Through Smith’s exploration of generational trauma that comes with colonialism, she exposes different ways trauma is manifested. Although some would rather ignore the past like Archie and Clara and others, like Samad, who avow it, it is a history that always follows them regardless of their choices. Smith shows how people from formerly colonized countries are still suffering the same microaggressions regardless of the periods. These issues tend to lead families to over-correct or under-correct their colonial roots causing generational clashes about the perceptions of “What it means to be English?” “Can I be Both?” “Am I a traitor to my culture?” Shifting the focus away from the romantic view of Great Britain, Smith tackles a realistic and (humane) perspective of colonial history its haunting qualities.
In a multi-cultural setting in Northern London, Smith follows the relationship of two families through the men, Alfred Archibald Jones (or just Archie) a white man and Samad Iqbal a Bengali immigrant, meshing identity with the haunting histories that transverses through three generations. The novel itself is broken into four parts: “Archie 1974, 1945”, “Samad 1984, 1857”, “Irie 1990, 1907”, and “Magid, Millat, and Marcus 1992,1999.” Each part focuses on one character and each character has two dates; the first three parts establishes the present and a past signifying the haunting historical events that plague the characters in the present day. The last part switches to present and future, the historical future of the Jehovah’s witness doomsday of the Apocalypse.
An early quote by E.M. Forester “Every little trifle, for some reason, does seem incalculably important today and when you say of a thing that ‘nothing hangs on it’ it sounds like blasphemy. There’s never any knowing—how am I to put it? —which of our actions, which of idleness won’t have things hanging on it forever,” from Angels Fear to Tread drives the structure of White Teeth. What things will hang? What part of our histories, will keep clouding our families? There is no way to know if we are in the present. We do not know what actions we take or paths we took or did not take will affect the future generations. Notably, this quote shows how it is impossible to escape the past and that is the vehicle in which Zadie Smith drives this novel.
In the latter end of the novel Smith writes, “the brothers will race towards 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” (Smith 385). Despite most of the characters in this novel are immigrants, the idea of a haunting history does not only apply to them (although most immigrants cannot escape their postcolonial roots). The novel begins with Archie attempting to commit suicide by sitting a car filled with carbon monoxide in Cricklewood Broadway. The day has just begun for everybody expect Archie, working-class people slowly shuffling around in the streets and Mo (the owner of The Hussein-Ishmael) trying to get his shop by waiting for his meat delivery. But Archie was in his way “gassing himself” (6) to which Mo takes it upon himself to tell him that if he wants to die, he needs to do that elsewhere not in front of his shop. The importance of this scene is what Archie is holding “his army medals (left) and Marriage license (right)” because its later in the book and where the audience discover his mistakes of 1945(3). Haunted by his time in World War II, the same event that also haunts Samad, because it was where they were both stationed in the First Assault Regiment R. E, the rejects of the war that never got any action. What denotes the sense of guilt of their time in the war is that during a mechanical error, both Samad and Archie took the first turn to find food and when they returned everyone who stayed behind in the truck guarding their equipment were heinously murdered. What did they do? They stole their commander’s medals and their positions. So, as Archie was sitting contemplating life, he realized that he has done nothing. His (first) marriage was doomed because his wife was mentally ill, and he had medals he did not deserve.
The dynamic between identity and history is a prevalent theme that shines through Smith’s ability to create characters through emphatic means. She compares immigrant and nationalist characters by drawing a line between them signifying their common struggles. She argues that there may have more in common than we would traditionally think because they are both wrapped up in the imagined history. They both have a fear of losing their histories and cultures leading them go through extreme measures to keep their blood, culture, and histories pure. An example of this over-correction come stems from Samad. He has always believed that he was destined for greater things, this feeling of greatness drove him to enlist in her majesty’s army, so he could live up to the familial standards back home of his great grandfather Mangal Pande, who led the Indian mutiny of 1857.
Although his victory was short lived because he was accidentally shot in the leg and sent to the rejected battalion, this single event made Samad feel overqualified for every job and aspect of life that came later in the future. Stealing the medals off of his commanding officers and having an affair with his children’s music teacher did not make him feel better either, in fact it made him feel more unworthy. This fueled Samad’s over-correcting nature with his own children Millat and Magid. An extreme example was when Samad essentially sent one of his sons, Magid, back to the motherland, Bangladesh, to purify their blood and culture, without Alsana (his very young wife’s) consent and kept the Millat with him in London because he did not have enough money to send him too. Later as the years pass and Millat now has two cultures: British and Bengali.
