As the girls grow older, the narrator is a fairly serious student while Tracey is a disruptive one. 

It is dance that holds the friendship together. They share a love of old movie musicals, especially Top Hat with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, and of contemporary dancers, especially Michael Jackson and eventually Aimee. For Tracey, however, dance is a way to prove her talent and win gold medals. For the narrator, who has flat feet, it is a way into a world where nobody weighs you down and anything is possible. As critic Dayna Tortorici, reviewing the novel in The Atlantic, put it, the narrator believes dance is “a universal language, one that can transcend race, class, and even time.” However, the contrasts between Tracey and Aimee—the Black dancer doomed by her upbringing and the white one propelled by her endless narcissism—show that in the end, dance cannot really transcend race and class. It can, perhaps, transcend time as dancers like Tracey look to the past for inspiration. 

“Together we got that tiny white woman’s life in order.” (Part 1, Chapter 12)

—Narrator

Analysis: The narrator is describing how, after a childhood fight with Tracey, the girls make up by organizing a Barbie doll’s wardrobe. However, the quotation also foreshadows the way in which the narrator will subjugate herself to organize her tiny employer Aimee’s life, doing everything from hiring her dog walkers to helping supervise the school Aimee builds in West Africa. As the critic Holly Bass commented in the New York Times, the way in which Aimee completely overtakes the narrator’s existence turns the narrator into a “kind of new-century domestic,” like the Black “minstrels, maids and butlers” in the musicals she loves. Tellingly, the narrator points out that while Black tap dancer Jeni LeGon had featured dancing roles in some films, in others she is a maid or a “tragic mulatto.”

Aimee does do one service in return for the narrator by frequently urging her to form goals and reach for them. She tells the narrator in Part 3, Chapter 2 that she apologizes far too often. But the narrator resists Aimee’s advice, in part because she is on to Aimee and knows her employer thinks her own experience applies to everyone else. The narrator’s tragic flaw is that she can see Aimee’s faults but does nothing to remove herself from Aimee’s sphere until it is too late.

“Did all friendships . . . involve this . . . exchange of power?” (Part 2, Chapter 6)

—Narrator

Analysis: The role of power in relationships is one of the obstacles the narrator faces in trying to find her identity. Nearly every relationship in her life is transactional in some way, with the exception of her friendship with Mr. Booth and the love of her selfless father. Her mother and Aimee try to dominate her; Tracey judges her and ultimately sabotages her; her high school boyfriend Rakim tries to subjugate her; Lamin eventually uses her to get out of his village; even kind Fernando is put out when she refuses to marry him. Hawa loves the narrator freely and openly. Then, however, she criticizes the narrator for not understanding why she feels she has to change in order to marry her fiancé.

The narrator’s trip to Kunta Kinteh Island leads her to consider that slavery involved both many kinds of power and many kinds of weakness. Yet, she thinks, power does this everywhere. It is at once global and intensely personal.

“We have to be the change we want to see.” (Part 3, Chapter 1)

—Aimee

Analysis: Aimee believes that governments and charities can’t be trusted because they have their own agendas. It’s up to individuals to change unjust situations. The narrator cynically muses that in Aimee’s mind, the “we” who need to make changes are people like herself, wealthy and eager to do good. She states that if one follows Aimee’s logic to the end, the conclusion is that “wealth and morality are in essence the same thing.” Wealth defines one’s potential to do good. 

Combined with Aimee’s impatience and belief in her own decision-making, her thoughts about individuals making change happen mean that she rushes into building the girls’ school in West Africa without taking time to assess the political situation. Nor does she know that the girls are taught in English but don’t speak the language at home. The character is a perfect parody of do-good celebrities who arguably create charities in African countries as a way of drawing attention to themselves. In the real world, such figures as Madonna and Oprah Winfrey have been accused of behaving in this way.

