by Zadie Smith
Featured on the Time Magazine Top 100
I had a professor in college who was a very outspoken woman. I think she was incredibly disappointed with us, since we had the gall to walk into her classroom not being able to read Old English with ease and sophistication. The class took on a very antagonistic tone early on. Our professor seemed openly hostile to anyone who became frustrated with the material, and students stepped up the normal eye roll or gritted teeth motions that accompany frustration. To top it all off, at least one day a week the room smelled like cat pee. Then she broke her arm. She didn't know what this meant in terms of her continuing as our teacher, but she knew what she wanted it to mean. She requested that someone else take over our class, and in the interim, while she waited for a decision, she stopped teaching the class and began a series of academic gossip (we got an earful about the former President of Harvard), angry sermons about the state of education in general (she said something concerning her good spirits upon hearing of Diane Hacker's death), and, most alarmingly, a rant about the large Pakistani population living in London.
This last part was rather uncharacteristic. Although she could come off as a gruff and joyless person, it was easy to see (especially if a student dared to speak one on one with her) that this was a ruse, and that in actuality, she was a kind, warm, and even funny individual. But when she spoke of Pakistanis in her beloved London, it was with a disdain that came from a place that was hard to understand, and of all her bits of rather salty discourse, this was the one that made me actively uncomfortable (as opposed to amused or horrified).
A while ago I wrote about a friend's reaction to Blood Meridian: "It's about America." Well, with the same enthusiasm and almost breathless praise, let me say this about White Teeth: "It's about Britain." More to the point, it's about how Britain's past has caught up with its present. The novel begins with a man named Archie on New Year's Day, 1975. His wife walks out on him, and, distraught and suicidal, he walks into a bar where he meets a younger woman named Clara. Clara is the daughter of a Jamaican woman, and has had a very devout upbringing. The two marry and have a child. Flash forward, and that child befriends the twin sons of Archie's old war buddy, a Pakistani who has emigrated to London following World War II. His twin boys, despite sharing the same DNA and looking exactly alike, are as different as two people can be. One is attempting, in a rather confused and bumbling way, to assimilate into mainstream British culture. The other is becoming a part of a Muslim Brotherhood (the end of the novel sees him furious at writer Salman Rushdie, whose publication of a novel entitled The Satanic Verses caused a fatwā, or death sentence, to be placed on him). White Teeth could be seen as no more than an allegory, a look at how the nuclear families of the novel do not reflect conservative values, but are instead more of a mixed bag, but that would suggest that the characters are there only to serve Smith's vision of contemporary London. And it is so much more than that. The novel humanizes the feelings of the people that my professor seemed so content to dismiss. Archie's friend is living in London, and there is no reason for him to think he should feel bad about it. He fought for the British in World War II. Archie marries a black woman, not out of any sort of social insight or need to make a statement. It is for love. Despite the chaos of the lives of these characters, the novel is partly hopeful about the state of Great Britain as it starts the journey toward the 21st Century. The novel sees these two families becoming one, if not happily (or even functionally), at the very least, irrevocably.
It is interesting that the professor who was so indignant about the large Pakistani presence in London was teaching a class on The Canterbury Tales. That celebrated poem was about a group of people making a journey and telling stories, and in a way those stories help readers to understand what Britain was. And that was the Britain that made sense to my professor. But Britain has changed, permanently, over and over again during its history. White Teeth is a novel that shows us the state of affairs moving forward, giving the reader strings of multicultural stories and histories that are being woven into the tapestry of an ever evolving social landscape. I have been to London once, and I think partly because I was shown the more touristy part of the city, I did not see the London my professor saw, which was a city that was going through a turbulent change. No doubt the feelings of separation, rejection, and anxiety caused by being made to feel an "other" in the place that one calls home, contribute to the frame of mind that produced the vicious bombings of July 7, 2005. Zadie Smith's book helps to illuminate the past, to understand it, and to help the reader realize that it is not something that can be escaped.
Coming Soon:
No comments:
Post a Comment