White Teeth

“[W]hen Clara fell, knocking the teeth out of the top of her mouth, while Ryan stood up without a scratch, Ryan knew it was because God had chosen Ryan as one of the saved and Clara as one of the unsaved. Not because one was wearing a helmet and the other wasn’t. And had it happened the other way round, had gravity reclaimed Ryan’s teeth and sent them rolling down Primrose Hill like tiny enamel snowballs, well…you can bet your life that God, in Ryan’s mind, would have done a vanishing act.” 

Ryan’s reaction to the scooter accident (and the discussion of Sod’s Law that precedes it) highlight the tension between fate and chance in White Teeth. Ryan interprets the crash as destiny only because he walks away from it unscathed; if he had not, he—like the person who drops a piece of toast right-side up—would have seen the event as incidental rather than the work of a “defining force” (37) and consequently lost interest in God. Smith therefore implies that the difference between fate and chance is subjective; events are interpreted as one or the other based on whichever idea serves best. This explains the novel’s conclusion: both fate and chance play a role in human lives and influence people’s actions at least in part because of belief.

The passage also develops the symbolism surrounding teeth because Clara losing her front teeth mirrors her rejection of her religious and familial “roots.”

“‘I’d spit on that Enoch Powell…but then again he does have a point, doesn’t he? There comes a point, a saturation point, and people begin to feel a bit uncomfortable…You see […] all he was saying is enough is enough after a certain point, isn’t it? I mean, it’s like Delhi in Euston every Monday morning. And there’s some people around here, Arch—and I don’t include myself here—who just feel your attitude is a little strange.’”

This exchange between Archie and his boss, Mr. Hero, sets the tone for the kind of discrimination and prejudice Smith’s characters face throughout the rest of the novel. Hero is keen to avoid appearing overtly racist but clearly sympathizes with the idea that immigration to England has gone too far. The remark about “Delhi in Euston” is especially telling; it implies that Hero fears a kind of reverse colonialism, with Indian culture being imported to England as English culture once was to India.

This kind of unspoken prejudice is one that many other characters share, though often in slightly different forms. Poppy, for instance, is enthusiastic about multiculturalism but nevertheless views immigrants through the lens of romanticized stereotypes.

“‘I am educated. I am trained. I should be soaring with the Royal Airborne Force, shelling from on high! I am an officer! Not some mullah, wearing out my chapels in hard service. My great-grandfather Mangal Pande’—he looked around for the cognition the name deserved but, being met only with blank pankcake English faces, continued—‘was the great hero of the Indian Mutiny!’” 

One of Samad’s defining traits is his insistence that he deserves better, and as this passage demonstrates, the feeling extends as far back as his service in World War I. To the annoyance of his fellow soldiers, Samad talks incessantly about how he would have had a brilliant career as a fighter pilot if he had not lost the use of his hand. Over the course of the novel, Samad’s tendencies towards arrogance and ambition come increasingly into conflict with his professed belief in the importance of modesty. At one point, Samad even attributes his desire for fame and recognition to the harmful influence of Western society. Arguably, it is precisely the fact that Samad is not English by birth that gives rise to his urgent need to assert himself. Many of the novel’s non-white characters, including Irie and Samad’s own son Millat, struggle with the sense that they are invisible to society at large. 

“‘Our children will be born of our actions. Our accidents will become their destinies. Oh, the actions will remain. It is a simple matter of what you will do when the chips are down, my friend. When the fat lady is singing. When the walls are falling in, and the sky is dark, and the ground is rumbling.’”

This passage touches on several of the most important themes in White Teeth, including fate, chance, free will, and history. The immediate context is Archie’s claim that, if he knew the world was about to end, he would either have sex or (failing that) masturbate. In response, Samad urges him to think about the legacy of his actions. What is especially noteworthy about this passage is the fact that Samad describes chance and fate as working in tandem, with accidents having ripple effects that become a kind of destiny. The plot of the novel seems to bear this out, as chance encounters have long-lasting consequences. Samad’s words also draw on the apocalypse motif, in this case suggesting that choices made in extreme circumstances carry an extra moral weight.

“Unbeknownst to all involved, ancient Ley-lines run underneath these two journeys—or, to put it in modern parlance, this is a rerun. We have been here before. This is like watching TV in Bombay or Kingston or Dhaka, watching the same old British sitcoms spewed out to the old colonies in one tedious, eternal loop. Because immigrants have always been particularly prone to repetition—it’s something to do with that experience of moving from West to East or East to West or from island to island. Even when you arrive, you’re still going back and forth; your children are going round and round.”

