Source: Persuasion
by Eboo Patel
“From her perch in a council estate (which is the British term for a housing project) Zadie Smith wrote about the friendships and feuds, the romances and reconciliations, of this motley crew of friends and neighbors, a motley crew she clearly loved. … In 2016, Smith returned to the old neighborhood. She came to tend to a family member who had an illness. One of the first things she noticed was that the playground she had immortalized in her first novel, the one which held together those children whose names were on a collision course, had a new fence around it, a fence with tall bamboo slats between the bars that blocked views from the outside in, and the inside out. She started seeing fences all around her old neighborhood, around the entire city of London, in fact.” (09/21/25)
https://www.persuasion.community/p/what-we-lose-when-we-cant-talk-to