Category: White Teeth

What is unique about the narrative form in which each novel is written?

White Teeth’s ability to switch time periods and characters in a chronological flow at the same time, allows the readers to see how every sequence in one’s life ripples and changes others. The excessively descriptive stance that Smith takes by criticizing the appearance and personality traits of every character creates an even more omniscient, wide lense of the character’s reality. Smith focuses on encompassing descriptions to inform the readers of the circumstances as she sees them. Since in Mrs. Dalloway, the audience can’t see the characters progressions over drawn out periods of time, like in White Teeth, Woolf makes the narrative be dependent on the characters’ thoughts and perceptions. Virginia Woolf focuses more mainly on Clarissa even though the story is told through the thoughts of the random individuals that appear throughout the story the main person‘s past present and future that is focused on Clarissa maybe Richard Peter Clarissa‘s daughter and this directly contrasts to how in white teeth every characters Past present and future is being displayed. this creates a different lens of you in both books because the scale is different Clarissa is like a part of a very large puzzle that is her life.

How does this form lends itself to the novel’s themes and messages?

The satire and comedy that Smith adds to White Teeth brings out the nuances of how a multicultural family adjusts to living in London. She takes sex, religion and tradtion into a comedic lense to juxpostion Samad’s persistence to uphold tradition with frequenct racial backlash. “A racialist,” as Mr. Hero denied being, is a type of the outside backlash that the characters deal with, comedy adds balance to a rich and dense story. Smith used the lengthy progression of time to utilize characters ability to change, grow, transform, and mature, which all ultimately shape a character’s identity. In white teeth, the importance of continuing the progression of characters allows for readers to see how important one character is to the creation and existence of another. The book has a variety of character vocal points, all which could be seperate novels, Rather than focusing on change over time, Woolf focuses on the passage of time and how the past is cyclical, constantly influencing the characters present and future. In Mrs.Dalloway’s life, the thought of what her life could have been if she had accepted Peter’s marriage proposal, influences the thoughts present throughout the novel. Her past has influenced her present when she thinks of Peter and then he shows up. Woolf paints a picture of reality without the separations of time simply by allowing a constant flow of thoughts, unhindered by chapters or breaks.

How do the different characters’ lives intertwine?

We see how characters affect each other in different ways in both books. And white teeth we see it physically through how to different chapters are separated by the different characters in the different time. We see how Simard sending his son away changes everyone in their family because we can see into the future essentially as the chapters progress. But in Mrs. Dalloway we have a unique ability to see how each character is feeling rather than seeing the actions we see the thoughts. not to say that either is more important than the other it’s just different. this creates two different worlds one Clarissa’s, that is more introspective focused The recollection of past actions and thoughts and feelings but in white teeth we see a description of their actions so character seem more argumentative mad and more likely to be in disagreement with another. Just like the characters from White Teeth, Clarissa is influenced by the people around her. Her husband, daughter, and by Septimus, whose death became the talk of her party.

How does one character’s experience influence and transform another?

Samad’s experience with religion, a major subject matter for the book, seems to influence not only he brought up his children but how he, as a person, presents himself. Samad is rooted in his traditional values, values that he believed were being corrupted by England, leading to send Magid away, to save him. This transforms both children’s lives, by turning them into opposites of each other, and changes his relationship with Alansa. Also, he fasts to counter his indulgences, out of guilt and desire to be accountable for his actions without changing them. Samad and Archie’s children have to decide how much they are going to follow, accept, and coincide with the values passed down to them when they were raised. E: How does each novelist explore the question of how our identities are shaped? sadie smith create this whole narrative of characters over years and years to create the ultimate case for how the situations that you were raised in the nurture that you receive from your parents decide who you are. As we get to see how the kids grow up we get to see you that parts of our identity both good and bad are present within all of us, based off how we interpret what was passed down to us from our parents. One significant testimonial of this is when Erie went to get her hair straight because she wanted to fit in because having kinky unruly hair wasn’t what was suicidal he excepted so of course her family and friends were taking back after seeing her with straight hair because her hair represents something of her identity but she was willing to squash her mothers identity to simply fit in. The reoccurrence of characters like Dr.Sick from White Teeth, show readers that the past isn’t a permanent unchangeable entity, rather it is the essence of the present and future. The audience gets to see that not only is our identity shaped by the long term impacts certain people, cultures, and experiences have on us, but everyday, our identity is being shaped by what we experience. in Mrs. Dalloway the purpose of thoughts rather than actions being the driving force principle of how wolf created her novel allows us to see that our identity as well one makes of it it’s not all how others view us rather our own thoughts fuel our feelings of identity. If we compare both books readers get a sense that identities fueled by so many things thoughts, feelings, actions, culture up bringing, country of origin, etc, past the present and the inevitable future.

Zadie Smith is a British author, essayist and professor of creative writing. She was born in North London in 1975. Her father is a working-class Caucasian English man and her mother is a Jamaican immigrant. Since childhood she got absorbed in every book. In one of the interviews, she said that she “inhales” books and takes them with her in dinner time because she feels that they are a meal in themselves. Zadie attended King’s College in Cambridge where she studied English literature. Being a student, she began a manuscript for her debut novel White Teeth. Smith got really lucky to get picked up by a literary agent Hamish Hamilton and got a contract with a prominent literary agency Andrew Wiley Agency after finishing just first 80 pages (one chapter). The novel was published in 2000 when Smith was 25 years old and just graduated from college. Soon the novel got a universal recognition and received a wide range of awards: The Guardian First Book Award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize (for fiction), the Whitbread First Novel Award, and the Commonwealth Writers Prize (Overall Winner, Best First Book). White Teeth also won two EMMAs (Ethnic and Multicultural Media Awards) for Best Book/Novel and Best Female Media Newcomer. Smith has been called the “voice of a “new England””.

Despite such acclaim, Smith remained humble after White Teeth’s release, maintaining that her ambition was not fame, but to sharpen her skills: “Even if I never write anything which anybody ever buys and reads again, White Teeth is enough for me always to be able to publish some little thing some day. That was the greatest pleasure of it, because all I wanted to be was a writer.”

