Zadie Smith's White Teeth
Zadie Smith's White Teeth
"This has been the century of strongers, brown, yellow and white. This has been the century of the great immigrant experiment," says Zadie Smith, one of the contemporary British novelists in her novel , White Teeth , published in 2000. Immigrants' lives in modern Britain have been chronicled in abundance in a string of recent novels. Zadie Smith, born in London in 1975 to an English father and a Jamaican mother explores the cultural diversification of Britain in White Teeth. She says in an interview that she had to behave better than the English, as a child because of her skin colour'. Magid, the elder of the Iqubal twins fashions himself on the English name Mark Smith' at the age of nine. Torn between the pressures of his new country and the old religious tradition of his homeland their father, Samad sends Magid back to Bangladesh. Magid ends up in becoming an Anglophile more English than the English'. On the other hand, Millant, the younger of the
Iqbal twins models himself on Hollywood gangster movies, Godfather and The Taxi Driver. He falls into religious extremism and joins a militant Islamic group The Keeper of the Eternal and Victorious Islamic Nation,' without proper faith.
Undoubtedly, Magid in the White Teeth exemplifies Homi Bhabha's theory of mimicry. Millant embodies media representations of the confusion of identities in Britain. Hybridisation, as is seen in the Iqbals, signals a move towards newer forms of socio-cultural identification. Smith presents this multiethnic cohabitation as a fact of life'.
She puts it distinctly in an interview : I was expected to be some expert on multicultural affairs, as if multiculturalism is a genre of fiction or something, whereas its just a fact of life Robin Cohen observes in the late 1990s that in such an age our socio-cultural identity is no longer defined exclusively by nationalities or ethnicities. Smith's depiction of the aspiration of Alsans, the mother of the twins to a genteel English culture and Irie's adolescent wish to be like her white English classmates is an attempt to identify themselves with culturally electric and transnational modes. The sense of belonging to home or territory has undergone a cataclysmic change. All the characters in the novels, just discussed, struggle with their transcultural conditions. None of the multi-ethnic characters can legitimally claim to be culturally authentic.
The tooth-half root, half protrusion, makes a perfect trope to depict the in-between-ness' on the characters in a culturally eclectic society as depicted in Smith's White Teeth. Her foremost interest lies in what she calls a fact of life' the fact that the British Establishment and immigrant cultures are not inextricably interwoven. Though Diaspora' invokes the imagery of the traumas of separation and dislocation, yet diasporas are also potentially the sites of new beginning', observes Avtar Brah in Cartagraphies of Diaspora : Contesting Identities. This aspect of diaspora reveals the dynamic nature of identity in a multicultural society like Britain, since it can never be represented as fixed but always in process. Even the concept of Englishness' everything of value in English history and traditional is today repackaged, notes Julian Barnes in England, England. The old model of second generation youngsters being lost between two cultures' as stated by Watson in 1977 is now, replaced by Roger Ballard's imagine of the skilled cultural navigator' in Desh Pardesh (1994).
Today expatriates celebrate their mobile identity, the freedom to choose the appropriate traits from a melange of cultures. This liminality of identity through an assimilation in-between cultures is a release from traditional fixities. The ethics or activities and aesthetics or theories both have become more relative in nature to challenge all sorts of absolutism.This is a plunge into a broader spectrum of life by doing away from the futile attempts to locate one's origin. The work is a reminder to all expatriates abroad that blind imitation of any culture is futile but to appropriate upon any acquired transcontinental culture and imbibing its traits in a tration is appreciable.
WORK CITED:
Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London:Routeledge , 1994.
Brah ,Avtar. Cartographics of Diaspora : Contesting Identities.
London : Routledge , 1996.
12Feb.2006http://www.lanes.ac.uk/depts/english/21stcentury/multicultural_britain>
Lane , Richard J. , Rod Mengham & Philip Jew , eds. Contemporary British Fiction.
Cambridge : Polity Press ,2003. " Zadie Smith's White Teeth."
13 Feb. 2006 http://www.scholars.nus.edu.sg/landow/post/poldiscourse
Pope, Rob. The English Studies Book. London : Routledge , 1998.
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