Heritage, Culture and Culture Shock of Emergent Identities in the Novel White Teeth by Zadie Smith - Research Paper Example

Prof’s Zadie Smith: Heritage, Culture and Culture Shock of Emergent Identities in the Novel White Teeth In the time since the close of the Second World War, some of the largest population shifts in the history of mankind have emerged – with startling consequences for everyone from individuals and families to governments and government agencies. No longer is a person born, married and buried within a few miles of the same location, rather, people are often thrust into new and often unsettling circumstances, inserting themselves into new countries and cultures, and forcing themselves to learn new language and life-skills. This emergent melting pot, and the breakdown of many traditional support networks, serves as the backdrop for Zadie Smith’s remarkable novel White Teeth. The novel begins on the first of January, 1975 – nearly a perfect half-way mark between the close of the Second World War and the time when the novel was published, the year 2000 – and is immensely concerned with both the pasts and the futures of every character. Each character’s origin is shaped by the twenty five years preceding the opening of the book: the places their parents came from, their religious backgrounds, their cultural origins. Yet the book is also imminently concerned with the future of each character – how this background translates into the development of the person they end becoming, their children’s development and so on. This relationship between one’s origins and the destination of one’s life journey serves as the central conflict of the novel: how do we become who we become? and, for immigrants, how we preserve our origins while assimilating into our new surroundings? The novel satirizes the idea that one can have control over the destination of one’s life, essentially arguing that, even though each person is obviously shaped by their cultural origins, the exact impact these origins will have one the path of one’s life is impossible to predict. Cultural background is almost like the uncertainty principle: though it has an obvious impact, and one must assume it is governed by some kind of comprehensible pattern or law, it is nonetheless impossible to actually understand the complex outcomes one’s origin will create. This essay will reference both academic studies of immigration and critical analysis of Smith’s work to show that any immigrant must thus form a reaction to the dominant society they live in – embracing it, rejecting it, or anything in between – but it is impossible to tell how this reaction will affect one’s future. Smith subtly begins to mock the idea that one can understand or predict the way various forces shape one’s life from the opening of the book. The first tableau Smith present the reader with is that of a familial dispute – Archie Jones, a prototypical English bloke, has his somewhat deranged Italian wife storm out on him, and decides to take his own life (Smith, 3). He begins trying asphyxiate himself, only to be interrupted by a mere chance. Then, following a coin flip, he ends up at a party, having a new zest for life, and meeting a woman who would become his second wife, Clara – who he quickly marries and has a daughter with. This opening section begins to explore several themes that will become important as the work progresses. Firstly, in introduces the reader to one of the most important themes of the work – the complex interaction of divergent cultures meeting and sometimes clashing in the polyglot society that is London. Archie, in this context, finds himself transposed by the issues of a myriad of different cultures on a single night – the entirely Western method of celebrating new years (with excessive drinking and partying), the travails of his Italian wife, and the attempt to construct a bridge and connection with a woman of Jamaican heritage. All the characters are inherently “thrust into a dialogue” about their origins – and are thus already being controlled by them from the very opening scene (Thomas 17). The novel opens by introducing its readers to the idea that the struggle with one’s origins, and the origins of people in one’s life, will play a central role in shaping the course of the work, but also play a central role in shaping the course of everyone’s life in the melting pot of our post World War II society. But beyond simply introducing the reader to the idea that the confluences of race and heritage will play an important part in the work, the opening sequence introduces a much more subtle but important theme: the utter lack of control that a person has over their own life. Archie’s entire life, along with Clara’s and everyone else’s that they meet through the course of the novel, are fundamentally formed by a confluence of events that they have no control over. The firmest decision Archie makes is to commit suicide – an activity he finds himself unable to complete, and his life mate is essentially determined by the flip of a coin. None of the characters are actually able to take any real control of their lives “chance” thus plays a central role in the construction of their life, as much as anything else (Walters 43). And it is the conflux of these two issues, cultural origins and pure chance, that make it so impossible to actually gather any real control over process of immigration and assimilation, integration or rejection with or of the dominant society – one can try to make so many decisions as one likes, but ultimately, that process is somewhat out of one’s control. Throughout the novel the reader sees a number of reactions to the immigrant experience though all of these are polarized, extreme