Smith’s second novel, The Autograph Man, was less successful than the White Teeth, however, it led Smith to nomination as one of 20 ‘Best of young British Novelists’ by Granta magazine and also Jewish Quarterly Literary Prize for fiction.

She spent the next seven years establishing herself as an essayist and cultural critic, writing pieces for the New Yorker, the Guardian, The New York Times and the Sunday Telegraph.

Hysterical realism

The storytelling style of White Teeth is categorised as hysterical realism. This term was first used by one of the most admired literary English critic at work today James Wood in an essay Human, All Too Inhuman published in 2000 in the magazine The New Republic where he analyzed Zadie Smith’s novel White Teeth. Dale Peck labels this writing style as recherché postmodernism. Two popular critics were the first to articulate the turn in intermillenial postmodern fiction. “Recherché postmodernism” and “hysterical realism” became the interchangeable motto for a new literary movement the main features of which are: continuing at length, formal complexity, narrative and linguistic eccentricity, conceptual interconnection, and a shift in emphasis from “humans” to ideas and information. Hysterical realism refers opinionated narratives that evoke emotional richness from worldly events and are characterized by disorderly action and numerous completely different lines of thought.

Wood describes hysterical realism as a literary genre characterized by a strong contrast between prose, plotting and characterization, from one side, and careful, detailed investigations of real, specific social phenomena from the other. He describes the genre as an attempt to turn fiction into social theory. This literary genre is also characterized by exceptional length, frenetic action, offbeat characters, and long digressions on topics secondary to the story. (Word Spy) Wood calls the forefathers of this literary genre American novelists Don DeLillo and Thomas Pynchon and their follower David Foster Wallace.

The contemporary fiction books that fall into the category of “hysterical realism” are:

• big
• full of information, ideas and stylistic rhythms
• eventful plots that happen on so-called “broad social canvas”
• experiment with form and voice
• overtly

Wood uses the term to describe the contemporary conception of big ambitious novels, “novels of immense self-consciousness with no selves in them at all, curiously arrested and very “brilliant” books that know a thousand things but do not know a single human being.” (Wood) They are “social” novels but not because of their content or style but of their audience united by this kind of literature. This genre is consolidated by the fans who tend to like the same books rather than by the books themselves. The same people tend to like them, thus shaping society of the shared taste. A lot of these fans are critics. The reason for that is that these novels are full of ideas that can be explained by them. They also full of essayistic passages, and since critics are essayists themselves, such passages they find very attractive for the analysis.

“Hysterical realism is not exactly magical realism, but magical realism’s next stop. It is characterized by a fear of silence. This kind of realism is a perpetual motion machine that appears to have been embarrassed into velocity. Stories and sub-stories sprout on every page. There is a pursuit of vitality at all costs.” (Wood)

The novelist’s task is to go on to the street and figure out social reality. However, whatever the novel tries to reach, the “culture” can always reach something bigger. “If the contemporary American novel in its current, triumphalist form – are novelists’ chosen sport, then they will sooner or later be outrun by their own streaking material. Fiction may well be, as Stendhal wrote, a mirror carried down the middle of a road; but the Stendhalian mirror would explode with reflections were it now being walked around Manhattan.”

The novelist used to “alter the inner life of the culture.” It will be tricky of setting themselves up as analysts of society, while society bucks and charges so helplessly. Surely they will tread carefully over their generalizations.

“Indeed, “knowing about things” has become one of the qualifications of the contemporary novelist. Time and again novelists are praised for their wealth of obscure and far-flung social knowledge.”

In her response to Wood’s article published in the Guardian, Zadie Smith agreed with Wood by writing “these are hysterical times; any novel that aims at hysteria will now be effortlessly outstripped – this was Wood’s point, and I’m with him on it.” She said that it is not the writer’s job “to tell us how somebody felt about something, it’s to tell us how the world works”.

In regard to the term hysterical realism, she writes that it is “a painfully accurate term for the sort of overblown, manic prose to be found in novels like my own White Teeth and a few others he (Wood) was sweet enough to mention.” However, later she argued that “any collective term for a supposed literary movement is always too large a net, catching significant dolphins among so much cannable tuna” meaning that first-time novelists like she is, cannot be placed with literary giants like DeLillo, Pynchon and Wallace.

Zadie has praised the American writers David Foster Wallace and Dave Eggers as “guys who know a great deal about the world. They understand macro-microeconomics, the way the internet works, maths, philosophy, but… they’re still people who know something about the street, about family, love, sex, whatever.”

Time newspaper wrote: “She has the gift David Foster Wallace had: the mere act of watching her think — about Kafka, Buffy, her father, her writing habits, whatever attracts her critical intelligence — makes you feel smarter.” Her way of writing is unique and intriguing and filled with a moderate dose of skepticism and sarcasm. Smith cuts between incidents, points of view, and eras with movie-like deftness, weaving these disparate stories into one narrative.

David Sexton wrote in the article The Autograph Man wrote that White Teeth had no harsher critic than Zadie Smith herself: “Exasperated by the enormous reputation accorded her debut, she disparaged it as “the literary equivalent of a hyperactive, ginger-haired, tapdancing 10-year-old”.

About the novel White Teeth

The novel White Teeth is centered around Britain’s relationships with people from formerly colonized countries in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean. It illustrates the immigrant experience in the new society. The main characters are confronted with conflicts between assimilating and preserving their cultures. The novel illustrates the dilemmas of immigrants and their offspring as they are confronted by a new, different society. The novel examines the impact that cultural history can have on identity.

White Teeth is an examination of contemporary London, told from a different range of viewpoints. Though packed with tangential references to various eras and earlier generations, it focuses primarily on the parents and children of the culturally and ethnically diverse Jones, Iqbal and Chalfen families.

White Teeth is about various ethnic and cultural identities, and about the consequences of colonialism. The mixture of culture and races allows Smith to mix custom and vocabulary.