The beginning of the “Molars” chapter sets the stage for Samad’s meeting with Poppy and the children’s meeting with J. P. Hamilton. Here, Smith ties the often-circular nature of history to the story of colonialism. The description of British TV shows being aired overseas draws on multiple layers of repetition: the shows are reruns, they are aired multiple times, and they are aired to an audience of Britain’s former colonies—the implication being that this cultural dominance is the latest form of colonialism. In the case of the Iqbals, this repetition takes the form of wavering between two sets of values, as when Samad’s affair with Poppy ultimately leads him to cling more tightly to his heritage. These vacillations then spill over into the next generation, with Millat first embracing Western culture and then joining the fundamentalist group KEVIN.

“O’Connell’s is the kind of place family men come to for a different kind of family. Unlike blood relations, it is necessary here to earn one’s position in the community; it takes years of devoted fucking around, time-wasting, lying-about, shooting the breeze, watching paint dry—far more dedication than men invest in the careless moment of procreation.”

O’Connell’s is one of several different communities in White Teeth that offer characters a sense of shared identity; the men who go there are motivated by a similar desire to escape from family life and share the common purpose of wasting time and accomplishing nothing. This makes it even more significant that O’Connell’s opens to women at the end of the novel; it allows women like Clara and Alsana to participate in what was previously an exclusively male form of bonding. 

“[S]amad, who usually had no time for omens or nose-tapping, was nervous enough to take the advice [from Ibelgaufts’ letter]. But then Poppy (who was acutely aware that she was fading from Samad’s mind in comparison with the question of the boys) suddenly took an interest, claiming to have just sensed in a dream that it should be Magid and so it was Magid once more. Samad, in his desperation, even allowed Archie to flip a coin, but the decision was hard to sticky by—best out of three, best out of five—Samad couldn’t trust it. And this, if you can believe it, was the manner in which Archie and Samad went about playing lottery with two boys, bouncing the issue off the walls of O’Connell’s, flipping souls to see which side came up.”

This is a good example of the way the novel’s characters appeal to chance or fate in order to avoid responsibility. Overwhelmed by the ramifications of choosing which son to send to Bangladesh, Samad tries to leave the decision to chance (in the form of a coin toss) or destiny (in the form of the “omens” contained in Ibelgaufts’ letter and Poppy’s dream). This underscores the fact that, for all their superficial differences, Archie and Samad have one major personality trait in common: they are fairly weak-willed and struggle with taking decisive action. 

“That’s the real difference in a life. People who live on solid ground, underneath safe skies, know nothing of this; they are like the English POWs in Dresden who continued to pour tea and dress for dinner, even as the alarms went off, even as the city became a towering ball of fire. Born of a green and pleasant land, a temperate land, the English have a basic inability to conceive of disaster, even when it is man-made.”

Alsana’s anger when Samad sends Magid to Bangladesh stems less from concern over her son’s safety—he will live in a part of the country that is fairly safe from flooding and mudslides—and more from a belief that living under the constant threat of natural disaster fundamentally alters a person’s mindset for the worse. If the world at large appears random and uncertain, people will think and act in similarly chaotic ways. By contrast, someone who grows up in a stable environment will view themselves as in control of their futures. As the death of the English POWs in Dresden demonstrates, that feeling may be an illusion, but it is in keeping with Alsana’s down-to-earth approach to life that she views this illusion as necessary. 

“‘Oi, mister! Indo–Aryans…it looks like I am a Western after all! Maybe I should listen to Tina Turner, wear the itsy-bitsy leather skirts. Pah. It just goes to show […] you go back and back and back and it’s still easier to find the correct Hoover bag than to find one pure person, one pure faith, on the globe. Do you think anybody is English? Really English? It’s a fairy tale!’” 

Exasperated by her husband’s demands that she “act like a Bengali,” Alsana looks the word up in a dictionary. The passage is an example of Alsana’s outspoken demeanor, but it also aligns with the novel’s overall depiction of history and its relationship to identity. As Alsana points out, distinctions based on race, ethnicity, and nationality are largely arbitrary. Ultimately, everyone’s ancestors came from somewhere else, so the idea that anyone is fundamentally English, Bengali, etc., is a “fairy tale.” This does not mean, however, that the past has no influence on the present. On the contrary, fairy tales—that is, the stories people tell about their histories—can greatly influence actions and identities.

“But Irie didn’t know she was fine. There was England, a gigantic mirror, and there was Irie, without reflection. A stranger in a strange land.” 

