Literary Analysis Of White Teeth By Zadie Smith - Essay Example

Literary Analysis of White Teeth by Zadie Smith White Teeth has been translated into over twenty languages and was adapted for Channel 4 television in 2002. Zadie Smith has also edited an anthology of erotic stories, Piece of Flesh (2001), and was nominated as one of the best of young British novelists by Granta magazine in 2003. She is currently a Fellow at Harvard University in the US. Our children will be born of our actions. Our accidents will become their destinies. Oh, the actions will remain. It is a simple matter of what you will do when the chips are down, my friend. When the fat lady is singing. When the walls are falling in, and the sky is dark, and the ground is rumbling. In that moment our actions will define us. And it makes no difference whether you are being watched by Allah, Jesus, Buddha, or whether you are not. On cold days a man can see his breath, on a hot day he can't. On both occasions, the man breathes. -Zadie Smith, White Teeth If World War II and the knowledge of oppression it represents are absent from all too many postcolonial studies, fifty-five years after its ending, the event and its lingering effects have found a critical position in the remarkable novel White Teeth, by Zadie Smith, Britain's most celebrated postcolonial prodigy. In White Teeth, the last days of that war mark the beginning of an escape from the nightmare of belonging to someone else and chart a journey to somewhere else. White Teeth proclaims a declaration of independence not only from the haunting and constraining memory of the war's catastrophes and racist oppression, but from the very idea of belonging. After centuries of colonial oppression and decades of postcolonial depression and anger, White Teeth imagines the grand finale of Empire as the construction of a multicultural, multiclass British bazaar. Acknowledging its colonial history and debt to postcolonial studies, the novel creates a set of unanticipated mutating connections among historical and imagined events and identities interwoven among first-, second-, and third-generation postcolonial citizens of Britain. (Mike Storry, Peter Childs 53) The end of World War II meets the creation of a new Britain when a younger generation seizes the monocultural ground of Englishness on which their racialized conditions originated. As this younger generation remaps the future of their interrelated history, the narrative and political effects of their takeover represent a response not only to postcolonial critics, but to British women writing the end of Empire. Born in 1975, of a Jamaican mother and English father, in the epicenter of "British racism of the 1970s and 1980s, "Zadie Smith writes White Teeth as a rebellion against her confinement in the role of marginalized victim in an ongoing history of oppression. Neither she nor her characters will accept their places as objects of an interminable and global racist plot. (Nasta 11) Instead, she insists that "her own education at a comprehensive school and then at Cambridge shows that"life changes, my family is a picture of change"). The novel's hyperkinetic romp across interracial, multiethnic London veers from the marriage of working-class Englishman Archie Jones to biracial Jamaican Clara, from his friendship with his Bengali Muslim army mate, Samad Iqbal, to their children's entanglements with the Jewish Chalfen family. As their children hip-hop unimpeded through London's jumble of social and cultural identities, White Teeth understands, toys with, and then refuses inclusion in the "official racism of Britain in the 1970s". These characters and the whole of White Teeth will not play into the hands of Enoch Powell's racist rhetoric-"the triumph of barbarism over civilization". Powell's rallying cry against the postwar waves of postcolonial immigration reverses that slogan used by colonial conquerors and also by the Allies in their war against Nazi conquest-the triumph of civilization over barbarism. But Powell's slogan also exposes what all the antagonists of World War II had to deny: though their ideas, goals, and practices of "civilization" differed radically, the word "civilization" claims superiority and so also justifies the "barbarism" of its right to dominate Others. As so many British women writers realized, neither their testimony nor the Allies' victory could eradicate the many brands of racism in their own civilization. In its construction of a multi-vocal civilization, White Teeth represents a counterplot to "official" British racism, which, paradoxically, like the pessimistic postcolonial critic, determines the fate of "Afro-Asian citizens" as indeed very dark. In Smith's novel, even as they persist, both racist and antiracist positions are echoes of the past her zigzagging narrative will not accept as determining. Instead, White Teeth embraces the power of the past as a haunting or binding presence but also subjects it to a restless striving that ventures even beyond antiracist resistance. (Head 19-20) Smith's novel lays the oppressive past and its critique to rest. White Teeth articulates the demands of postcolonial questions on historical memory and then integrates those demands in the characters of a younger, decidedly non-Anglo British generation that insists on speaking for itself. The dissonant harmonies of their voices do not, moreover, represent a unified body that can be labeled Other, but rather an agitated, squirming dismissal of conceptual, social, or political confinement. (Malcolm Miles, 111-112) I do not think that Zadie Smith's carnivalesque plotting denies the oppressively racist history and conditions of either colonialism or postcolonial Britain. In fact, these historical conditions can be seen in the light-skinned Jamaican faces of her characters Hortense, Clara, and Irie. These women were born of their great grandmother's seduction a hundred years earlier by a wellintentioned Englishman who managed, by "accident," to avoid the responsibilities of his actions. Recalling Phyllis Bottome's and Phyllis Shand Allfrey's portrayals of biracial characters, Smith makes sure we know that "just as the English loved India and Africa and Ireland; it is the love that is the problem, people treat their lovers badly" (299). But like her younger characters, Smith has moved on from this formative history and from Bottome's and Allfrey's tentative endings. White Teeth forges newly unsettling fates out of the past, in particular, out of the racist tragedies of colonial history. These include her own references to the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857 and on to World War II and the oppressive residue that led up to and formed a racist continuum between these events. Her characters not only chafe against the dominant mythology of the war's heroic morality and Britain's mono-culturally racist character, but struggle with their own desires to insinuate their racial, class, and cultural differences into British modernity. Works Cited Head, Dominic; The Cambridge Introduction to Modern British Fiction, 1950-2000, Cambridge University Press, 2002 Malcolm Miles, Tim Hall; Urban Futures: Critical Commentaries on Shaping the City, Routledge, 2003 Mike Storry, Peter Childs; British Cultural Identities, Routledge, 2002 Nasta, Susheila; Writing across Worlds: Contemporary Writers Talk, Routledge, 2004 Read More