White Teeth deals with issues of race, ethnicity and culture. Smith claims that it is impossible to write about London without addressing these issues as London is a highly diverse city. In the interview, Smith said: “I was just trying to approach London. I don’t think of it as a theme, or even a significant thing about the city. This is what modern life is like. If I were to write a book about London in which there were only white people, I think that would be kind of bizarre. People do write books like that, which I find bizarre because it’s patently not what London is, nor has it been for fifty years.”

However, John Mullan a professor of English Literary History in an article for the Guardian wrote that the ethnic identities are so various in the book, that “Smith seems to be taking and enjoying new liberties rather than plotting the consequences of the Empire.”

It is colonialism that brought all the characters of the book to London and they are aware of their post-colonial identities.

The role of the past in forming one’s identity

In the preface to the novel Zadie writes the following quote: “What is past is prologue” – Inscription in Washington Museum, thus setting the thematic mood for the novel. The preface suggests that the past is inescapable, and encourages attention to details. By letting the wise words of the past speak before her, Smith acknowledges that ‘What is past is prologue applies to writers as well. Thus, the ideas she examines in the next 500 pages have developed out of her own personal consideration of the past. In that sense, the preface credits all the authors who have inspired Smith to write this, her first novel.

Some of the characters hold to the past while others try to reject it. In the novel, past is not just the prologue as the preface suggests but is sometimes hardly separated from the present. Example

The novel’s main story covers the time period from 1975 until 2000, however, in a flashback it goes back in 1907 and beyond. The events are set mainly in Willesden, North London, the part where Zadie was born and raised and which she knows the best. There are three different families of mixed ethnicity in the middle of the novel who are struggling with issues of heritage and legacy.

The protagonist is Alfred Archibald Jones (Archie) an Englishman who served in World War II. There he met his best friend a Bangladeshi Samad Iqbal and his Italian wife Ophelia Diagilo. As the war was over, Archie brought Ophelia with him back to London and after 30 years of marriage Ophelia become insane from Archie’s mediocrity and they divorced. On New Year’s Day, 1975, Archie attempts to gas himself to death in his car. However, the butcher, Mo Hussein-Ishmael, saves him. Archie feels for the first time in his life worthwhile. The same day, full of enthusiasm, Archie joins an End of the World party where he meets his future Jamaican wife Clara 20 years younger than he. Soon after the marriage with Archie, Clara becomes pregnant with a daughter, Irie.

At teenage years, Clara was an awkward and unattractive Jehovah’s Witness who spent her days proselytizing door-to-door. She abandons her religion when she began dating a boy named Ryan Topps. Ironically, Ryan eventually became a Jehovah’s Witness and tried to win Clara back to the Church. While riding on his scooter, they crashed into a tree, knocking out Clara’s upper teeth.

According to Smith, the novel is not autobiographical, however, she was inspired by the mixed-race marriage of her parents. She calls the scene where Archie and Clara meet, “a bastardized version of how her parents met.”

A second family is a bangladeshi man Samad Iqbal a middle-aged World War II veteran with a crippled right hand. Samad is working at an Indian restaurant, where he receives few tips. Samad is religious and straightforward, enjoy having control. He believes in destiny and imagine himself more worldly and intellectual than other do.

His wife Alsana Begum. Their marriage was arranged. She was promised to Samad even before her birth. To help her husband to pay bills, she sews clothing for an S&M shop called Domination in Soho. Despite the fact that Alsana believes that marriage is best handled with silence, because of her volcanic temper and judgmental nature, she always wins battles with Samad, injuring him. She becomes pregnant with two boys, Magid and Millat.

Most of all, Samad wants his sons to grow into good, traditional Bengali Muslim men. To ensure this, he kidnaps his son Magid and send him to be raised in Bangladesh.

Themes

Teeth

Throughout the novel, teeth symbolize people. Teeth are presented as a universal symbol of humanity, they are always white no matter what a person’s race. They are something what unites human beings and are common to all. Even though teeth are universal, they are nothing without their roots. Samad tries to send Magid back to his Bengali roots, but Smith mocks: “You would get nowhere telling [Samad]… that the first sign of tooth decay is something rotten, something degenerate, deep within the gums. Roots were what saved, the ropes one throws out to rescue drowning me, to Save their Souls.” By saving a tooth’s root, one does not necessarily save the tooth. Indeed, even sending Magid back to Bangladesh does not prevent him from becoming an English intellectual.

J.P. Hamilton lectures the children about keeping their teeth healthy. While his madness eventually makes them run away, his wisdom is genuine. He says, “If you do not brush your teeth, they will fall out, in other words, If you do not pay heed to where you came from, you will not know where you are going.” Hamilton interjects the point from Smith’s preface, that the past always influences the present.

Heritage and Legacy

Smith does explain that Magid and Millat are destined to honor their roots, to “more and more eloquently express their past,” because as “[the sons of] immigrants, [they] cannot escape their history any more than you yourself can lose your shadow.” However, even if the twins’ actions are always products of their past, they have the power to make their own decisions. Magid’s intelligence threatens Samad who wants his sons to fulfill Mangal Pande’s legacy of devotion to the Bengali people. Mangal Pande is Samad’s great grandfather who shot the first bullet in the Indian Mutiny of 1857. Samad considers Pande a tragically unappreciated martyr and bases his sense of worth on his relation to Pande. In all but one history book, Pande is remembered as a clumsy would-be hero who could not even commit suicide successfully after starting the mutiny.

Samad thinks that sending Magid to Bangladesh would secure such a legacy. However, Magid develops into an English intellectual, espousing the progressive views Samad fears instead of the traditional ones he intended Magid to learn.

Fundamentalism

Many of the KEVIN and FATE members are more interested in the simultaneous security and thrill of fundamentalism than in what makes up their doctrine.

Many different organizations:

Millat is a member of the Islamic fundamentalist group, KEVIN (Keepers of the Eternal and Victorious Islamic Nation)

Smith defines KEVIN as: “an extremist faction dedicated to direct, often violent action, a splinter group frowned on by the rest of the Islamic community; popular with the sixteen-to-twenty-five age group; feared and ridiculed in the press.” KEVIN believes in strict adherence to Islamic doctrine and discourages all things Western, including pop culture, promiscuity, and open female sexuality. KEVIN satisfies Millat’s desire to be a gangster, and some members, such as Mo Hussein-Ishmael, join just to gain status.