Irie’s insecurities about her appearance center on the traits that most clearly reflect her mother’s ancestry: her curvy figure and curly hair. Coupled with the fact that Irie wants to look like an “English Rose”—a “slender, delicate” white woman—this suggests that her anxiety is largely about her ethnic identity (222). Like Millat, Irie has no cultural depictions of people who look like her to affirm her own Englishness. As a result, despite having spent her entire life in London, she feels alienated and invisible.

“If you were arguing with a Chalfen, trying to put a case for these strange French men who think truth is a function of language, or that history is interpretive and science metaphorical, the Chalfen in question would hear you out quietly, then wave his hand, dismissive, feeling no need to dignify such bunkum with a retort. Truth was truth to a Chalfen, And Genius was genius. Marcus created. Beings. And Joyce was his wife, industrious in creating smaller versions of Marcus.”

The Chalfens’ faith in logic and objectivity is, in its own way, as fundamentalist as the ideas of a group like KEVIN. Chalfenism argues that only one way of looking at the world is correct; for the Chalfens, it is self-evident that the world operates in rational ways, humans are rational and capable of understanding the world around them, and science therefore holds the key to improving life in all respects. By contrast, the worldview White Teeth embraces is more in line with the “strange French men” (postmodernist philosophers). Time and again, what matters is not a situation’s objective facts but rather the meanings people attach to the situation, which are often diverse and contradictory.

This passage also summarizes the relationship between Marcus and Joyce Chalfen, which does not live up to their liberal politics. Joyce has no part in her husband’s work because both she and Marcus consider her his intellectual inferior. Therefore, childbearing is considered her greatest contribution to Chalfenism.

“[I]t 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. Even the unflappable Alsana Iqbal would regularly wake up in a puddle of her own sweat after a night visited by 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 (Aaaaaaa!), their Bengaliness thoroughly diluted, hidden by phenotype. It is both the most irrational and natural feeling in the world.”

This passage gets to the heart of the novel’s views on multiculturalism. On the one hand, as Smith says, the fear of one’s culture or genes going extinct is natural, particularly when that culture has been historically marginalized (and, in this case, marginalized by the culture the Iqbals themselves now live amongst). In fact, this fear is powerful enough to affect Alsana, who generally wants her sons to assimilate into English society.

At the same time, Smith describes the fear as “irrational” because any attempt to preserve or recover one’s cultural purity is doomed from the start. As Alsana herself noted in her argument with Samad, there are no pure people or traditions because humans have been exchanging cultures and genes throughout all of history. This is truer than ever during the time period White Teeth is set, since the spread of European people and ideas via 19th-century imperialism, and the related “great immigrant experiment” of the 20th century (271), have accelerated the process of exchange.  

“Every moment happens twice: inside and outside, and they are two different histories […] And then the world began to shake. Inside Ambrosia, waters broke. Outside Ambrosia, the floor cracked.”

Smith’s description of Hortense’s birth introduces a phrase that she repeats in the novel’s final chapter: “Every moment happens twice: inside and outside, and they are two different histories.” There is a literal truth to the idea, with the turmoil inside Ambrosia mirroring the turmoil of her surrounding environment. However, the statement points toward a deeper truth about the nature of history in the novel: it exists not just as fact but also as subjective experience. In fact, the latter is arguably a more powerful force in White Teeth, since it is the way people tell and interpret history that influences the way they behave.  

“He still thinks of the land as his, his to help or his to hurt, even now when it has proved itself to have a mind all of its own. He still retains enough of his English education to feel slighted when he spots two American soldiers who have docked without permission […] standing outside their consulate building, insolently chewing their tobacco. It is a strange feeling, this powerlessness; to discover there is another country more equipped to save this little island than the English. It is a strange feeling, looking out on to an ocean of ebony skins, unable to find the one he loves, the one he thinks he owns.”

The relationship between Ambrosia Bowden and Charles Durham is a symbol for the colonial relationship between England and Jamaica. At one point Smith notes that Durham “loves [Ambrosia]; just as the English loved India and Africa and Ireland” (299). In this passage, Smith extends the metaphor by drawing a parallel between the ownership Durham feels over the country and the ownership he feels over his lover—as well as the tragic consequences of both. Durham’s resentment of the American ships will eventually cause the governor to decline their offers of help and his plans to educate Ambrosia backfire when she similarly rejects his help, placing her faith instead in her new religion.  

“‘And then you begin to give up the very idea of belonging. Suddenly this thing, this belonging, it seems like some long, dirty lie…and I begin to believe that birthplaces are accidents, that everything is an accident. But if you believe that, where do you go? What do you do? What does anything matter?’ 

As Samad described this dystopia with a look of horror, Irie was ashamed to find that the land of accidents sounded like paradise to her. Sounded like freedom. 

‘Do you understand, child? I know you understand.’ 