This binationality is an issue for Samad and many immigrant parents because they feel like their children are purposely ignoring their customs and culture. The idea that people can have this sense of duality is inconceivable for the older generation and their children are often seen as failures or lazy. For some parents not allowing any western music or entertainment in the house is a way of preserving the culture, for others like Samad the only option is to burn every ounce of western influence in a “great bonfire… in the back of garden” to which Alsana later predicts that “Everyone gets what’s coming, sooner or later” (197). An accurate prediction because as he sent one son to Bangladesh to live a traditional life that aligns with their Muslim values, Smith reverses the outcomes by making Millat join a fundamentalist Muslim group called KEVIN and having Magid lead a more scientific and British life. Hence this parental failure added to Samad’s previous guilt because now he has robed Alsana of her sons and they did not turn out like he wanted them to.
The Jones household differs in the sense that they are biracial. Archie marries Clara (also much younger, 19), a Jehovah’s Witness that immigrated from Jamaica. She did not like the religious and strict household her mother ran—aching to find a way-out Clara meets forty-seven-year-old Archie at a party (shortly after the attempted suicide outside Hussein-Ishmael). Soon after, Clara realized that their marriage is uneventful. Be that as it may, she stays with him and they have Irie. Besides having an issue with her weight (opposite to that of Clara who was skinny with European features), it was the biracial aspect of Irie’s heritage that gave her a hard time. When she goes to a hair salon to get her hair chemically straighten and dyed red the dialogue between Irie and the hairstylist sums up the reality of a racially ambiguous person. The first thing the hairstylist says “Pale, sir! Freckles an’ every ting. You Mexican?… Arab” (229)? Many biracial kids feel like they have to choose one of their heritages because they feel like they cannot be both. In Irie’s case, her identity crisis is in part because she is in love with Millat, who has only dated and had sex with White girls, so she decides to have a She’s All That makeover.
Most of Irie’s identity crisis comes from not knowing her roots, like the Chalfens, who can trace their ancestry back with precision unlike the Jones/Bowden’s. “For starters, in the Chalfen family everybody seemed to have a normal number of children. More to the point, everybody knew whose children were whose. The men lived longer than the women. The marriages were singular and long-lasting. Dates of birth and death were concrete. And the Chalfens actually knew who they were in 1675” (280). Smith immediately contrasts this with Archie’s vague familial history that he can only trace back to his father, while Clara lineage remained non-existent. All she really know was that her mother was born “2:45 p.m. on January 14, 1907, in a Catholic church in the middle of the Kingston earthquake” (280). This like Pande, was a story that was passed down generationally to signify greatness. Provided that the Chalfens have maintained a detailed record about their existence in the world, Irie feels that if she knew her past, she could understand her present.
Soon after Zadie Smith dedicates an entire chapter to Irie’s great grandmother, Ambrosia, illustrating to the reader why Hortense, Clara’s mother, does not agree with her marriage to Archie. Smith dives deep into the effects of colonialism in this chapter as a response to Alsana’s comment on English education and influence “the English are the only people… who want to teach you and steal from you at the same time” (295). Hortense’s mother Ambrosia used to take lessons from Captain Charlie Durham, which resulted in her getting pregnant. Ambrosia’s own mother did not pay much attention to fact that the captain was raping her daughter, maybe it was normal for White men to come into their homes and have sex with their daughters, they probably could not do anything about it. Then, when Durham left, he wanted his project (Ambrosia) to go study the “English Anglican Church,” but is instead introduced to the Jehovah’s witnesses by “a fiery Scottish spinster who specialized in Lost souls” (297). From then on “no Bowden woman took lessons from anyone but the lord”, Smith uses this story as a way to humanize the Bowden’s colonial roots, magnifying on the consequences of having a “little English education” and how Hortense found refuge in her religion (301).
Given all the issues with identity and the generational trauma forcing them to understand their colonial history, they have no clean slate compared to their contemporary and idealized White English counterpart. Given the chance, would we genetically modify our histories? Marcus Chalfan’s study into the enhancement of genetic traits in Futuremouse, was a freaky study that many people, especially those of color were skeptical about. Some were concerned with the wellbeing of the animal and others were more concerned with the implications that came with altering the genome. Is this the government’s way of whitening their countries? Although the programs’ primary concern was fishing out the “unfavorable traits” like cancer, many people objected to this because “once you know the restriction enzyme for a particular, like bit of DNA, you can switch anything on or off, like a bloody stereo… What are they creating? And who do they want to wipe out? You’ve got to be seriously naïve if you think the West intend to use this shit in the East, on the Arabs. Quick way to deal with fundamentalist Muslims—no, seriously, man” (345). People were afraid that this study may lead to larger implications towards a Whiter civilization, but in doing so, people will be the directors and arbitrators of their own fate. This quest of genetic engineering attempted to rid itself of the past because the past is in our genes and that is not something we can remove. Smith refers to genes as the “prophets of the future,” signaling to the scientific desire to eliminate history and genes to show this new wave of living, a popular thought in the early 2000s because of the technology available. However, in taking such a scientific role, it can often push us away from our families and cultures causing more divisions among each other and ourselves.
Works Cited
Smith, Zadie. White Teeth. n.d.
Berwick Street market – Sound effects – Environment and nature | British Library – Sounds (bl.uk)