Joshua Chalfen joins FATE (Fighting Animal Torture and Exploitation), the extreme animal-rights activism group

Hortense grandmother of Irie and Ryan (ex-friend of Clara) taking part in a hunger strike against genetic engineering

Magid supports FutureMouse. a project in which he genetically engineers a mouse to develop certain cancers at specific times in its development. Chalfen hopes his research might someday help cure cancer. The leader is Marcus Chalfen a genetic engineer, the father of Joshua. Magid accepts genetic engineering as the new God.

FutureMouse is met with protest from at least three fronts, including KEVIN, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, and FATE.

Jehovah’s Witness

A member of a religious denomination founded in the United States during the late 19th century in which active evangelism is practiced, the imminent approach of the millennium is preached, and war and organized governmental authority in matters of conscience are strongly opposed.

In White Teeth by Zadie Smith, reminders of the past are everywhere, not always flattering to their subjects, and it at times seemingly all-consuming for the characters. For Smith, the past is so crucial that she begins the novel with a line from William Shakespeare’s The Tempest: “What’s past is prologue” suggesting that history and the past have a profound and inescapable impact. White Teeth winds through the years of an altogether unexpected life-long friendship between Bengali immigrant Samad Iqbal and Englishman Archie Jones. Smith uses the past to help the reader understand how history between characters is linked and how it can manifest in different ways as in the case of the families in White Teeth. Personal and shared histories play a central role throughout White Teeth for every character, whether they choose to embrace or reject it. The past is used to explain almost everything that happens throughout book, from explaining the lasting impacts of British colonialism, to providing the motivations for the actions of characters, to remaining a legacy the second generation chose to explore (or despise) in trying to understand their place in the world.

British Colonialism

It is the past, and the varied experiences of colonialism and assimilation that are present in the minds of Zadie Smith’s characters, and the impact of postcolonialism in shaping their lives. Many of the characters experienced British colonialism at some point in their lives, and it is colonialism that brought many to London, where they worked to maintain their identity as they started new lives. In White Teeth, the characters, especially those who are first-generation immigrants to Britain, grew up in British colonies where they were often made to take directions of the ruling minority and saw their traditional values and customs diminished or vilified. To illustrate the way British rule influenced the lives of the people in colonies, in Chapter 5 “The Root Canals of Alfred Archibald Jones and Samad Miah Iqbal”, Smith portrays the events during the Second World War that led to Samad and Archie developing their life-long friendship. As a citizen of one of the British colonies Samad was required to fight in the Second World War as part of the British army and if it were not for that obligation and the time they spent stranded in a “tiny Bulgarian village”, the shared past of Samad and Archie may never have happened. Smith also provides another important link to the colonial past of the Indian subcontinent, when mentioning Mangal Pande, the great-grandfather of Samad. For him, the legend of Mangal Pande remained crucial to his connection to his homeland and the reputation of the Iqbal family. For him, the existence of Pande in colonial history gave him a sense of pride and allowed him to build his own identity on its importance to history. In Chapter 13, “The Root Canals of Hortense Bowden,” Smith introduces the history of colonialism in Jamaica and presents the story of Ambrosia Bowden, Clara Jones’s grandmother, and Hortense Bowden, Clara’s mother. Smith points to the colonizer’s attempts to educate and fundamentally change the lives of the local people, which often led not to a better life, but rather to its opposite. They tried to make the local population think, act and live like the British, and more specially there were those who “took great pleasure in the conversion of others” to religions the local population was unfamiliar with it including “Mrs. Brenton who introduced the Bowdens to the [Jehovah] Witnesses”. It is these experiences of a past living under British colonial rule and living with its lasting impacts that have shaped the lives on each of the characters, setting an environment for their motivations later in life, and to understanding the challenges they faced in assimilating to a culture very different from their own.

Character Motivations

Consequently, varying motivations for each character’s thoughts and actions are based on their awareness of their past and their acceptance or rejection of its importance.

For Samad, the past, and especially the motivation to pass on the proud history of his home and especially the values he felt were a part of his youth motivates him to send his son Magid to Bangladesh. It was in sending him to this country, which his son had never set foot in, that Samad was certain would enable him to learn of the history Samad was so concerned would otherwise be lost to his sons’ assimilation to British culture. Samad is not alone in living, at least partially, in the past. As his wife Alsana Iqbal says in Chapter 4, “Three Coming” that despite her own lack of interest in revisiting of the past, she recognizes that Samad and Archie continue to have ‘one leg in the present, one in the past,’ and therefore ‘their roots will always be tangled’. Samad’s obsession with the past is in stark contrast to Clara Jones’s utter rejection of her own. This rejection of the religion and burden of her family and her past allowed Clara to focus on raising her daughter Irie at a distance from the influence her mother Hortense.

in comparison to the connection and dedication to the past of the older generation, the second generation of characters find it challenging and, in most cases, not of interest to understand or have impact their lives. The three characters representative of the second generation are Samad’s twin sons Magid and Millat and Archie’s daughter Irie, all whose parents never told them properly where they came from or instilled a sense of pride in their heritage, as was the case for Irie. As they were all born in London and grew up surrounded by the English way of life, the western influence on them is apparent since their early childhood. Overall, both Magid and Millat are unaware of the concept of a Bengali identity that their father so desperately desired them to possess, and although in different way, pursue lives that actively reject the values their father found central to his own life. Of the second-generation children only Irie Jones expresses an interest in understanding her heritage despite first rejecting it, in favour of Chalfenism, because of how complicated it she perceived it to be. Early on, in Chapter 11 “The Miseducation of Irie Jones” the internal struggle Irie faces in being unable to accept her appearance as it contrasts sharply from the white, English beauty standards of the society she has grown up in. It is only after admiring the Chalfen family tree which dates back generations, she realizes that her own family history is hidden from her and seeks out answers to where she has come from. She is not able rely on her parents for information or direction about her ancestors and she becomes “sick of never getting the whole truth” and frustrated in her parents, especially her mother’s lack of interest in sharing any information. As a result, Irie’s grandmother Hortense is the one to introduce her to their family’s past and set off Irie’s embrace of her origin and invites her to Jamaica in 2000. It is this trip to Jamaica that Irie is overjoyed to go on because she wants to explore her past and her roots “[f]or Jamaica appeared to Irie as if it were newly made. Like Columbus himself, just by discovering it she had brought it into existence; … a place where things simply were. No fictions, no myths, no lies, no tangled webs; … it sounded like a beginning … Like the first morning of Eden and the day after apocalypse. A blank page.” However, Irie comes to believe that obsessing over the past is ‘self-indulgent’ because ‘it doesn’t fucking matter”, a change in perspective that occurred after she found out she was pregnant, and therefore likely realized that this new life, and the future, were far more important to focus on that the challenging and never-ending drama of the past. in comparison to the connection and dedication to the past of the older generation, the second generation of characters find it challenging and, in most cases, not of interest to understand or have impact their lives.