And what he really meant was: do we speak the same language? Are we from the same place? Are we the same?” 

[…] 

“Yes,” she said. “Yes, yes, yes.” 

This exchange illustrates the differences between Samad and Irie, while also tying together themes of fate, chance, and the desire to belong. Samad’s sense of identity largely rests on his ethnic and religious heritage. As a result, he is deeply shaken by the discovery that sending Magid to Bangladesh has—far from teaching him to identify with his Bengali heritage—made him more English than ever. As Samad says, this turn of events challenges the idea that his sense of “belonging” to Bangladesh is necessary rather than a product of chance. Irie, meanwhile, struggles throughout the novel to free herself from her family’s history. Therefore, she finds the idea of a “land of accidents” very appealing because it seems to offer her the chance to define her identity on her own terms. However, despite their different attitudes towards fate and chance, Samad and Irie are motivated by the same desire to “belong”—to be part of a larger group with which they identify. It is perhaps out of this sense of underlying sympathy that Irie sets aside her misgivings and reassures Samad that they are in fact “the same.”

“[Marcus] was no student of history (and science had taught him that the past was where we did things through a glass, darkly, whereas the future was always brighter, a place where we did things right or at least right-er), he had no stories to scare him concerning a dark man meeting a white man, both with heavy expectations, but only one with the power.” 

One of the many problems with Chalfenism is that it shares the cultural biases of the Enlightenment philosophy it draws on. Smith suggests that those biases extend even to its forward-looking and optimistic bent. The issue is not simply that other cultures and religions may place greater emphasis on tradition than Chalfenism does. It is that the ability to focus exclusively on the future, as Marcus does here, is a privilege most of the novel’s characters do not enjoy, if only because they are constantly reminded of their ethnic or racial background by English society at large. Furthermore, as this passage hints, Marcus’s ignorance of history makes him naive, setting in motion a chain of events that nearly culminates in Millat shooting Dr. Perret or even Marcus himself. 

“Now, he knew, he knew that if you wanted an example of the moribund, decadent, degenerate, oversexed, violent state of Western capitalist culture and the logical endpoint of its obsession with personal freedoms (Leaflet: Way Out West), you couldn’t do much better than Hollywood cinema. And he knew (how many times had he been through it with Hifan?) That the ‘gangster’ movie, the Mafia genre, was the worst example of that. A yet…it was the hardest thing to let go […] And when he found himself doing it, he tried desperately not to, he tried to fix it, but Millat’s mind was a mess and more often that not he’d end up pushing open the door, head back, shoulders forward, Liotta style, thinking:  

As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a Muslim.” 

Millat’s love of mafia movies sums up the broader cultural divisions and confusions that increasingly plague him over the course of the novel. Millat has lived his entire life in England and has no real interest in the religious or political beliefs KEVIN espouses. At the same time, he feels invisible in the eyes of the Western culture he admires, and his widespread popularity at school only exacerbates this feeling: “[U]nderneath it all, there remained an ever-present anger and hurt, the feeling of belonging nowhere that comes to people who belong everywhere” (225).

While Millat’s sense of alienation makes KEVIN’s message of war against the West appealing, he cannot help but view his affiliation with KEVIN through the eyes of Western culture. His awareness that this is forbidden only deepens his sense of being pulled in different directions and ultimately leads him to attempt to shoot Perret as a way of cutting himself off from the West once and for all. 

“Even worse, among the members of FATE, Joely and Crispin’s marriage served as a kind of cosmogony, an originating myth that explained succinctly what people could and should be, how the group began and how it should proceed in the future.”

Like the novel’s other teenaged characters, Joshua spends a lot of time trying to assert an identity independent of his family. Like Millat in particular, he does so in part by finding a replacement group with which to identify. As with so much else in the novel, however, FATE operates under the influence of history—or rather, the story it takes to be its history. This is unfortunate for Josh; the “originating myth” that governs the group’s actions centers on Joely and Crispin’s relationship, and Josh is infatuated with Joely. 

“No battle down the birth canal, no first and second, no saved and unsaved. No potluck. No random factors. No you have your father’s snout and your mother’s love of cheese. No mysteries lying in wait. No doubt as to when death will arrive. No hiding from illness, no running from pain. No question about who was pulling the strings. No doubtful omnipotence. No shaky fate […] It would not travel through time (and Time’s a bitch, Magid knew that much now. Time is the bitch), because its future was equal to its present, which was equal to its past. A Chinese box of a mouse. No other roads, no missed opportunities, no parallel possibilities. No second-guessing, no what-ifs, no might-have-beens.” 

