79 pages • 2 hours read
Zadie SmithWhite Teeth
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2000A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Summary
Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Character Analysis
Themes
Symbols & Motifs
Important Quotes
Essay Topics
Tools
BetaPart 3, Chapters 11-13Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 3: “Irie 1990, 1907”
Chapter 11 Summary: “The Miseducation of Irie Jones”
Irie, now 15, is anxious to adhere to Western beauty standards (partly in the hopes of attracting Millat’s attention). Her identity as a woman of color is constantly challenged by her surroundings. One day, in school, she proposes that “the dark lady” Shakespeare write about is black, and her teacher shoots the idea down:
‘No, dear, she’s dark. She’s not black in the modern sense. There weren’t any… well, Afro-Carri-bee-yans in England at that time, dear. […] I mean I can’t be sure, but it does seem terribly unlikely, unless she was a slave of some kind, and he’s unlikely to have written a series of sonnets to a lord and then a slave, is he?’ (226).
So, essentially, Irie is told that a white man could not find a black woman, like her, desirable.
In desperation, Irie books an appointment to have her hair relaxed. However, she does not tell the hairdresser that she recently washed her hair; as a result, the ammonia burns most of it away. She is therefore forced to get extensions but refuses to allow the hairdresser time to fully braid the hair in.
Irie sets off for the Iqbals’ house, where Neena and her girlfriend Maxine react with horror to Irie’s new hairstyle. Irie talks to Alsana, observing that Samad seems unhappy. In response, Alsana shows Irie a photo and letter from Magid documenting a meeting with the writer R. V. Saraswati:
[I]t had long been my intention to make the Asian countries sensible places, where order prevailed, disaster was prepared for, and a young boy was in no danger from a falling vase (!) New laws, new stipulations are required (I told him) to deal with our unlucky fate, the natural disaster. But then he corrected me: ‘Not fate,’ he said. ‘Too often we Indians, we Bengalis, we Pakistanis throw up our hands and cry “Fate!” in the face of history […] We must be more like the English (240).
By the time Irie leaves, her extensions are already falling out (241).
One day, Irie learns about a planned drug sweep at her school and sets off to warn Millat. She finds him smoking and talking to his friend Hifan, who has joined a group called Keepers of the Eternal and Victorious Islamic Nation (KEVIN). Unable to get Millat’s attention, Irie leaves, passing by a group of nerdy boys. One boy—Joshua Chalfen—compliments Irie on her short hair. Millat comes to retrieve a joint Irie had absentmindedly walked away with, and all three teens are caught in the raid.
In the principal’s office, Joshua—eager to improve his social standing—claims that the marijuana was his. The headmaster catches the lie but decides that, in keeping with “‘the whole ethos of Glenard Oak, ever since Sir Glenard himself’” (252), Millat and Irie should attend study sessions at Joshua’s house. In an aside, the narrator explains that the headmaster is wrong about Glenard—a tobacco farmer who used his fortune to fund a building where he hoped Jamaicans and Englishman could teach one another faith and a work ethic, respectively. Glenard, however, lost interest in the project before dying in the 1907 Kingston earthquake, effectively stranding many Jamaican workers in London.
Chapter 12 Summary: “Canines: The Ripping Teeth”
Joshua’s father is Marcus Chalfen, a geneticist who believes his experiments on mice will one day translate into a better, more productive existence for humankind. Joshua’s mother Joyce has written several books on gardening, but her main focus in life is supporting her husband, her four sons, and the “Chalfen way” of rationality, liberalism, and optimism (260). Nevertheless, she secretly “need[s] to be needed” (262) and wishes her children were less independent and well-adjusted.
On her first visit to the Chalfens’, Irie is immediately impressed: “No one in the Jones household made jokes about Darwin, or said ‘my foot and mouth are on intimate terms,’ or offered choices of tea” (265). Joyce talks nonstop, gushing about the power of nurture over nature and saying that her youngest son “finds brown strangers really stimulating” (271).
Millat likes the Chalfens for a different reason: attention. He quickly learns that the more he acts out by smoking, insulting his hosts, skipping sessions, etc., the more Joyce will dote on him. This irritates Irie, whose grades have been improving and who has begun organizing files for Marcus and talking with him about “FutureMouse”—a mouse he engineered to develop specific cancers in an attempt to learn how to “program every step in the development of an organism: reproduction, food habits, life expectancy” (283).
Clara and (especially) Alsana become frustrated with the Chalfens’ influence over their children and enlist Neena to have dinner with the family and report back. Neena is initially reluctant, saying Alsana should be more worried about Millat’s friends in KEVIN. However, when Neena and Maxine visit, Joyce and Marcus are awkward and offensive; Marcus jokes that “dykes” are “terrible temptations for a man” (289). Neena tells Alsana that the Chalfens are “screaming-mad basket-cases” (291).
Nevertheless, visits to the Chalfens continue, and when Irie does well on her exams, Clara decides to thank the family. When she does, Joyce wonders where Irie gets her intelligence from, and Clara cautiously mentions her English grandfather, Charlie Durham—even though everyone in Clara’s family considers Durham a “no-good djam fool boy” (294).
