Dickensian Multiculturalism
Jun. 11th, 2006 02:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mtvessel28 May 06
White Teeth - Zadie Smith - Penguin Books, 2001
* * * *
I have few regrets about my upbringing, but one of them is that it was, to quote Greg Dyke, horribly white. In my class at school there was only one person from an ethnic minority. His name was Cyrus. I liked and admired him - he was a gifted violinist - but I think his experiences at school must have been similar to those of Steve, the black character in Jonathan Coe’s fine novel The Rotters’ Club. One of my friends used to tease him about his name and accent, and I, to my eternal shame, smiled and said nothing (racism is a sin of omission as well as commission). Cyrus bore it all in good part but did not attempt to keep in touch once we went our separate ways after A-levels. I checked on Friends Reunited the other day and unsurprisingly he wasn’t there.
I might perhaps have been more sensitive to Cyrus’ thoughts and feelings if I had had the opportunity to read a decent novel about the British ethnic minority experience when I was growing up, but at the time there weren’t any (or at least none that made it into the school library). Things have changed. Now there are several to choose from, and White Teeth is one of them.
It is set in the last three decades of the twentieth century and concerns the relationships within and between three families. One is an improbable mixed marriage between a middle-aged white man called Archie (who as the novel opens is trying to commit suicide) and Clara, a Jamaican gap-toothed twenty-something refugee from a family of Jehovah’s Witnesses. The second is the Iqbals, a Bengali moslem family headed by Samad, Archie’s best friend whom he met in a tank in World War 2. Archie has a daughter, Irie, and Samad has twin sons, Magid and Millat, by his much younger wife Alsana (an arranged marriage, naturally). The third family, introduced relatively late in the novel, are the Chalfens, a white liberal family whose son Joshua encounters Irie and Millat when they get into trouble at school.
The story is told through the eyes of the main characters and covers the development of the children and their search for identity in the difficult multicultural environment of the 80s and 90s. Smith has a terrific Dickensian style, inventive, humorous and sour, and there are numerous nice elements of characterisation and thought-provoking comments. My favourite example of the former is Alsana’s wonderfully subtle revenge on Samad when, without her knowledge or consent, he ships their son Magid off to Bangladesh so that he will get a proper education (it doesn’t work; he comes back “more English than the English”). For the next eight years she refuses to give him a straight answer to any question he asks (“What time is it?” “It could be three, Samad Miah, but Allah knows it could also be four”), leaving him in the same agony of uncertainty as she is suffering over Magid’s whereabouts and well-being.
And uncertainty - or more exactly the uncertainty of cultural identity suffered by first and second generation immigrants - is really what this novel is about. As Smith comments, when immigrants hear the BNP-style concerns of white people about “them” coming here with their “foreign ways”, they laugh, for it is as nothing compared to the threat of the complete extermination of their values and traditions by the cultural steamroller of the white majority. This fear is transmitted to their children, who, more immersed in mainstream culture than their parents, feel the schism in their cultural identities more acutely and rush to the apparent certainties of political, religious or scientistic extremism.
This is a sobering and thought-provoking observation (implying as it does that 9/11 and 7/7 were the inevitable result of cultural mixing), but Smith doesn’t quite succeed in following it through or suggesting practical solutions. One obvious question she never answers is why Samad, who has come to hate English culture and all it stands for, ever came to Britain in the first place. To understand this we would have needed to know more about his Bangladeshi background, which is not vouchsafed. My other main beef is with the character of Marcus, Joshua’s father, a stereotypical scientist who genetically engineers mice without the slightest concern about whether the resulting animals are suffering or not. Now I have worked with a number of scientists who used animals in their experiments, and none would so blithely ignore the ethics of what they were doing (quite apart from the fact that the law would not allow them to). The animal rights theme feels tacked on - there is a link because Marcus is trying to demonstrate how genetic determinism eliminates uncertainty in personal fate in the same way that belief in cultural or religious purity eliminates questions of personal identity, but the comparison feels forced. It also results in a rather unsatisfactory and rushed ending consisting of a sequence of events that resolves the themes of the novel but leaves the fates of the main characters hanging.
Flaws aside, Smith’s overall conclusion that cultural apartheid is neither desirable nor in fact achievable cannot really be argued with. Our human identity should trump any other groups to which we might have allegiance. After all, as the title of the novel implies, whatever the colour of our skin might happen to be, our teeth are white.