The personal and shared pasts of each of the characters play a central role throughout White Teeth, regardless of if they choose to embrace it or reject it. Author Zadie Smith explores the importance of knowing one’s past in maintaining or manipulating one’s identity, especially for immigrants, and later, their children who find themselves trying to find their way in competing cultures, with histories that find themselves in conflict. Reminders and influences from the past of each of the characters are central to understanding how they came to be in London, and how, through a life-long friendship, the past can both help and harm the families in connects. The past provides a common point of reference for the events that take place throughout the book, including frequent reminders the impact colonialism had, which then creates the context for many of the actions of the characters, and which finally presents a narrative of the past that can either be explored or ignored by the second generation.

The search for identity in Zadie Smith’s White Teeth is one of the threads that Smith continually weaves throughout her novel. At one point or another, each character deals with the inevitable question of “Who am I?” From Irie’s search for an identity through her family history to Samad’s futile resistance to all things British, it becomes clear that the multiculturalism of modern London is making it increasingly difficult to align one’s self with a singular culture or background. Through the designation of names, nicknames, and other various epithets, Smith allows her characters to explore, choose, or deny their cultural identities in earnest. For somebody like Samad, these “nicknames” are considered slurs because they essentially insult the importance of his cultural background. But for his son, Magid, his attempts at Anglicizing his given birth name are simply attempts to adapt and blend into the multicultural British scene. Such differences, due to the “intergenerational adaptation” that Kris Knauer examined in his essay, are examples of why several characters respond in various ways to their names and nicknames. From “Mark Smith” to KEVIN, names in White Teeth serve to illustrate the difficulty of defining the multicultural British identity.

In White Teeth, the characters’ names are constantly altered. The significance of these name changes reflects the fluidity of cultural identities, and how different generations consider the idea of multiculturalism. For the older generation, nicknames and various monikers are perceived as a threat to take away the culture they had brought with them from their homelands. According to Knauer, Smith demonstrates how difficult it was for older generations to accept anything other than their fundamental views of how race and culture are to be socially constructed. No more is this apparent than in Samad Miah Iqbal. Samad comes from an era in which Bangladesh is still colonially subjected to the British crown; hence, he becomes subjected to the racial and cultural ignorance of his fellow British comrades. In the waning days of World War II, the other men in Samad and Archibald Jones’s tank give Samad the crude nickname of “Sultan.” This nickname is meant to put Samad in his place among the crew, and serves as a constant reminder that he is still essentially an “other” in the British army. “He’ll shut it if he knows what’s good for him, the Indian Sultan bastard,” Roy Mackintosh says to Captain Dickinson-Smith, speaking about Samad as if he were an inherently different species and dumping him into a general ethnic category. Samad takes this incorrect use of culture and throws it back at them, giving them a derogatory nickname of their own. He responds, “To call me Sultan is about as accurate, in terms of the mileage, you understand, as if I referred to you as a Jerry-Hun fat bastard”. In such context, Samad’s interactions with these white British men are setting the stage for how he will handle the concepts of multiculturalism and assimilation when he later immigrates to London.

Already having been belittled for being from a different culture, Samad also finds it insulting when Archie tries to show solidarity and friendship by calling him the more British moniker, Sam. By trying to use a friendlier nickname for Samad, Archie wants Samad to know that although he is from a different cultural background, it is still possible for them to be friends under the umbrella of British culture. But Samad has already had enough. “Don’t call me Sam… I’m not one of your English matey-boys. My name is Samad Miah Iqbal. Not Sam. Not Sammy. And not – God forbid – Samuel. It is Samad,” he growls. Samad feels that he cannot be one of Archie’s “English matey-boys” because he is so culturally and racially different from their “Englishness,” a belief that has been ingrained in him because of his earlier nickname, “Sultan.” Overall, Samad cannot fathom a possibility where Bangladeshi and British identities can come together harmoniously. The nicknames he has had to deal with during his time in the British army give him ample reasons for resisting the idea of multiculturalism. According to Nick Bentley’s essay, “Re-writing Englishness,” new ways of thinking about ethnicity are made more difficult by the fact that “old ideas about race and culture are difficult to shift”.

In contrast, the younger generation in White Teeth seems to have a more eager grasp of becoming British. Whereas their parents “know more about constructs such as ‘otherness’ and ‘difference,’” Archie and Samad’s children are more familiar with concepts such as hybridity and multiculturalism. Knauer explains that Glenard Oak, the secondary school in Willesden Green, “is a school in which the word ‘difference’ is not a demonized mumbo jumbo that we somehow have to incorporate… to show how liberal and progressive we are, but it is a part of lived experience of the young crowds”. For example, such sentiments arise when Samad’s own son, Magid, embarks on a journey to Anglicize himself, starting with his unfamiliar, un-British birth name.

