Post-Colonialism and Fundamentalism in Zadie’s Smith White teeth

Abstract

 The novel White Teeth is surely about ethnic identity and the latter-day consequences of colonialism. Colonialism that brought some of those characters to London, and they are sometimes conscious of their post-colonial identities. Samad Iqbal, is a waiter with higher ambition, He is proud of his descent from Mangal Pande, executed by the British in the first phases of the Indian Mutiny. Hortense Bowden, is a Jamaican stalwart of the Lambeth Jehovah's Witnesses, was fathered by an English officer, posted to the West Indies, on his landlady's daughter. Yet the ethnic and cultural identities of the characters are so various that Smith seems to be taking and enjoying new liberties rather than plotting the consequences of empire. Much of the book is devoted to a Bangladeshi family and Smith (daughter of a Jamaican mother and an English father) has no hesitation about taking us into the inner world of its would-be patriarch, musing on his failed attempts to pass on his culture. The son he keeps in England turns into a Muslim fundamentalist. The son he sends back to Bangladesh to imbibe the wisdom of the old country "comes out a pukka Englishman, white suited, silly wig lawyer". Smith has allowed herself a certain imaginative freedom. "All the mixing up" of cultures and races allows her to mix customs and vocabularies at will. Parents lie awake at night foreseeing their "unrecognizable great-grandchildren... genotype hidden by phenotype". But the odd mixes go on. They come alive in Smith's dialogue, where we hear the English language comically accommodating every new pressure and habit. In one way, this is characteristic of "post-colonialism" as a type of literature: fiction and poetry in English written by citizens of former colonies, or by British citizens who are immigrants or the children of immigrants from those colonies. The label has replaced "Commonwealth literature", with its implication of grateful subjects creatively repaying their debts to British civilization. White Teeth is full of jokes about odd couplings of cultures. Thus its cameos of what we might call "post-colonial cuisine". Once, Archie told Samad what he fought for in the war: "Democracy and Sunday dinners, and... promenades and piers, and bangers and mash - and the things that are ours". But eating becomes something much stranger in modern

 England, the land as Samad reflects, of "terrible food".