"If this were a fairy tale, it would now be time for Captain Durham to play hero. He does not seem to lack the necessary credentials. It is not that he isn't handsome, or tall, or strong, or that he doesn't want to help her, or that he doesn't love her (oh, he loves her; just as the English loved India and Africa and Ireland; it is the love that is the problem, people treat their lovers badly)—all those things are true. But maybe it is just the scenery that is wrong. Maybe nothing that happens upon stolen ground can expect a happy ending" (299).
Zadie Smith's White Teeth lived up to the hype. Whether or not one would consider it the first great novel of the 2000s and proclaim Smith's debut an instant classic depends on one's penchant use of hyperbole. I will admit that I particularly enjoyed Smith's narrative voice, which is indeed quite comedic and ironic in the midst of terrible social conditions and the absurdities as well as inconsistencies of life. Thus, Smith's prose impresses the reader as ingenious, clever, hilarious, and overall engaging in such a way that escapes most novelists' initial works. For these aforementioned reasons, those who make specious claims that the only reason Smith received such critical acclaim because of her youth, stunning beauty, womanhood, and blackness should be rejected. While there is a problem in the novel where female characters are not as fully developed as the males (something Smith alludes to in an interview as one of her weaknesses), Smith's innovative structure of the text poignantly captures the cyclical nature of history and families, and the universality of the human experience which transcends race, nationality, or skin color, which is encapsulated within the novel's title that alludes to something we all share, white teeth. Furthermore, such assumptions about the praise for the work of a woman of color masks feelings of white racial resentment which see whites as threatened by or suffering "reverse discrimination" or "hating on whitey" and thereby fueling undeserved acclaim or mainstream academic support for writers, artists, academics, and writers of marginalized identities.
Moreover, Smith recreates her own world growing up in North London in mixed English and Jamaican family. The other family in the novel is a Bengali immigrant couple and their twin sons, who each adapt to London life and the immigrant and first generation experience in widely divergent ways. The novel does take some expected directions, with critiques of Islamic and Christian fundamentalism, the fatalism of both and especially regarding the Jehovah Witnesses, as well as the extreme of scientific rationalism in the "real" English family, the Chalfens (who are actually of Polish Jewish descent through the father and therefore recent immigrants) which leads to destructive egotism as well as an absence of pathos to understand the myriad ways a project of genetically engineered mice could be abused. However, the religious fundamentalists, both Christian and Muslim, who oppose the project as well as the animal rights terrorists cannot evade a moral quandary. Neither can Archibald, who gives up the power to make decisions in his life by tossing a coin instead of taking a decisive stand until the novel's conclusion, once he finally sees that "man makes himself. And he is responsible for what he makes" (Smith 445). The novel also addresses issues of race, immigration, and English identity after decolonization as "hordes" of black and brown people from places such as Jamaica and Bangladesh change the ethnic makeup as well as national identity of Britain as a white, European nation built on imperialism and racism.
Personally, as someone with little knowledge and exposure to western Europe's expanding African, Asian, and Muslim populations, this novel sheds light on issues of racism and discrimination, as well as miscegenation and the new British identity that cannot be located or replicated in dry statistical analyses and reports. Smith brings to life the experiences of the foreigner, the perpetual outsider who society ostracizes based on religion, race, skin color, sexual orientation, gender, and the persistence of racist beliefs even among those so-called liberal whites, like the Chalfen family. As a person of color living in the United States, which is still identified or perceived by many European-Americans as a white nation primarily, I too have been on the receiving end of racist assumptions and attitudes carried by white characters in the novel. For instance, being assumed to not be from the United States or not considered a "real" American based on racial and ethnic heritage, often mistaken for another despised or unpopular nationality, and always being asked about origins. Likewise, Millat, the rebel twin realizes immediately that regardless of what he says or does, he
"was a Paki matter where he came from; that he smelled of curry; had no sexual identity; took other people's jobs; or gave all the jobs to his relatives; that he could be a dentist or a shop-owner or a curry-shifter, but not a footballer or a filmmaker; that he should go back to his own country; or stay here and earn his bloody keep; that he worshiped elephants and wore turbans; that no one who looked like Millat, or spoke like Millat, or felt like Millat, was ever on the news unless they had recently been murdered. In short, he knew he had no face in this country, no voice in the country, until the week before last when suddenly people like Millat were on every channel and every radio and every newspaper and they were angry, and Millat recognized the anger, thought it recognized him, and grabbed it with both hands" (194).
