White Teeth

The question of what determines a person’s life, and to what extent they can set that course themselves, is central to White Teeth. In the novel’s opening pages, for instance, Smith writes of Archie’s failed suicide attempt:

[T]he position of the planets, the music of the spheres, the flap of a tiger moth’s diaphanous wings in Central Africa, and a whole bunch of other stuff that Makes Shit Happen had decided it was second-chance time for Archie (4).

The nature of this force, however, is not immediately obvious even in this passage; the “music of the spheres” calls to mind a cosmic or divine plan, whereas “the flap of a tiger moth’s diaphanous wings” ascribes the event to a string of coincidences.

Broadly speaking, much of White Teeth involves a debate about whether fate or chance is the guiding principle at work in the world. Of course, fate can take many different forms. Given the novel’s interest in history, particularly the legacy of colonialism, it is not surprising that the past often exerts a destiny-like influence over characters’ lives. To take just one example, Smith describes an argument between Magid and Millat as their racing “toward the future only to find they more and more eloquently express their past, that place where they have just been” (385).

The novel’s religious characters believe that God is the ultimate arbiter of people’s lives; as Samad puts it, “If Allah says there will be storm, there will be storm. If he says earthquake, it will be earthquake. Of course it has to be!” (240). At the opposite end of the spectrum, secular characters like Marcus and Magid believe in another kind of destiny: genetics. Of course, Marcus’s career is premised on modifying DNA and changing the path that destiny will take, but the underlying assumption is that an organism’s genes entirely determine its future. In fact, this “certainty” is precisely what Marcus and Magid find so appealing about the idea: “No question of a journey, no question of greener grass, for wherever this mouse went, its life would be precisely the same” (405).

The goal of Marcus’s FutureMouse, then, is to “eliminate the random” (283)—the role that chance plays in human lives. The idea that chance is the driving force in the world frightens many of the novel’s characters; Alsana, for instance, resents Bangladesh as a place where people “live under the invisible finger of random disaster, of flood and cyclone, hurricane and mudslide” (176). Nevertheless, White Teeth suggests that many key moments in our lives are in fact pure accidents, including the meeting that will result in Archie and Clara’s marriage:

[S]omething […] happened that led to the transformation of Archie Jones in every particular that a man can be transformed; and not due to any particular effort on his part, but by means of the entirely random, adventitious collision of one person with another. Something happened by accident. That accident was Clara Bowden (19).

For certain characters, the fact that accidents can happen is liberating; Irie often feels hemmed in by her family history, so the idea of a world in which chance governs everything “sound[s] like freedom” (337).

White Teeth is sympathetic to this idea, and in the debate between fate and chance, it favors the latter. This becomes especially clear in the novel’s final chapter, when Archie’s decision to jump in front of Millat’s gun happens to break FutureMouse’s cage. Therefore, it is not only the action itself but its unintended consequences that alter the course of events that had seemed fated until that moment. With that said, Smith leaves the possibility that certain events are predetermined, saying of Irie and Josh’s future relationship that “you can only avoid your fate for so long” (448).

Perhaps one way of understanding the balance White Teeth strikes between fate and chance is that both are, to some extent, open to interpretation and free will. For example, Ryan Topps concludes that God’s will allowed him to walk away unscathed from the scooter accident that knocked out Clara’s teeth, and as a result, any lingering doubts he had about the Jehovah’s Witnesses disappear. In other words, by ascribing events to either fate or chance, people influence the course of the future.

The extent to which people can determine their destinies is a major theme that often intersects with the novel’s interest in fate and chance. The role that fate and chance play in determining the novel’s events seems to leave little room for individual free will. This is, at least, the conclusion Joshua reaches on the way to the FutureMouse exhibit: “[T]he world happens to you, thought Joshua, you don’t happen to the world. There’s nothing you can do” (412). White Teeth certainly proves skeptical of attempts to secure a particular vision of the future; Samad’s decision to send Magid to Bangladesh has the opposite effect than he intended, and Marcus’s hopes of establishing “a new phase in human history, where we are not victims of the random but instead directors and arbitrators of our own fate” go awry when FutureMouse escapes (357).

At the same time, White Teeth suggests that people sometimes cling to ideas of fate or chance to avoid responsibility. Because the world is complex and unpredictable, every decision involves, as Marcus puts it, “some element of moral luck” (347): over time, the consequences of our actions may turn out to be harmful in ways that we didn’t anticipate. This does not dissuade Marcus from carrying out his experiments, but it does frighten many other characters. Josh, for instance, feels that freedom of action would only truly be possible in a world about to end: “[I]t’s a lovely fantasy, this fantasy of no time (TWELVE HOURS LEFT TWELVE HOURS LEFT), the point at which consequences disappear and any action is allowable” (411).

