Freie Universität Berlin
Seminar: Writing the City: Representations of London
Wintersemester 2003/04, 7. Semester

Zadie Smith’s White Teeth: Identity Construction between
Historical Roots and Transcultural Hybridity

by: Natalie Lewis

Table of Contents

Introduction 3

1. Problems of Identity Construction in Post-Colonial Britain 3

2. The Concept of History 10

3. The Concept of Transcultural Hybridity 14

Conclusion 17

Bibliography 18

Introduction

In 1997, Zadie Smith, a young talented graduate from Cambridge, set out to write a novel about a simple white working-class Londoner who lives a good life throughout the 20th century by accident. Three years later, the author published her fictional debut, White Teeth, which gives its readers a panoramatic view of multicultural British society. The plot evolves around three families of different ethnic origins living in north-western London. In contrast to other initial works of contemporary Black British novelists, Zadie Smith’s first novel is not the usual account of Black youth experience in Britain written from an autobiographical perspective. On more than 500 pages, the Anglo-Jamaican author explores a wide range of themes such as Second World War experiences, first-generation migrant life in the diaspora, recent British youth culture, intergenerational family conflicts, radical religious fanatism and biogenetical engineering. Despite its numerous discourses, diverse characters and multiple time-layers, all of the novel’s addressed issues center around the problem of the individual person forming an authentic identity in a multicultural society and the establishment of a new national identity in postcolonial Britain. Zadie Smith explores the characters’ identity conflicts before the background of their family history. However, while genetic inheritance, cultural origins and prehistory seem to play an important part in the individual’s development, chance and personal choice are deceisive factors which have the potential to overrule any apparently predetermined life path. History and fate are constantly intermingled throughout the narrative, which is at the same time a migrant novel, bildungsroman and family saga.

1. Problems of Identity Construction in Post-Colonial Britain

Zadie Smith draws a portrait of British society on the brink of a new millenium. It is a confused society of mixed races, cultures, languages and customs. Her novel White Teeth captures the very atmosphere that Salman Rushdie already tried to describe in his essay “The New Empire Within”, written at the beginning of the 1980s: “Britain is undergoing a critical phase of its postcolonial period ... It’s a crisis of the whole culture, of the society’s entire sense of itself”¹. This crisis manifests itself in the individual’s search for a personal identity, which is the major theme of White Teeth. Smith touches the problem of identity construction in a post-colonial Britain by using elements of the migrant novel, the bildungsroman and the historical novel or family history to cast a light on her characters.

As a migrant narrative, the novel gives different perspectives of first and second generation migrant life in Britain. It focusses on the construction of personal identity within a diaspora and the problem of selfdetermination in relation to a white “mainstream” society which confronts people of a different origin with racism and misrecognition and automatically labels them as “different”. Smith does not only presents the migrant’s intracultural conflict of assimilating to the dominant culture and retaining his/her original cultural identity, but also examines the intergenerational dichotomy between the traditionalistic views of parents and the Westernized views of their children. Through its continuous emphasis on the construction of self, White Teeth can also be defined as a bildungsroman. Chapter headings like “The Miseducation of Irie Jones” clearly allude to this classical genre.The novel is divided into four different parts exploring significant life-altering experiences of the main characters. While the first two parts, Archie 1974, 1945 and Samad 1984, 1857, concentrate on identity conflicts and new beginnings during male mid-life crisis, the last two sections, Irie 1990, 1907 and Magid, Millat and Marcus 1992,1999, contain coming-of-age tales presenting the young generation’s maturation process and the difficulties of puberty. On a third level, White Teeth can be interpreted as a historical novel about the lives of three families from Willesden Green, although Smith does not follow the usual form of chronological life-writing. Shifting between different levels of time, the author draws parallels between places and generations and recovers interventions in the past which explain the present identity problems of the characters and their involvement with one another. She explores the social concept of family by portraying dysfunctional structures and conflicts within families as well as bonds and friendships between the Jonses, the Iqbals and the Chalfens.

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1 Rushdie, Salman. “The New Empire Within Britain”. Imaginary Homelands –Essays and Criticism 1981-1991. London: Granta, 1991. 129.