Overall, an excellent, cleverly-written English novel by a fascinating Jamaican-English writer. Some of the slang and expressions were difficult to follow at times, but mainly due to an ignorance of European English expressions. When Clara or her mother, Hortense Bowden, break down into Jamaican patois it's also interesting since these two women can never leave their homeland behind them. In fact, Shiva states just that to Samad, "Who knows what Shiva Bhagwati would have turned out like back in Calcutta? Prince or pauper? And who," said Shiva, some of his old beauty returning to his face, "can pull the West out of 'em once it's in?" (121) Though some further character development would have been appreciated with Irie and Clara, the two Jamaican/English women in the novel, as well as Irie's grandmother, Hortense, the novel succeeds in creating an inclusive narrative that incorporates English colonialism in Jamaica, the subjugation and dilemma spawned by British imperialism on the Indian subcontinent and how people with roots in widely scattered areas of the British empire intersect globally and locally through immigration to the former metropole. Smith did indeed devise a postcolonial text, but one that cannot be bashed for being unduly critical of Europe or homogenizing the experiences of postcolonial groups either, since Smith does not neglect to mention problems of colorism among the Asians as well as racism between and among Afro-Caribbeans and Asians in Britain. Alsana's thoughts about Clara, the Jamaican wife of her husband Samad's best and only friend unambiguously reveal deep, widely held prejudices and assumptions of inferiority:
"Black people are often friendly, thought Alsana, smiling at Clara, and adding this fact subconsciously to the short "pro" side of the pro and con list she had on the black girl. From every minority she disliked, Alsana liked to single out one specimen for spiritual forgiveness. From Whitechapel, there had been many such redeemed characters. Mr. Van, the Chinese chiropodist, Mr. Segal, a Jewish carpenter, Rosie, a Dominican woman who continuously popped round, much to Alsana's grievance and delight, in an attempt to convert her into a Seventh-Day Adventist--all these lucky individuals were given Alsana's golden reprieve and magically extrapolated from their skins like Beijing tigers" (55).
Great quotations
1. Archie's co-worker's statement about Archie marrying a black woman half his age from Jamaica after attempting suicide and trying to change the course of his life.
(59) "Oh, Archie, you are funny," said Maureen sadly, for she had always fancied Archie a bit but never more than a bit because of this strange way he had about him, always talking to Pakistanis and Caribbeans like he didn't even notice and now he'd gone and married one and hadn't even thought it worth mentioning what color she was until the office dinner when she turned up black as anything and Maureen almost choked on her prawn cocktail."
2. (193) "It was a new breed, just recently joining the ranks of the other street crews: Becks, B-boys, Indie kids, wide-boys, ravers, rudeboys, Acidheads, Sharons, Tracies, Kevs, Nation Brothers, Raggas, and Pakis; manifesting itself as a kind of cultural mongrel of the last three categories. Raggastanis spoke a strange mix of Jamaican patois, Bengali, Gujarati, and English. Their ethos, their manifesto, if it could be called that, was equally a hybrid thing: Allah featured, but more as a collective big brother than a supreme being, a hard-as-fuck geezer who would fight in their corner if necessary; kung fu and the works of Bruce Lee were also central to the philosophy; added to this was a smattering of Black Power (as embodied by the album Fear of a Black Planet, Public Enemy); but mainly their mission was to put the Invincible back in Indian, the Bad-aaaass back in Bengali, the P-Funk back in Pakistani. People had fucked with Rajik back in the days when he was into chess and wore V-necks. People had fucked wih Ranil, when he sat at the back of the class and carefully copied all teachers' comments into his book. People had fucked with Dipesh and Hifan when they wore traditional dress in the playground. People had even fucked with Millat, with his tight jeans and his white rock."
3. (204) "Finally, O'Connell's. Inevitably, O'Connell's. Simply because you could be without family in O'Connell's, without possessions or status, without past glory or future hope--you could walk through that door with nothing and be exactly the same as everybody else in there. It could be 1989 outside, or 1999, or 2009, and you could still be sitting at the corner in the V-neck you wore to your wedding in 1975, 1945, 1935. Nothing changes here, things are only retold, remembered. That's why old men love it."
4. (238) Alsana on her niece's lesbianism and her partner:
"I'm as liberal as the next person," complained Alsana, once they were alone. "But why do they always have to be laughing and making a song-and-dance about everything? I cannot believe homosexuality is that much fun. Heterosexuality certainly is not."
5. (262) Joshua's family messed up; obsessed with Chalfenism and itself
"They were still the same remarkable family they always had been. But having cut all ties with their Oxbridge peers--judges, TV execs, advertisers, lawyers, actors, and other frivolous professions Chalfenism sneered at--there was no one left to admire Chalfenism itself. Its gorgeous logic, its compassion, its intellect. They were like wild-eyed passengers on the Mayflower with no rock in sight. Pilgrims and prophets with no strange land. They were bored, and none more than Joyce."