White Teeth - Zadie Smith - Penguin Books, 2001
* * * *
I have few regrets about my upbringing, but one of them is that it was, to quote Greg Dyke, horribly white. In my class at school there was only one person from an ethnic minority. His name was Cyrus. I liked and admired him - he was a gifted violinist - but I think his experiences at school must have been similar to those of Steve, the black character in Jonathan Coe’s fine novel The Rotters’ Club. One of my friends used to tease him about his name and accent, and I, to my eternal shame, smiled and said nothing (racism is a sin of omission as well as commission). Cyrus bore it all in good part but did not attempt to keep in touch once we went our separate ways after A-levels. I checked on Friends Reunited the other day and unsurprisingly he wasn’t there.
I might perhaps have been more sensitive to Cyrus’ thoughts and feelings if I had had the opportunity to read a decent novel about the British ethnic minority experience when I was growing up, but at the time there weren’t any (or at least none that made it into the school library). Things have changed. Now there are several to choose from, and White Teeth is one of them.
It is set in the last three decades of the twentieth century and concerns the relationships within and between three families. One is an improbable mixed marriage between a middle-aged white man called Archie (who as the novel opens is trying to commit suicide) and Clara, a Jamaican gap-toothed twenty-something refugee from a family of Jehovah’s Witnesses. The second is the Iqbals, a Bengali moslem family headed by Samad, Archie’s best friend whom he met in a tank in World War 2. Archie has a daughter, Irie, and Samad has twin sons, Magid and Millat, by his much younger wife Alsana (an arranged marriage, naturally). The third family, introduced relatively late in the novel, are the Chalfens, a white liberal family whose son Joshua encounters Irie and Millat when they get into trouble at school.
The story is told through the eyes of the main characters and covers the development of the children and their search for identity in the difficult multicultural environment of the 80s and 90s. Smith has a terrific Dickensian style, inventive, humorous and sour, and there are numerous nice elements of characterisation and thought-provoking comments. My favourite example of the former is Alsana’s wonderfully subtle revenge on Samad when, without her knowledge or consent, he ships their son Magid off to Bangladesh so that he will get a proper education (it doesn’t work; he comes back “more English than the English”). For the next eight years she refuses to give him a straight answer to any question he asks (“What time is it?” “It could be three, Samad Miah, but Allah knows it could also be four”), leaving him in the same agony of uncertainty as she is suffering over Magid’s whereabouts and well-being.
And uncertainty - or more exactly the uncertainty of cultural identity suffered by first and second generation immigrants - is really what this novel is about. As Smith comments, when immigrants hear the BNP-style concerns of white people about “them” coming here with their “foreign ways”, they laugh, for it is as nothing compared to the threat of the complete extermination of their values and traditions by the cultural steamroller of the white majority. This fear is transmitted to their children, who, more immersed in mainstream culture than their parents, feel the schism in their cultural identities more acutely and rush to the apparent certainties of political, religious or scientistic extremism.
This is a sobering and thought-provoking observation (implying as it does that 9/11 and 7/7 were the inevitable result of cultural mixing), but Smith doesn’t quite succeed in following it through or suggesting practical solutions. One obvious question she never answers is why Samad, who has come to hate English culture and all it stands for, ever came to Britain in the first place. To understand this we would have needed to know more about his Bangladeshi background, which is not vouchsafed. My other main beef is with the character of Marcus, Joshua’s father, a stereotypical scientist who genetically engineers mice without the slightest concern about whether the resulting animals are suffering or not. Now I have worked with a number of scientists who used animals in their experiments, and none would so blithely ignore the ethics of what they were doing (quite apart from the fact that the law would not allow them to). The animal rights theme feels tacked on - there is a link because Marcus is trying to demonstrate how genetic determinism eliminates uncertainty in personal fate in the same way that belief in cultural or religious purity eliminates questions of personal identity, but the comparison feels forced. It also results in a rather unsatisfactory and rushed ending consisting of a sequence of events that resolves the themes of the novel but leaves the fates of the main characters hanging.
Flaws aside, Smith’s overall conclusion that cultural apartheid is neither desirable nor in fact achievable cannot really be argued with. Our human identity should trump any other groups to which we might have allegiance. After all, as the title of the novel implies, whatever the colour of our skin might happen to be, our teeth are white.