‘This particular art [is] all about walls’: Nomadic Poetics of Identity in Ali Smith’s How to be both

This chapter examines Ali Smith’s How to be both (2014) to demonstrate how her experimental writing affirms the novel form’s potential to promote ways of understanding the complexities of being human moving beyond limiting and redundant binary oppositions. Influenced by Rosi Braidotti’s work on nomadic subjectivity and nomadic theory, it sustains that, through this novel, Smith explores the plasticity of a nomadic poetics of identity that is transitive and combinatory, conjunctive and transitional, grounded on difference as a generative stimulus for transition and meaning. In How to be both, Smith has embedded a divide that fragments the novel’s diegesis creating two narratives that are seemingly unconnected. Readers must discover the porosity of the wall between them to negotiate the permeable spaces in between. This chapter argues that, through the wall, Smith employs the border as an epistemological device. It is the wall that creates multiple alternative representations of borders, claiming its instability, porosity, and potential as a space of encounter, exchange, and dialogue. Readers need to go through a wall to navigate the liminal space in between and generate cartographies of traces, patterns, and repetitions through which they can negotiate ways of connecting and intersecting them, becoming nomadic readers.