6. (264) Joyce and her infatuation with Millat, the handsome son of Samad and Alsana
"Pulchritude--beauty where you would least suspect it, hidden in a word that looked like it could signify a belch or skin infection. Beauty in a tall brown young man who should have been indistinguishable to Joyce from those she regularly bought milk and bread from, gave her accounts to for inspection, or passed her checkbook to behind the thick glass of a bank till."
7. (271) Joyce Chalfen's racism and love for Millat and Irie
"You'll stay for dinner, won't you?" pleaded Joyce. "Oscar really wants you to stay. Oscar loves having strangers in the house, he finds it really stimulating. Especially brown strangers! Don't you, Oscar?"
8. (271) "This has been the century of strangers, brown, yellow, and white. This has been the century of the great immigrant experiment. It is only this late in the day that you can walk into a playground and find Isaac Leung by the fish pond, Danny Rahman in the football cage, Quang O'Rourke bouncing a basketball, and Irie Jones humming a tune. Children with first and last names on a direct collision course. Names that secrete within them mass exodus, cramped boats and planes, cold arrivals, medical checkups. It is only this late in the day, and possibly only in Willesden, that you can find best friends Sita and Sharon, constantly mistaken for each other because Sita is white (her mother liked the name) and Sharon is Pakistani (Her mother thought it best--less trouble)."
9. (287) "Sit down," hissed Alsana, grabbing her by the arm. "Sit down, all right, point made, Miss Clever Lesbian. Look, we need you, OK? Sit down, apology, apology. OK? Better."
10. (288) "But the idea of women loving women was so far from Joyce's cognitive understanding of the world that she couldn't process it. The idea of them. She just didn't get it. God knows, she made the effort."
11. (290) "I can't help thinking," said Marcus, unheeding, "that a Chalfen man and an Iqbal woman would be a hell of a mix. Like Fred and Ginger. You'd give us sex and we'd give you sensibility or something. Hey? You'd keep a Chalfen on his toes--you're as fiery as an Iqbal. Indian passion."
12. (294) "Captain Charlie Dunham was a no-good djam fool bwoy."
13. Captain Dunham's relationship with Ambrosia, great-grandfather of Irie after the earthquake of 1907 destroyed Kingston
(300) "It is a strange feeling, looking out on to an ocean of ebony skins, unable to find the one he loves, the one he thinks he owns. For Durham has orders to stand here and call out the names of the handful of servants, butlers, and maids, the chosen few the English will be taking with them to Cuba until the fires die down. If he knew her last name, God knows he would call it out. But in all that teaching, he never learned it. He never asked."
14. (336) Samad to Irie on his twin sons straying from the life he wanted for them
"They have both lost their way. Strayed so far from the life I had intended for them. No doubt they will both marry white women called Sheila and put me in an early grave. All I wanted was two good Muslim boys."
15. (337) Samad on coming to Britain and immigration:
"Who would want to stay? Cold, wet, miserable; terrible food, dreadful newspapers--who would want to stay? In a place where you are never welcomed, only tolerated. Just tolerated. Like you are an animal finally housebroken. Who would want to stay? But you have made a devil's pact...it drags you in and suddenly you are unsuitable to return, your children are unrecognizable, you belong nowhere."
16. 338) Hortense on sexism in the Jehovah's Witnesses
"I gat so tired wid de church always tellin' me I'm a woman or I'm nat heducated enough. Everybody always trying' to heducate you; heducate you about dis, heducate you about dat...Dat's always bin de problem wid de women in dis family. Somebody always tryin' to heducate them about someting, pretendin' it all about learnin' when it all about a battle of de wills. But if I were one of de hundred an' forty-four, no one gwan try to heducate me. Dat would be my job! I'd make my own laws an' I wouldn't be wanting anybody else's opinions. My mudder was strong-willed deep down, and I'm de same. Lord knows, your mudder was de same. And you de same."
17. (355) "Reporters were factional, fanatical, obsessively defending their own turf, propounding the same thing day after day. So it had always been. Who would have guessed that Luke and John would take such different angles on the scoop of the century, the death of the Lord? It just went to prove that you couldn't trust these guys. Irie's job, then, was to give the information as it stood, every time, verbatim from a piece of paper written by Marcus and Magid, stapled to the wall."
18. (359) "In the Chalfen lexicon the middle classes were the inheritors of the enlightenment, the creators of the welfare state, the intellectual elite, and the source of all culture. Where they got this idea, it's hard to say."
