White Teeth

White Teeth is about the one and the many, the inseparability of the one from the many and the many from the one. It’s a narrative about paradox and about balance. There are multiple tensions within the novel that begin in the tangled relationships between the characters. The story begins in the friendship forged during World War II between Archie Jones, a white Englishman, and Samad Iqbal, a Bengali and later an immigrant to England. From there, the Jones and Iqbal families intertwine. These families include the marriage between Archie and Clara Bowden, the rebellious daughter of a (half-white-English) Jamaican-immigrant-Jehovah’s Witness, as well as Archie and Clara’s daughter Irie, who at the end of the novel gives birth to a child whose father is either Millat Iqbal or Magid Iqbal, the identical twin sons of Samad and Alsana Iqbal. 

Smith looks directly at issues like the feelings of dissolution faced by immigrants and those considered “multicultural.” The narrator, for example, reflects, “But it makes an immigrant laugh to hear the fears of the nationalist, scared of infection, penetration, miscegenation, when this is small fry, peanuts, compared to what the immigrant fears—dissolution, disappearance” (272). The text goes on to consider what wakes the no-nonsense Alsana Iqbal up at night: “visions of Millat (genetically BB; where B stands for Bengaliness) marrying someone called Sarah (aa, where a stands for Aryan), resulting in a child called Michael (Ba), who in turn marries somebody called Lucy (aa), leaving Alsana with a legacy of unrecognizable great-grandchildren (Aaaaaaaa!)” (272). But grasping to one’s cultural roots is also not a successful tactic in the novel, as demonstrated by Alsana’s husband Samad, nor is sending their son Magid back to Bengal for his secondary education the answer to maintaining the “Bengaliness” of their sons, as Magid becomes aligned with science and Millat, who stays in London, aligns with radical Islam. Both their identities are a result of their being both British and Bengali, both Western and Eastern.

In the character of Irie Jones, we see the struggle between both white and not white written into her DNA. She struggles to find a way between the inescapability of her roots and the necessary tools for moving forward from the many paradoxes in the novel. As a high school student, Irie observes, “there was England, a gigantic mirror, and there was Irie, without reflection. A stranger in a strange land” (222). Her desire to attain the cultural ideal of beauty leads her into P.K.’s Afro Hair: Design and Management (owned by Mr. Paul King, “a big white guy; in his mid-fifties” (232)) for hair straightening. The women in the salon coo over Irie’s soft curls but Irie doesn’t know the drill: come with dirty hair, and she pays the price in pain. Her desire for straight hair leads her to Roshi’s Haircare (which sells “Natural Thai…Natural Pakistani…Natural Chinese” hair (233)). Here Irie sees an older woman in a sari haggling over the price she will pay for the hair of “an Indian girl whose hair had been shorn haphazardly close to the scalp…Irie saw hot tears, not unlike her own, spring to the girl’s eyes” (233). Of all three children, Irie finds a way to embrace her roots—in the character of her Jamaican-born, half-white, Jehovah’s Witness grandmother, Hortense Bowden, and the white, British-born world exemplified in the Chalfen family. The end of the novel sees Irie in Jamacia with Josh Chalfen and her grandmother Hortense, bearing a child who is black, white and Bengali, the grandchild Alsana had feared but had not predicted.