“Who comes for the girls?” (Part 4, Chapter 1)

—Narrator

Analysis: The narrator wonders “who comes for the girls” in Part 4, Chapter 1 after she witnesses a dancing kankurang, a symbolic figure who leads initiation rituals for young Mandinka men. Her question reflects the fact that the Mandinka society has a designated traditional figure to help young males make the transition into adulthood. Young women, in contrast, have only their mothers, grandmothers, and friends.

The question crystallizes the differences between the narrator and Tracey. While Tracey’s mother does try to feed and support her daughter’s ambition, the example she sets for Tracey is that of an unmotivated woman. In contrast, the narrator is lucky enough to have a mother with a driving need to educate and better herself. While the narrator’s mother is so overpowering that the narrator rejects her for a long period of her life, she internalizes enough of her mother’s attitude to realize at the story’s end that she needs to improve her situation.

The question also reflects on the novel’s presentation of West African culture. Men, the narrator remarks, simply have more advantages than women, who are expected to tend to the crops and children. A school for girls like Aimee’s is unusual, which is in part why Aimee’s mismanagement of it is such a travesty. The men who are able to improve their lives do so only to get away from village life and its limitations.

“A verse that seemed to swing time itself.” (Part 4, Chapter 5)

—Narrator

Analysis: The novel’s title is a play on words. Swing Time is the title of one of the black-and-white movie musicals the narrator loves. In the prologue, seeing a clip from the film at a lecture leads to the narrator’s epiphany in which she realizes she’s tried to live her life through others. The phrase comes up again in Part 4, Chapter 5 as the narrator watches another movie, Ali Baba Goes to Town. In ancient Arabia, Al Cantor sings to a group of African musicians a verse that “seemed to swing time itself,” drawing the men a thousand years into the future to Harlem. This is the cue for the entrance of Jeni LeGon, the pioneering Black tap dancer who becomes a hero to both Tracey and the narrator.

“Swing time” is thus a metaphor for the way in which music and dancing can connect the past and the future. Songs—like the narrator’s beloved Broadway melodies—and dances—like Jeni LeGon’s, which Tracey memorizes—are like a bridge between different eras.

Smith’s phrasing here also underscores the book’s structure. The narrator “swings time” as she searches through memories that shift back and forth between different phases of her life in order to come to a new understanding about herself. Each part of the book, apart from the last, includes past and present narratives in adjacent chapters. This shows how the narrator is seeking to reconcile who she has been with who she is now.

“Speaking passionately of . . . the many missing men in her bloodline . . . all of them ghost men.” (Part 5, Chapter 2)

—Narrator’s mother

Analysis: The narrator’s mother speaks to her of “ghost men” after the narrator reveals she has met Tracey’s Jamaican father, Louie, for the first time. The mother angrily berates her daughter about how the legacy of enslaved Africans brought to toil in Jamaica has created generations of “ghost men.” Her own father was one of these missing men, the result of generations of families broken up and “children torn from their mother’s arms” by the institution of slavery.

The narrator rarely ponders her own connection to her African roots. At one point, she is told she resembles the Jola women, a group found in Senegal, The Gambia, and Guinea-Bissau. However, when she visits Kunta Kinteh Island and tries to picture the misery of the enslaved Africans walking up gangplanks to their death ships, she feels no personal connection to them: she can’t believe the pain of her tribe is particularly felt in this place. She can only think about how power is usurped everywhere. Presumably the different ways in which the narrator and her mother view their ancestral connection to slavery are the result of their different upbringings. The narrator’s own loving father never experienced the broken families that can be traced to the era of transatlantic slavery. Her mother, raised without a father, did.

“If London was unreal, if New York was unreal, they were powerful stage shows.” (Part 6, Chapter 3)

—Narrator

Analysis: The novel sweeps back and forth from London to New York to the unnamed West African country where Aimee’s school for girls is located. With this quotation, the narrator shows how delusional Aimee and her entourage can be about the decisions they make concerning the girls’ school. When they are in the big cities, for example, they can decide to teach the children about evolution. In the village, they find that not only have many of the teachers never heard of Darwin but the villagers are more preoccupied with malaria. Not only are their educational ideas misguided but they are further complicated by Aimee’s limited attention span. When she falls in love with technology, she decides to give each of the girls a laptop, though they are all stolen before they reach the village.