As Magid becomes more involved with his British school and white British friends, he feels that in order to fit in properly, he has to publicly shed his given name. At home, Magid still understands and participates in his Bangladeshi background, since his parents were clearly unaware of the British persona that Magid uses to mask himself while at school. It might be that Magid does not want to completely reject his cultural identity, however; it is just that he is searching for another part of it – the British part. Samad himself fails to understand that Magid comes from two worlds, having been born in London to immigrant parents, and therefore cannot be expected to only bind to the Bengali Muslim world that dominates their household. “I told you, Magid, I told you the condition upon which you would be allowed. You come with me on hajj. If I am to touch that black stone before I die I will do it with my eldest son by my side,” Samad fiercely declares to his son in an attempt to show Magid what particular culture he must adhere to. It is Samad’s own unwillingness to let British culture seep into their Willesden home that leads to Magid searching for the British part of his cultural identity outside the private sphere.

In a different vein, nicknames in the novel are also given in disapproval of certain lifestyle choices that disagree with aspects of one’s culture or heritage. Neena, Alsana Begum Iqbal’s niece, is given the unfavorable epithet of “Niece-of-Shame.” This is in response not specifically to Neena’s embrace of British culture, but to her homosexuality. The nickname “used to come in longer sentences, e.g., You have brought nothing but shame… or My niece, the shameful… but now… it had become abridged to Niece-of-Shame, an all-purpose tag that summed up the general feeling”. Rather than being directly designated to Neena, this particular epithet grows out of a gradual process, shrinking down from longer sentences to “an all-purpose tag.” The tag of being someone who has let down the strict traditions of her culture has been firmly affixed to Neena, even though she can still speak Bengali and manages to spend time with her ethnic family. But Alsana, by giving such a nickname to Neena, is demonstrating a disapproval of Neena’s liberal views and homosexuality that can only be possible in a country like Britain. Continuing the theory of intergenerational adaptation, as Samad’s wife, she is also part of the older generation, for Alsana “really was very traditional, very religious, lacking nothing except the faith”.

Speaking in even broader perspectives, particular names also give significant meaning to various institutions and movements that attempt to define some facet of multicultural Britain. Samad’s other son, Millat, whose British upbringing is due to a complete immersion in pop culture rather than education like his twin brother, finds himself at a crossroads in the middle of the novel. His love for American gangster movies instills in him a desire to construct his own identity as a Western icon, something he cannot develop at home because of Samad’s resistance to British culture. Millat is searching to expand his persona as the leader of the Raggastanis, fellow weed-smoker of the black kids, hero and spokesman for the Asians. Enter the Keepers of the Eternal and Victorious Islamic Nation. The initial appeal of this youthful organization to Millat begins with his old mate Hifan as “the don. Look at the suit… gangster stylee!”. The members of this group believe they are fighting for fundamentalist Islam against the tyranny of British imperialism, but who can ignore the fact that their acronym, KEVIN, spells out a common Western boy name? Even their uniform, the gangster-style suits that Millat admire, can be considered distinctly Western. In essence, KEVIN serves as an outlet for the conflicted individuals of Millat’s generation. Having largely ignored his Muslim heritage throughout his whole life in favor of Al Pacino and The Godfather, Millat is trying to compensate for his Westernization by taking part in an extremist Muslim brotherhood. KEVIN’s acronym problem, in fact, reminds readers that prominent members such as Millat are still English born and bred.

Undoubtedly like many older generation immigrants like him, Samad is completely unable to grasp the concept of intergenerational adaptation because he fails to see his children as culturally different from him. He cries out, “Don’t speak to me of second generation! One generation! Indivisible! Eternal!”. It worries him that his children either will become completely British or not Bangladeshi at all. But times are changing. Smith regards the evolving tales – and indeed, names – of the Iqbal family as an example of how “old categories of race are an inaccurate way of describing the ethnic diversity of contemporary England”. Even Millat Iqbal’s own middle name is a play on different cultures set on a crash collision course. Millat “lived for the in between, he lived up to his middle name, Zulfikar, the clashing of two swords”.

Since even before its publication in 2000, Zadie Smith’s debut novel White Teeth has been surrounded by intense hype and media publicity. Smith’s status as a young black female writer who received a quarter million pounds advance on a first book no doubt fueled the frenzy and made her a popular talking point. Today, the majority of audiences and critics would agree that the book lived up to its hype. Translated into over 20 languages, praised by veteran writers and a poet laureate, and adapted into a popular television show, the novel was a major success and the sensational rumors now seem warranted. While Smith’s story perhaps was seen as a trendy news piece at first, its investigation of postcolonial European culture and society has made it a serious and important work that aims to make sense of an increasingly complicated, diverse modern world. Smith uses compelling immigrant characters like Bangladeshi Samad Iqbal and his twin sons to explore the difficulties of identity and assimilation in late 20th century Europe, illustrating the need for compromise and understanding in navigating multiculturalism today.

As is common for many writers, Zadie Smith took her own experiences into account as inspiration for her fiction. Smith herself is of mixed race and is the daughter of a Jamaican immigrant mother and British father. To be sure though, Smith’s background speaks to a larger phenomenon, as it is similar to that of millions of Europeans from this century and the last. According to data collected in 2004, approximately 8.3 percent of the population of Great Britain was born abroad. This number takes into account only foreign-born immigrants and not their children who make up a large and uniquely important part of the population. In her novel, Smith explores the difficulties these groups face in postcolonial Europe where an influx of immigrants occurred in the second half of the 20th century from Commonwealth nations such as Jamaica and India. The question of belonging or assimilating into a new society and culture is the crux of Smith’s novel, a process that immigrants and their children deal with in vastly different ways. In the Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Riva Kastoryano considers how immigrants are theoretically supposed to undergo the assimilation process into a new country. Kastoryano writes the following: The concept of citizenship is mainly defined by membership in a political community, which takes shape through rights (social, political, and cultural) and duties…implies the integration or the incorporation of “foreigners” into a national community theoretically sharing the same moral and political values. Moreover, these foreigners are supposed to adopt, or even “appropriate,” historical references as a proof of belonging and of loyalty to a nation’s founding principles.

Kastoryano outlines these ideas about assimilation commonly held by the hegemony of the ruling society. This view of assimilation defines belonging in a somewhat cold and clinical political sense, as a person changes to become an integrated or incorporated “citizen.” For Kastoryano, the native and often socially, culturally, and economically superior class understands assimilation in this simple way. Kastoryano takes issue with this school of thought as it presents the shedding of an old identity and transition into a new community as an easy act. In her novel, specifically through characters like Samad Iqbal, Smith similarly aims to complicate this idea of assimilation and illustrate the difficulties it presents for many individuals.