Chapter 13 Summary: “The Root Canals of Hortense Bowden”
The narrative flashes back to 1907 Jamaica, when Ambrosia Bowden (Irie’s great-grandmother) was 14 and pregnant by her mother’s lodger, Captain Charlie Durham.
Durham decided to give Ambrosia an English education in preparation for marrying her: “He taught her how to read the trials of Job and study the warnings of Revelation, to swing a cricket bat, to sing ‘Jerusalem.’ How to add up a column of numbers. How to decline a Latin noun” (296). Before the baby was born, however, Durham left for an assignment in Trinidad, placing Ambrosia in the care of his friend Edmund Glenard. Glenard, embarrassed by Ambrosia’s pregnancy, handed her over to a “fiery Scottish spinster” named Mrs. Brenton (297), who converted Ambrosia to the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Hortense believes that she became conscious at the moment of Ambrosia’s conversion: “[She] was there; she remembers; the events of 14 January 1907, the day of the terrible Jamaican earthquake, are not hidden from her, but bright and clear as a bell” (298).
On that day, Ambrosia came across Glenard, who coaxed her inside a church and began to grope her. At that moment, the earthquake struck, killing Glenard and sending Ambrosia into labor.
Durham returned to Kingstown the next day and—never having learned Ambrosia’s last name—struggled to learn news of her. After finally ascertaining her safety, he went to the governor to ask that Ambrosia be granted a spot on the next ship leaving Jamaica. The governor refused, and Durham, “hurt and vengeful” (301), mentioned that he had seen American soldiers in Kingston in violation of British authority. As a result, Swettenham sent away two American relief ships, leaving thousands of Jamaicans without aid. Ambrosia, meanwhile, was in a state of religious ecstasy as she anticipated the end of the world, and her family interpreted her words—“it soon come” (301)—as a reference to the ships.
Part 3, Chapters 11-13 Analysis
Unlike Magid and Millat, whose lives are directly impacted by their father’s insistence on tradition and heritage, Irie grows up with a mother who deliberately cut herself off from her past. Significantly, this does not make Irie herself feel any freer. On the contrary, she is constantly frustrated by her inability to escape history, which exists in her very genes:
Irie Jones, aged fifteen, was big. The European proportions of Clara’s figure had skipped a generation, and she was landed instead with Hortense’s substantial Jamaican frame, loaded with pineapples, mangoes, and guavas (221).
Irie’s “unwilling[ness] to settle for genetic fate” (222) also extends to her curly hair, which she attempts to have straightened with disastrous results. This insecurity stems partly from beauty standards that ignore the existence of women of color; the fact that Millat—Irie’s longtime crush—only dates white girls further exacerbates the problem.
By the time Irie meets the Chalfens, it is clear that Irie’s dissatisfaction with her looks reflects a broader form of frustration. Irie is drawn not only to the Chalfens’ intellectualism and middle-class status but also to one of the core tenets of “Chalfenism” (262): its focus on the future rather than the past. Marcus in particular embraces an exaggerated form of Enlightenment-era thought, which holds that human reason can solve virtually every major problem in the world. Of course, Irie’s own interest in Chalfenism is more personal than philosophical; frustrated by the many subjects that are off-limits in her own family (Archie’s first marriage, Clara’s family, etc.), Irie is fascinated by a household in which “speech [flowed] freely from adult to child, child to adult, as if the channel of communication between these two tribes was untrammeled, unblocked by history, free” (265).
Nevertheless, there are many hints that the Chalfens are not the ideal family Irie believes them to be. For one, Joshua is not as well-adjusted as his parents assume and very quickly grows jealous of the attention Marcus and Joyce lavish on Millat, Irie, and (later) Magid. More broadly, White Teeth is skeptical of the philosophy that forms the basis of the Chalfens’ lives. The Chalfens view themselves as “the inheritors of the enlightenment” (359), but the ideas of the Enlightenment often went hand in hand with imperialism, which cast itself as a mission to share Europe’s progress with the rest of the world. As Alsana puts it, “‘The English are the only people […] who want to teach you and steal from you at the same time’” (294). The chapter that follows this pronouncement—the story of Ambrosia’s education—seems to bear this out. As a result, there’s reason to doubt the benefits of Chalfenism, particularly given that Joyce and Marcus often display a patronizing attitude toward people of color.
In the meantime, Irie’s infatuation with the Chalfens is the first of many attempts by the novel’s younger characters to find alternatives to their home lives. As Irie, Millat, and Joshua enter adolescence, they struggle to form identities that do not rely exclusively on their family’s expectations. Josh, for instance, takes an interest in Irie because he sees her as someone he can form a kind of tribe with:
She was clever and not entirely unpretty, and there was something in her that had a strongly nerdy flavor about it, despite that boy she spent her time with. The Indian one. She hung around him, but she wasn’t like him. Joshua Chalfen strongly suspected her of being one of his own (247).
This search for belonging eventually leads Millat and Joshua to two extremist organizations—KEVIN and FATE, respectively.
Related Titles
By Zadie Smith