Any real progress made at the school happens in spite of Aimee, mainly through the attention of Fernando, the project manager. Fernando does not base his plans for the school on glamorous “shows” of what might be. Instead, he is practical: he creates a garden for the students to keep them at school instead of home tending to their crops. He also manages to keep them in school by paying teachers to give classes in Arabic and the Koran. Formerly the students would have spent part of every day doing domestic chores for those teachers in order to pay for their studies. As the narrator puts it, the school is “built by Aimee’s money but not contained by it.”

“The aim of art was love.” (Part 7, Chapter 2)

—Aimee

Analysis: The narrator accuses Aimee of cultural appropriation as she uses West African clothing, drums, dance moves, and dancers in a show. Aimee’s reply is that she is an artist and artists must be allowed to love, touch, and use things. Art isn’t appropriation, she argues, because “the aim of art [is] love.”

Aimee’s belief that she has a right to take whatever she wants, including aspects of another culture, is a manifestation of her narcissism. Writing in The Atlantic, reviewer Dayna Tortorici points out that Aimee’s name is a pun on the words aim and me: her aim is “me.” Aimée is also French for loved. Ultimately, the aim of Aimee’s art is not love of the thing being appropriated—or even of the people to whom it belongs—but love of herself.

Tortorici points out that while the narrator can tolerate Aimee’s philanthropy and her cultural appropriation, her employer goes too far when she adopts baby Sankofa. This is the point at which the narrator betrays Aimee by revealing the details of the baby’s adoption. Like everything else in Aimee’s world, however, the betrayal only serves to buff her image. With the narrator painted as an ex-employee set on revenge, the tide turns back in Aimee’s favor. 

“Time was on my side, as much as it is on anyone’s.” (Part 7, Chapter 11)

—Narrator

Analysis: After she is fired by Aimee and betrayed by Tracey, the narrator sits in her London flat wondering whom to contact and eventually calls Fernando. A week later, he visits London and they have lunch; there, he tells her that Lamin is in Birmingham and believes he was always meant to be there. This leads Fern to muse that the future is always there, waiting for a person. Why not, he asks, wait and see what it brings? Fern’s hopefulness makes the narrator laugh. She then thinks it’s possible there might be a future where she could care for Fern. For the first time in her life, she doesn’t have to be anywhere, and so time is on her side.

This marks a turning point for the narrator in her quest for identity and not just because she admits to herself that she might have feelings for the steadfast, practical Fern. It is the first time in the novel that she thinks about the future at all. Up to this point, she has simply been living in the moment, as rootless as the dancers she admires, refusing to take responsibility for anyone but herself. Now she has, in effect, returned to linear time. She has a past, a present, and a future, and readers have some reason to believe she will finally make peace with herself and move on.

“There might be something else I could offer, something simpler, more honest.” (Epilogue)

—Narrator

Analysis: In Part 9, Chapter 11, the narrator describes herself as Tracey’s “only witness,” the only person who knows all her potential. She berates herself for leaving her friend back in the projects and says she feels a “sacred duty” toward Tracey. In the epilogue, she acts on that duty. Instead of walking toward the hospice where her mother lies dying, she follows up on her mother’s last instruction to her to do something about Tracey’s family.

Up to this point, the narrator has had a rosy dream of raising the children herself, inspired by her mother’s confused statement that this would be best for them. Now she realizes these are not—and never will be—her children. She gets the new idea that there might be something else she can give to Tracey and her family. It will be “simpler” and “more honest,” somewhere between her “mother’s idea of salvation” and nothing. Readers can picture this “something” as either friendship or help or both. Either way, it is sure to be free of the judgment and jealousy that have marred the relationship between Tracey and the narrator for so many years.