Smith’s character Samad Iqbal, World War II veteran and Bangladeshi immigrant, encompasses the struggle of assimilation and the reconciliation of multiple cultures in one individual. Samad’s greatest struggle is arguably a moral one. Though he is a Muslim, and desires to be a good one at that, he finds it difficult to maintain the tenets of his religion in a secular Britain that is full of temptation. His temptations come in several forms. One is lust for his sons’ music teacher, Poppy Burt-Jones. Although Samad is married and does not wish to be unfaithful to his wife and to sin in the eyes of Allah, he cannot help his arousal and eventually succumbs to it, as he has an affair with Poppy. Earlier in his married life, the man grappled with the morality of masturbation, an act he knew to be prohibited in the Islamic faith. He consulted the Alim at his local mosque but ultimately could not abstain, and so he obsessively repeats Islamic prayers and sayings to make up for his transgressions. Samad also fails to meet with the ideals of his native culture in his married life, as his wife Alsana is not the obedient woman that a Muslim man is supposed to have. Finally, Samad is also tempted by alcohol, a vice that he probably would not have to encounter in Bangladesh, in a community of Muslim peers with similar values.

Though he cannot honor them, Samad identifies strongly with his Muslim and Bangladeshi roots. In this new land, foreign compared to the home he is accustomed to, he cannot live up to the ideals he was born into. Smith writes: “To Samad, tradition was culture, and culture led to roots, and these were good, these were untainted principles. That didn’t mean he could live by them, abide by them or grow in the manner they demanded.” It is not his intention to shirk the values of his roots. In reality, he wishes to return to them as he says, “I don’t wish to be a modern man! I wish to live as I was always meant to! I wish return to the East.” Obviously Samad is unable to do this. One way in which the man attempts to hold on to his roots is through family and history, in the figure of his great grandfather Mangal Pandey. When Kastoryano refers to the appropriation of historical references by immigrants, he is probably alluding to examples like Commonwealth nations such as Jamaica whose people felt historically attached to the Motherland of Britain. Samad’s case stands very much in contrast to these positive examples as he champions a relative who is symbolic of British oppression and colonial rebellion. Samad uses Pandey not only as a connection to his native roots, but also as a rejection of his new country and a means of fighting his integration or assimilation into it.

Another facet of Samad’s story that speaks to the complicated nature of the immigrant saga is the development of his twin sons, Millat and Magid. Unhappy with his own ability to be true to his roots in a foreign country, Samad desires that his sons grow to become respectable men by Bangladeshi and Muslim standards. The twins, however, express a desire to live by Westernized British standards early on. Research has shown that children of immigrants, or second-generation children, are much more likely to attain a level of engagement with a new culture than their parents. Both children display this willingness to adapt to the British social-scape quickly. Still, the boys often feel uncertain about their identities and struggle to find a sense of community anywhere. For the twins there is the sense that “underneath it all, there remained an ever-present anger and hurt, the feeling of belonging nowhere that comes to people who belong everywhere.” They attempt to find purpose and identity in different ways—by embracing gangster culture, boycotting local festivals, disowning their names. In response to his sons’ adolescent rebellions, Samad sends one of them, Magid, back to Bangladesh to be raised in a traditional way, free from the perceived corruption of Britain. Ironically, Magid returns from his father’s homeland an atheist, science student, “more English than the English.” Here it seems Smith is simultaneously criticizing and sympathizing with her characters. She recognizes a father’s tragic desire to see his sons brought up in his own family traditions, but also points at Samad’s unwillingness to adapt or compromise—a necessity for not only the success of an immigrant, but of anyone clinging to the past in a sometimes aggressively modern world.

Smith’s personal experiences, coupled with her obvious insight into an increasingly diverse and complicated world, have allowed her to weave a story that unabashedly examines the issues of immigration and assimilation. While it may have been media hype that set off her book’s popularity, its prominence as an important text that speaks to themes past and present in European lives (an American ones, for that matter) is by no means unfounded. In White Teeth, Smith uses her many-layered, dynamic characters such as Samad and his sons to present the difficulties of the immigrant experience—from internal struggles to family battles to attaining meaningful membership in a community—and stresses the importance of compromise and understanding in these modern times of immense diversity and differences.

In White Teeth, ideological circulation is literally circular, because the vast majority of people are too obdurate to even listen to others’ views, much less alter their own belief systems. The inflexible and almost fanatic nature of belief, as well as the relentless need of different factions to publicize their opinions regardless of the result, reveals that something about ideology resists reality, that common sense does not carry over to the world of credo. Even letters sound like they are composed more for the addressor than to the addressee. Horst Ibelgaufts frequently sends letters to Archie Jones detailing mundane and random occurrences in his life (which Archie doubtlessly does not care to hear), from “I am building a crude velodrome” to “I am taking up the harp” to “each of my children has a vase of peonies on their windowsill”. Ibelgaufts also repeatedly offers Archie unasked-for advice and anecdotes from his own life that only he understands, and consequently, his letters sound as if written to a brick wall. Moreover, when Marcus and Magid write, it sounds as if they are addressing mirror images of themselves, vainly reflecting their shared ideas. Marcus: “You think like me. You’re precise. I like that.” Magid: “You put it so well and speak my thoughts better than I ever could.” Clearly, if Marcus and Magid did not think so much alike, there could never be “such a successful merging of two people from ink and paper despite the distance between them”. Smith’s characters have insatiable drives to communicate, but more often than not, communication fails because there is no mutual or reciprocal response. Communication is most successful, as in the case of Marcus and Magid, when it challenges nothing, when it merely confirms previously held believes.