That said, Josh also recognizes that “choices need time, the fullness of time, time being the horizontal axis of morality”; a choice made in a world with “no time” might be free, but it would also lack moral significance (411). White Teeth therefore suggests that it is important to exercise free will, despite the uncertainty that surrounds any action. This is part of why the novel’s final chapter, in which Archie intervenes to save Perret’s life, is so significant. More than any other character, Archie has shied away from any sort of decision-making, relying on coin tosses to decide everything from which son Samad should send to Bangladesh to whether the twins should meet when Magid returns to England. This habit dates back at least as far as Archie’s service in World War II, when he used it to decide whether to execute Perret—a very explicit attempt to dodge responsibility. Perret warns Archie that his “decision may come back to [him] as Oedipus’s returned to him, horrible and mutilated” and that Archie is not “sufficiently strong” to live with the consequences of his decision (445, 446), which terrifies Archie to the point of tears. By flashing back to this moment just as Archie once again saves Perret’s life, Smith underscores the change Archie has undergone: a decision Archie once left to chance is now one that he has truly made. 

Except for a few flashbacks, White Teeth takes place after the heyday of the British Empire. Nevertheless, colonialism’s legacy is one of the clearest ways history makes its presence felt in the novel. Given the Bowdens’ and Iqbals’ countries of origin (Jamaica and Bangladesh, respectively) were at one point British colonies, the very fact that they immigrated to London is a product of this legacy, as are the prejudices and pressures they face once there.

This is best summed up in Smith’s discussion of the “original trauma” the Iqbals seem destined to keep repeating: “[T]hey can’t help but reenact the dash they once made from one land to another, from one faith to another, from one brown mother country into the pale, freckled arms of an imperial sovereign” (136). Referring to Samad’s affair with Poppy Burt-Jones, passage highlights the parallels between Samad’s infatuation with a white Englishwoman and his family’s relocation to England—which are not lost on Samad. The guilt he feels is magnified by concerns that it represents assimilation into Western society and values. As a result, Samad becomes increasingly preoccupied with preserving his heritage against Western influences, which he associates with the imperialism his great-grandfather fought.

KEVIN, the fundamentalist group that Millat joins, shares this view, arguing that there is a “spiritual war” underway between competing cultures (245). However, for Millat, the issue is not so cut-and-dry. On the one hand, it is certainly the case that the immigrants White Teeth depicts are subject to discriminatory and racist attitudes from English society at large. Mo Hussein-Ishmael, for instance, joins KEVIN after a string of violent attacks by judgmental strangers:

[H]e was a Paki (try telling a huge, drunk Office Superworld check-out boy that you’re Bangladeshi); he gave half his cornershop up to selling weird Paki meat; […] his distance from home (‘Why don’t you go back to your own country’ ‘But then how will I serve you cigarettes’ Boof) (392).

Smith also lampoons the subtler biases of middle-class whites like Joyce Chalfen, whose desire to save Millat and Irie is a holdover of attitudes formerly used to justify colonialism. But while racism is clearly still part of British culture, it is not easy for a second-generation immigrant like Millat to reject that culture wholesale. Having grown up surrounded by Western movies, music, fashion, etc., Millat learns to view the world through this lens. As a result, his attempts to claim his ancestral identity are filtered through Western culture: “Millat was right in there, he was [KEVIN’s] greatest asset, he was in the forefront, the first into battle come jihad, cool as fuck in a crisis, like Brando, like Pacino, like Liotta” (368).

This sense of cultural division is a source of great frustration to Millat and, to a lesser extent, Samad, who sees himself as a “foreign man in a foreign land caught between borders” (148). What makes these divisions problematic is the fact that most people remain attached to ideas of cultural purity: “[I]t is still hard to admit that there is no one more English than the Indian, no one more Indian than the English” (272). These fears of “infection, penetration, miscegenation” (272) are not unique to white nationalists; Clara’s mother, for instance, disapproves of her daughter’s marriage to an Englishman because she wants to preserve her gene pool.

Repeatedly, the novel demonstrates that the search for a pure, authentic culture or ethnicity is not only harmful but misguided. At least in the modern world, everyone is a blend of different places and peoples; even the Chalfens, whom Irie considers the epitome of Englishness, are third-generation immigrants. As a result, White Teeth ultimately advocates for a form of multiculturalism in which cultural differences are respected but understood to be somewhat arbitrary.