Zadie Smith’s short story “Two Men Arrive in a Village” will leave you emotional and speechless. The setting of the story takes place in an African village where two men arrive in the village and terrorize the villagers. The story deals with the universal theme of violence, which can happen at any time and to anyone. The story is a short narrative of two men coming into a village, stealing from the people, killing a boy, and raping young girls. The narrator is identified as one of the villagers in the story. “What we can say with surety is that when these two men arrived in the village we spotted them at once, at the horizon point where the long road that leads to the next village meets the setting sun. And we understood what they meant by coming at this time”/ In fully understanding the short story, the reader must first understand the sources used by the author and the reasoning behind creating the story.
Smith mentions in an interview with the New Yorker that the story comes from two sources, one being the Romanian movie “Aferim”, which she says has an archetypal set-up of two men going around a country terrorizing people, and the other was from a conversation she had with an old friend who had given her a novel from a Hungarian writer which according to her “was a kind of allegory of the historical traumas of Hungary”. The characters were called “The Grandmother” and “The Soldier”. She mentions that she wanted to like it, but couldn’t get over the idea of “mythic archetypes”, and when expressing this to her friend, his response was “Well, your fiction is so obsessively local, but there’s another, more universal way of writing that has a different kind of power”. And then I was annoyed by the word “universal.” She admits that she pondered this concept for weeks which led her to wonder, “Is it possible to write a story that happens in many places at many times simultaneously? That implicates everybody?”
The author discusses this idea during her reading at Medgar Evers College which helps you understand the story better. She mentions that she was trying to write about horror and particularly, the horrible things men sometimes do to women, is a relate-able topic regardless of place. The opening of the story introduces how the men arrive in the village, sometimes by horseback, sometimes by car or foot. “But if we look at the largest possible picture, the longest view, we must admit that it is by foot that they have mostly come, and so in this sense, at least, our example is representative. In fact, it has the perfection of parable”. I didn’t understand this line at first, but during the reading, I realized that these lines are representative of the universal theme that is evident in the story.
In reading the story and hearing it read aloud, I was immediately drawn to the concept of colonialism. Colonialism entailed invaders going into a place and creating chaos within the community and inflicting violence. The plunder of the community and the rape of the women, especially at a time where the village only has women, children, and older men present is relative of the colonial mindset.
Zadie’s short story “Two Men Arrive in a Village” is cognizant of the universal theme of violence and chaos. Violence against women is one of the central themes of the story, which is a unified concept. The idea of colonialism being seen through this story is also possible because it shows the invasion of a village by men, which is something that has happened throughout history.
Read the full short story "Two Men Arrive in a Village" here.