Why, then, do people feel the need to publicize even when no one will listen? Smith writes, “[Samad] had instead the urge, the need, to speak to every man, and like the Ancient Mariner, explain constantly, constantly wanting to reassert something, anything. Wasn’t that important”? Perhaps, as Smith seems to suggest, people have a heightened sense of their own importance. Because Hortense believes her daughter Clara is “the Lord’s child, Hortense’s miracle baby” she forces Clara to “help her with doorstepping, administration, writing speeches, and all the varied business of the church of Jehovah’s Witnesses…This child’s work was just beginning”. For Hortense, “those neighbors, those who failed to listen to your warnings…shall die that day that their bodies, if lined up side by side, will stretch three hundred times round the earth and on their charred remains shall the true Witnesses of the Lord walk to his side. -The Clarion Bell, issue 245′. None of Smith’s characters have the slightest suspicion that they could possibly be wrong, and even in the face of contrary evidence, they still persist in their dogma. When the world does not end on January 1, 1914, 1925, or 1975, Hortense still has faith that the Lambeth branch of Jehovah’s Witnesses will correctly identify the exact date of the Apocalypse. Even when Samad breaks Islamic tenet after tenet, he still holds on to the belief that, one day, he will be a good Muslim. The self-importance of Smith’s characters is the fuel for the ideological fire, the impetus behind their circulation of belief.

While Smith’s characters do not realize is that they preach like broken records, Smith is fully cognizant of the circuitous, ineffectual nature of gospel. “The other problem with Brother Ibrahim ad-Din Shukrallah, the biggest problem perhaps, was his great affection for tautology. Though he promised explanation, elucidation, and exposition, linguistically he put one in mind of a dog chasing its own tail”. Dogma adheres most strongly to those, like Ryan Topps, who “didn’t move, not an inch. But then, that had always been his talent; he had mono-intelligence, an ability to hold on to a single idea with phenomenal tenacity, and he never found anything that suited it as well as the church of Jehovah’s Witnesses”. In White Teeth, it appears that preaching and believing are inextricably related-as if the more one preaches, the stronger their beliefs become and the more they come to believe that their views are true. Bombarded by leaflets from all sides, Smith’s characters need to publicize their own ideas so that their voices are not immersed, consumed, or erased. Publication-the act of putting an idea on paper-is an attempt at permanence, the small insurance that the idea will exist as long as publication is in circulation. History is not the truth, but rather the story that survives. “History was a different business…taught with one eye on narrative, the other on drama, no matter how unlikely or chronologically inaccurate”. By publicizing their beliefs, Smith’s characters attempt to put their individual marks on the history of ideas.

Like Samad, who writes “IQBAL” in blood on a bench because, as he says, “I wanted to write my name in the world. It mean I presumed”, Smith’s characters all suffer anxiety over their own historical inconsequence. Upon finding his father’s name, Millat sneers at his father’s small contribution, thinking: “It just meant you’re nothing… a man who had spent eighteen years in a strange land and made no more mark than this”. Samad believes wholeheartedly that his ancestor Mangal Pande is a hero, but Archie disagrees, arguing, “All right, then: Pande. What did he achieve? Nothing”! Though every book save one describes Pande as a military traitor, Samad chooses to believe the one “bound in a tan leather and covered in light dust that denotes something incredibly precious” which claims the little known Mangal Pande “succeeded in laying the foundations of the Independence to be won in 1947”-in 1857. People are arbitrary and believe the ideas they will, and when an idea somehow relates to their self-concept, like Magal Pande’s heroism to Samad’s personal history, it becomes even more entrenched. Joshua Chalfen becomes a militant animal rights activist out of resentment toward his father, not because he actually cares deeply about animals. Even as he rants to Irie about the injustice of the battery chicken’s life, he admits that he is not yet a vegetarian (“I’m becoming a fucking vegetarian”) and that he has not given up animal products (“I’m giving up leather-wearing it-and all other animal by-products”). Smith’s characters seem to form opinions more from of a sense of ownership or self-centeredness than out of any great allegiance to the world of ideas. Ideology can be interpreted as a form of egotism, because it is necessarily self-reflexive; it links and anchors the subjective and the personal to the greater universe, and the act of defining oneself according to a presumption of absolute universal truth seems, like Samad’s supposition that Mangal Pande was Gandhi’s mentor, incredibly audacious.

White Teeth does not comment on the truthfulness of ideology, on which beliefs are better than others, on who is right and who is wrong. Instead, Smith focuses on the ways that beliefs can become divisive and destructive when they are coercively applied to others. When Marcus publishes his article on FutureMouse, he receives hateful from “factions as disparate as the Conservative Ladies Association, the AntiVivisection lobby, the Nation of Islam, the rector of St-Agne’s Church, Berkshire, and the editorial board of the far-left Schnews,” and he is thoroughly bewildered at the response his experiment has provoked when, according to him, mapping the life of a mouse will help scientists understand how people live and why they die. People accuse Marcus of playing God, and Marcus argues that scientific knowledge exists for its own sake, that FutureMouse could not lead to a form of eugenics unless employed that way. “Of course, he understood that the work he did involved some element of moral luck; so it is for all men of science. You work partly in the dark, uncertain of future ramifications, unsure what blackness your name might yet carry, what bodies will be laid at your door”. Marcus’ publication is innocuous on its own, but applied to others or manipulated to apply to others (which Smith ostensibly hints is an inevitability), it can have devastating results.

It is ironic that one of the most insightful quotes in White Teeth comes straight from Joyce Chalfen, a character who is habitually oblivious to reality. In an article about flowers and gardening, she says, “If we wish to provide happy playgrounds for our children, and corners of contemplation for our husbands, we need to create gardens of diversity and interest. Mother Earth is great and plentiful, but even she requires the occasional helping hand”. Self-consciously and cheekily sentimental, Smith and Chalfen both acknowledge that the world is a garden comprised of many different types of plants, and in order to have a happy and peaceful world, we must learn to accept the diversity that surrounds us, which includes the different beliefs of others. We have no other choice. Zadie Smith quotes a famous song called “As Time Goes By,” citing “You must remember this, a kiss is still a kiss,/ A sigh is just a sigh;/ The fundamental things apply,/ As time goes by”. Smith suggests that some things, like ideology, never really change, that the “fundamental” beliefs of people are sometimes so deeply rooted that they cannot be altered. We can litter the world of leaflets and change nothing. At such a monumental impasse, our only solution is acceptance.