19. (384) "And it goes to prove what has been said of immigrants many times before now; they are resourceful; they make do. They use what they can when they can."
20. (384) "Whatever road presents itself, they will take, and if it happens to lead to a dead end, well then, Mr. Schmutters and Mr. Banajii will merrily set upon another, weaving their way through Happy Multicultural Land. Well, good for them. But Magid and MIllat couldn't manage it. They left that neutral room as they had entered it: weighed down, burdened, unable to waver from their course or in any way change their separate, dangerous trajectories. They seem to make no progress. The cynical might say they don't even move at all--that Magid and Millat are two of Zeno's headfuck arrows, occupying a space equal to themselves and, what is scarier, equal to Mangal Pande's, equal to Samad Iqbal's. Two brothers trapped in the temporal instant. Two brothers who pervert all attempts to put dates to this story, to track these guys, to offer times and days, because there isn't, wasn't, and never wil be any duration. In fact, nothing moves. Nothing changes. They are running at a standstill. Zeno's paradox."
21. (385)
"Yeah, Zeno had an angle. He wanted the One, but the world is Many. And yet still that paradox is alluring. The harder Achilles tries to catch the tortoise, the more eloquently the tortoise expresses its advantage. Likewise, the brothers will race toward the future only to find they more and more eloquently express their past, that place where they have just been. Because this is the other thing about immigrants ('fugees, emigres, travelers): they cannot escape their history any more than you yourself can lose your shadow."
22. (390) "A radical new movement where politics and religion were two sides of the same coin. A group that took freely from Garveyism, the American Civil Rights movement, and the thought of Elijah Muhammad, yet remained within the letter of the Qur'an. The Keepers of the Eternal and Victorious Islamic Nation. By 1992 they were a small but widespread body, with limbs as far-flung as Edinburg and Land's End, a heart in Selly Oak and a soul in the Kilburn High Road. KEVIN: 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; and gathered tonight in the Kilburn Hall, standing on chairs and packed to the rafters, listening to the speech of their founder."
23. (437) Clara will still break out into patois after living in London for most of her life: "you kyan jus leddem sing trew de whole ting!"
24. Why Samad wouldn't stop Hortense and the Jehovah's Witnesses from singing to interrupt Marcus Chalfen's presentation of his genetically-engineered mouse
439) "Samad watches it all and finds himself, to his surprise, unwilling to silence her. Partly because he is tired. Partly because he is old. But mostly because he would do the same, though in a different name. He knows what it is to seek. He knows the dryness. He has felt the thirst you get in a strange land--horrible, persistent--the thirst that lasts your whole life."
25. (442) "So as the gun sees the light, he is there, he is there with no coin to help him, he is there before Samad can stop him, he is there with no alibi, he is there between Millat Iqbal's decision and his target, like the moment between thought and speech, like the split-second intervention of memory or regret."
26. (446) Dr. Sick: "It is not a serious proposition. It is a test. Only those who are sufficiently strong and well disposed to life to affirm it--even if it will just keep on repeating--have what it takes to endure the worst blackness. I could see the things I have done repeated infinitely. I am one of the confident ones. But you are not one of them..."
27. (447) "But first the endgames. Because it seems no matter what you think of them, they must be played, even if, like the independence of India or Jamaica, like the signing of peace treaties or the docking of passenger boats, the end is simply the beginning of an even longer story."
28. (448) "But surely to tell these tall tales and others like them would be to speed the myth, the wicked lie, that the past is always tense and the future, perfect. And as Archie knows, it's not like that. It's never been like that."
29. (448) "Maybe it would make an interesting survey (what kind would be your decision) to examine the present and divide the onlookers into two groups: those whose eyes fell upon a bleeding man, slumped across a table, and those who watched the getaway of a small brown man rebel mouse. Archie, for one, watched the mouse. He watched it stand very still for a second with a smug look as if it expected nothing less. He watched it scurry away, over his hand. He watched it dash along the table, and through the hands of those who wished to pin it down. He watched it leap off the end and disappear through an air vent. Go on my son! thought Archie."
30. “Please. Do me this one, great favor, Jones. If ever you hear anyone, when you are back home...if ever you hear anyone speak of the East," and here his voice plummeted a register, and the tone was full and sad, "hold your judgment. If you are told 'they are all this' or 'they do this' or 'their opinions are these,' withhold your judgment until all the facts are upon you. Because that land they call 'India' goes by a thousand names and is populated by millions, and if you think you have found two men the same among that multitude, then you are mistaken. It is merely a trick of the moonlight.”
Interesting interview with Zadie Smith
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
ReplyDelete