The prologue with a thousand faces

Greetings, salutations!

Launching this newsletter has been a long time in the making. So long, in fact, that I created this Substack in 2021, wrote the first entry, and then sat on it for two more years. What can I say? Between moving across the country and back again, this project has been pushed to the lowest levels of my to-do list. I’m excited to pull this into the present and officially send it out into the world now.

When I tell stories in conversation, I often provide very granular preambles: what I was doing before that moment, who I was with, my tone of voice, and, yes, even more minutiae that I feel give context to the situation I was in. I promise that Past Prologue won’t be like this. However, it only makes sense that I should launch this newsletter with a preface of its own. In particular, why I named this Past Prologue and the profound influence that Zadie Smith has had on my fascination for nostalgia and memory.

Indulgences that set you free

Zadie Smith’s White Teeth begins with the epigraph, “What is past is prologue
- Inscription in Washington, D.C., museum,” introducing her multilayered novel with a cheeky take on linkages to the past. “What is past is prologue” is the inscription on the Future statue outside the National Archives and Antonio’s appeal to Sebastian to commit murder in Shakespeare’s The Tempest. “Whereof what’s past is prologue,” he explains, “what to come, in yours and my discharge.”

Here Antonio convinces Sebastian of the necessity to commit murder, explaining that what’s passed — the events that have occurred earlier in the play — have set the stage for what comes next. Not only is this passage a self-reflexive moment for Shakespeare to signal that he’s writing one of his last plays: it also shows how Antonio employs the power of the past for his own gain. To Antonio, all of the events leading up to his and Sebastian’s choice to kill Alonso have determined their trajectory — they are held by fate. Ironically, Antonio’s statement only seems to absolve these two men of guilt for their future actions. “In yours and my discharge” suggests an agency that wouldn’t actually be present were the men solely influenced by the past. In other words, the men are free to act in the present as they see fit.

Unknown to Antonio, or perhaps only Sebastian, is the central conflict anchoring their interpretation of the past. History has the ability to serve as a prologue for their futures or have zero impact at all; their choices in the present can be made devoid of their previous actions. However, it is this tension between past and present that gives them the flexibility to justify Alonso’s murder in both scenarios.

Henry Louis Gates, Jr. have I got some roots for you

Okay, so a little background on White Teeth. This novel is split between three families living in England, all of whom are immigrants or first-generation English citizens from formerly British colonies. While dethroned paters familias grapple with their displacement, their children buck tradition in favor of Englishness, and all reveal a conflict between reconciling family tradition with national identities that they have taken on or been forced to uphold.

So how is Smith diving into history? Her titular symbol implies genetics, inheritance, and beauty standards, but also rootedness: understanding the lineage of a family and its ties to the past. What’s significant about Smith’s epigraph then is that she chooses not to identify the National Archives or Shakespeare as the source for her epigraph, but rather a nondescript “Washington, D.C., museum.” Why? Because, like Antonio’s invocation of the past, it would be misconstrued.

Let’s talk about hierarchies

Another power behind historical preservation is the institution that asserts it into the world. Much of the meaning that contextualizes an object, artifact, or phrase is garnered through the authority that deems it significant and reproduces it in the contemporary context.

Smith removes the context behind “What is past is prologue” to scramble its authority; she uproots an infamous line from its two monolithic arbiters. It becomes another phrase in her book that, depending on the interpretation, holds a different result, particularly in informing the actions and history of the novel’s three families as they try to reconcile ethnic heritage, religious duty, and national identity with their past and future selves. And they do it all while navigating entrenched racism, sexism, and classicism in England.

By unlinking Antonio’s lines from both Shakespeare and the National Archives, Smith offers up the central conceit of the novel: the tension between historical influence and present agency, crossed and unraveled by the forces that form individual memories and systemic narratives. White Teeth weaves choice, fate, and historical precedent into a deeply personal collage of quotidian. Past and prologue overlap not in an objective and chronological order (a linear extension from a rooted subject), but through the ebb and flow of subjectivity, reexamining individual experience and hegemonic history on the same plane.

Zadie Smith, you got me good

In one epigraph, Zadie Smith disarms all expectations for her novel, and, man, did that stick with me. So much so that I even referenced her in my 2017 grad school personal statement:

I fell in love with Zadie Smith’s White Teeth and her mastery of narrative subjectivity. Smith distorts truths, warps cultural relics’ associations with the past, and manipulates the plot to draw clear connections across timelines while still leaving the reader uncertain of the result. From White Teeth, I saw the authority that a writer holds in creating and presenting one comprehensive history from individual characters’ lived experiences.

As I’m sure you can guess, Smith’s opening epigraph to White Teeth also became my inspiration behind this newsletter’s title. Truncating “what’s past is prologue” is my way of demonstrating how I view the linkages between (primarily family) history and individual agency, memory and current experience, nostalgia and reality. It’s a paradox that, on closer inspection, reveals how people’s past perceptions and present identity mirror and inform each other, often moving back and forth in imperceptible ways.

Plus, I’m a sucker for alliteration.