Because he is absent for so much of the narrative, Magid is one of the novel’s more enigmatic characters. This passage offers some insight into the source of his desire for total certainty: Magid feels that his life has consistently been at the mercy of events beyond his control—the most notable example of this being his father’s decision to send him to Bangladesh while keeping Millat in London. Because the brothers are twins, each functions as a “parallel possibility” of what the other’s life might be like if their positions had been reversed. In reality, Magid’s sense of being haunted by “other roads” dates all the way back to his birth; the birth order of the twins had a decisive impact on each of their lives (especially in the way their father responded to them).

Magid looks to FutureMouse as a way to eliminate the influence of what other characters view as fate or chance—the external events that partially or wholly determine the course of a person’s life. In fact, Magid even suggests that by preprogramming every aspect of the mouse’s life, Marcus has rendered time itself meaningless. The changes FutureMouse undergoes will not be the result of time progressing but of the genetic modifications Marcus made to it before it was even born. 

“Yes, Millat was stoned. And it may be absurd to us that one Iqbal can believe the breadcrumbs laid down by another Iqbal, generations before him have not yet blown away in the breeze. But it doesn’t really matter what we believe. It seems it won’t stop the man who thinks this life is guided by the life he thinks he had before, or the gypsy who swears by the queens in her tarot pack […] Amid the strange landscapes that have replaced our belief in the efficacy of the stars, Millat’s is not such odd terrain. He believes the decisions that are made, come back. He believes we live in circles. His is a simple, neat fatalism. What goes around comes around.”

Millat’s plans to open fire at the FutureMouse exhibit are (even in his own mind) a replay of his ancestor Mangal Pande’s role in the Sepoy Mutiny. The very idea of history as a circle is itself an echo, reiterating something Samad said during WWII while high on morphine: “What I have realized, is that the generations […] they speak to each other, Jones. It’s not a line, life is not a line—this is not palm-reading—it’s a circle, and they speak to us” (100). Although the novel eventually suggests that history does not need to repeat itself, this passage helps explain why it sometimes does. In effect, Millat believes so strongly in destiny that his ideas about it govern the way he lives his life. This almost has disastrous consequences; as Millat’s “stoned” state makes clear, he is not poised to “revenge” Pande but rather to “misfoot” in the same way Pande allegedly did.

“That is how her child seemed. A perfectly plotted thing with no real coordinates. A map to an imaginary fatherland. But then, after weeping and pacing and rolling it over and over in her mind, she thought, whatever, you know? Whatever. It was always going to turn out like this, not precisely like this, but involved like this.” 

Irie’s response to the realization that her daughter will never know her father illustrates how Irie’s ideas about history, chance, and free will have evolved. Where she previously resisted any suggestion that the past could influence the present, she now accepts that “[i]t was always going to turn out like this.” She clarifies, however, that the form events have taken was not preordained; her life did not need to unfold “precisely like this” but simply “involved like this.” In reserving a space for chance or free will to operate within, Irie echoes the novel’s depiction of the relationship between fate, chance, and human action.  

“He’s a cunning-looking little blinder too, this mouse. He looks like he’s pulling faces a lot of the time.” 

Like his daughter Irie, Archie sees cunning in FutureMouse’s expression. This is significant because it foreshadows the mouse’s escape, as well as the reasons why it is possible; Marcus might have programmed the mouse on a genetic level, but it still retains a kind of free will. The fact that Archie notices this is also important because it suggests an affinity between him and the mouse. This is ultimately born out in Archie’s split-second decision to jump in front of Millat’s gun, which—like FutureMouse’s “cunning”—illustrates the limitations of history and fate.

“And then, with a certain horrid glee, [Samad] get to the fundamental truth of it, the anagnorisis: This incident alone will keep us two old boys going for the next forty years. It is the story to end all stories. It is the gift that keeps on giving.” 

This passage describes the moment Samad realizes Archie lied about shooting Perret back in World War II. That event was the foundation for the two men’s friendship, so Samad’s initial reaction is, not surprisingly, one of anger. That response soon gives way to amusement, however, as Samad thinks about reliving this moment with Archie “for the next forty years.”

What is particularly significant about this is Smith’s use of the word “fundamental” to describe Samad’s realization. Throughout the novel, characters have searched for fundamental truths on which to build their understanding of themselves and those around them. The moral decisiveness Archie supposedly showed in executing Perret was, to Samad, one of these basic truths. Ultimately, the novel advises against putting too much stock in fundamentals, which it suggests are usually just stories people tell themselves. In this passage, Samad—one of the characters most invested in the idea of a pure or original truth—realizes this and describes not the events themselves but the story of them as “fundamental” to his friendship with Archie.