and “almost caricatures” of actual immigrant life (Charters 33) – they are somewhat hyperbolized in order to “create humor” (34), but also to fully demonstrate the range of reactions one can have to living in a new society with new rules, cultural expectations, mores and so on. On one end of this scale lies Clara, Archie’s wife of Jamaican origin, who has a Jehova’s witness mother, and attempts to whole heartedly reject her own cultural origins, especially her mother’s religion. This is one of the most common reactions to the immigrant experience, especially for second generation people who tend to “abrupt[ly] reject their own ethnic cultures,” but often without “fully assimilating” into the parent culture, and thus tend to end up being left in something of a cultural no-man’s land (Barvosa 10). Yet Clara’s assimilations tendencies do not result in her actually being able to cut ties to her roots – she still has an inherent connection to her mother that she cannot break, and at times demonstrates that her atheism is only skin deep. This is made especially apparent by the line in White Teeth: “But how fragile is Clara’s atheism! Like one of those tiny glass doves Hortense keeps in the living room cabinet – a breath would knock it over” (Smith 326). Clara thus exemplifies another aspect of immigrant life – the idea that “event those who staunchly reject their cultural origins … [are] shaped by them in unexpected ways” (Xin 157), especially when in intermarried situations and retaining family members (173). Clara’s decision to reject her mother’s culture and embrace English culture thus do not necessarily take hold – she demonstrates that her cultural baggage has control over her, rather than herself having control over her cultural baggage. Her answer to the dominant society, a choice of assimilation, does not fully take hold. This process also extends to her daughter Irie Jones, who is half ethnically English. She still finds the process of battle between her Jamaican origins and her English existence a constant struggle, perhaps best exemplified by one particular situation. In aspiring to conform to English ideals of beauty, she goes to extraordinary lengths – not to mention pain, both physical and emotional, to straighten her hair. This extraordinary pain over such a simple issue demonstrates one of the most fundamental aspect of the immigrant’s dilemma: the dominant white society will not make allowances to adopt you (through acceptance of variances of beauty ideals, etc) (Leddy 22), yet when several generations removed from one’s immigrant origins, there is often nothing to fall back on – so again, control over how one’s immigrant or cultural origins affect one’s life are wrenched out of one’s control. White Teeth also shows another common immigrant response to the dominant society at the other end of the spectrum – rejection of the new culture rather than the old, and resistance to assimilation. In White Teeth this rejection is exemplified by the Iqbal family, especially Samad, who immigrated to England after World War II. He finds many aspects of English culture unsettling, finds it unaccommodating of his Islamic values and practices, and intense conflict between the materialistic, sex-crazed English society he lives in and his own internal morality. In an attempt to protect at least one of his children from the effects of this culture, he sends his child, Magid, to Bangladesh to develop under more Islamic conditions. He keeps one son with him, in England, however, Millat. But all of Samad’s attempts to shape the way his children interact with English culture fail miserably – his son who moves to Bangladesh becomes an atheist, while, quite ironically, his son who stays in England becomes an angry Islamic fundamentalist even more frustrated with English society than his father, and more interested in violently opposing it. So Samad’s attempts to control the interaction between English culture and his own culture also end up eluding his grasp, with both of his son’s integrating to levels that are dissatisfactory. So, like outright rejection of one’s immigrant culture, outright rejection of the dominant culture also bears little fruit, and make it impossible to control the way the confluence of cultures will interact in any given individual. Zadie Smith in her novel White Teeth tears down any illusion of control we may have over the way that we interact with the different cultures that necessarily make up our lives in the emerging multi-cultural world we live in. She shows that both attempts at outright rejection of one’s culture of origin and whole-hearted acceptance of the dominant culture in one’s new home, and its reverse, both end up causing unimagined consequnes – we cannot help but end up somewhere in the middle. Smith shows us that the cultures that make up our identity will push and pull us in ways we cannot control – so give up the illusion, do the best you can, and accept that Jamaica will always be part of you if you are of Jamaican origin – and if you live in England, so will England. Works Cited Barvosa, Edwina. “American Immigrants in American Conflict” Georgetown Journal of International Affairs 7.2: 7-14 Print Charters, Mallay. “Zadie Smith: White Teeth” PWM 247.2 : 33-34 (2001). Print Leddy, Chuck. “Zadie Smith’s World View: The Acclaimed British Author Crosses Racial and Cultural Boundaries” Writer 119.2: 20-23. 2006. Print Smith, Zadie. White Teeth. New York: Random House. 2000. Print Thomas, Matt. “Reading White Teeth to Improve Intercultural Communication” The Journal of Carribean Literature 6.1: 15-32. 2009. Print Xin, Meng. “Intermarriage and the Economic Assimilation of Immigrants” Journal of Labour Print Read More