Clara was from somewhere. She had roots. More specifically, she was from Lambeth (via Jamaica) and she was connected, through tacit adolescent agreement, to one Ryan Topps. Because before Clara was beautiful she was ugly. (Smith 27)
We are left in no doubt, from the very opening chapter, that White Teeth is extremely multicultural and multi-ethnic; the first chapter opens very comically with the futile suicide attempt of Alfred Archibald, a white, working class Second World War veteran who has just been divorced by his violet-eyed Italian wife. As an indecisive and tentative person who never makes a decision without tossing a coin, Archie again flips a coin to decide on the nature of his death. Although the result of the coin flipping does indicate that there is a chance that he will kill himself, his suicide attempt is thwarted by Mo Hussein-Ishmael, a Pakistani Muslim immigrant who runs a butcher’s shop in North London: “We’re not licensed for suicides around here. This place halal. Kosher, understand?” (Smith 7)
The English-Pakistani butcher’s words sound to Archie like a sort of revelation,
so instead of ending his life, he goes to an “End of the World” party where he meets the nineteen-year-old Jamaican immigrant girl, Clara, whom he subsequently marries just six weeks later.9 His life is restored when he meets Clara who is “beautiful in all senses except, maybe, by virtue of being black,” and smiles with “a complete lack of teeth in the top of her mouth” (24). It is in this first accidental encounter between Clara and Archie that Zadie Smith evokes the image of teeth as a particularly valuable metaphor.
Clara’s missing teeth epitomize the central issues of White Teeth – identity and roots. If the faces of all racial people are covered whilst their mouths remain open with teeth shown, it is not so easy to identify whether the whitest teeth belong to the black or the white man. Conversely, however, if people of all races were to stand and show a grin, in comparative terms, the teeth on the black faces would appear to be whiter. As Thompson notes, given the colour contrast effect, a black’s teeth seem relatively whiter, so white teeth on a black face represents “a potent essentialist marker of Blackness”
and “an identifier of difference” (124).
What is striking about the identity given to the black man is the contrast; not only the extreme contrast of white teeth against black skin, but the contrasting differences which distinguish the black man from the white man. As Frantz Fanon argues, “for not
9 As Smith herself told Amazon UK, her writing of White Teeth was inspired by her father, with the first encounter between her parents in the party turning out to be the scene in the novel where Archie meets Clara. Refer to Farry (2005) for the discussion with Amazon UK on Smith’s novel.
only must the black man be black; he must be black in relation to the white man” (110).
Fanon’s argument indicates that there is more than just the power relationship between black and white. In similar manner, Stuart Hall points out that the identity of the black is “constructed historically, culturally, politically” rather than “stabilized by Nature or by some other essential guarantee” (“New Ethnicities” 446).
Clara Bowden’s blackness is constructed politically, so when she gets married to Archie, the only wedding guests are “two Indians” (actually two Pakistanis), Archie’s war pal, Samad Iqbal, and his wife, Alsana. Archie’s white boss and other family members had politely declined the invitation to the wedding; the inter-racial marriage between Clara and Archie is therefore not openly acknowledged.
References to Clara Bowden’s teeth, signified as a marker of her black identity, are also employed by Zadie Smith as a means of describing the issue of roots. Clara’s missing teeth symbolize a recurring theme throughout the remainder of the novel, questioning how roots, especially the roots of the migrants, can be reconstructed in a diaspora community. When nineteen-year-old Clara loses her upper teeth in a scooter rider with Ryan Topps, who shares the same outcast experience with Clara in high school, she is deemed by Ryan as the unsaved one, the forsaken one: “Likewise, when 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.” (44)
Ryan’s enlightenment leads to his conversion to a Jehovah’s Witness, to which Clara’s mother, Hortense Bowden, faithfully devotes her whole life; meanwhile, Clara turns her back on Jehovah’s Witnesses and her mother, and instead, chooses Archie, imagined by the desperate Clara as her savior. “By February 1975, Clara had deserted the church and all its biblical literalism for Archibald Jones” (46).
For Clara, the loss of her upper teeth also meant losing her faith, her connection with her strong-headed Jamaican mother. According to the analysis of identity and family resemblances undertaken by Jill Kiecolt and Anna LoMascolo, any individual may “perceive resemblances to their parents on any sort of identity; physical appearance (tall), mannerisms (gestures), personality or character traits (honest, hard-working), social types of persons (intellectual), role identities (Presbyterian ministers) or even socio-demographic (African-American)” (Kiecolt and LoMascolo 27). With her front teeth missing, the physical characteristics identifying Clara, both in terms of her roots and the resemblance to her parents, are somewhat shrunken.
Thus, Clara’s teething problem leads not only to the loss of her roots but to her engagement with a brand new identity – “Englishness.” In the wedding scene when the bride Clara emerges together with Archie and “a perfect set of false teeth” (Smith 36), this indicates that teeth can be remodeled; thus, one’s identity can also be replaced. As
the critic Esra Mirze observed, Clara turns to Archie in the hope that she will be able
“to embrace secular Englishness as an antidote to religious fanaticism” (188). However, since Clara can now wear false teeth, she can choose not to disclose the authenticity of her teeth/roots to others. The set of false teeth for Clara is, thus, a secret. Not only is it a secret to Clara, but it is employed as a metaphor of hidden secrets throughout the remainder of the novel.
Through her portrayal of Clara Bowden, with her set of false teeth, Zadie Smith seems to assert an absence of biological facts in making distinctions of any racial difference. Smith does not choose skin colour – the “primary sign of racial difference and a frequent target of racialising characteristics”10 – as evidence of racial difference that gives away Clara Bowden’s identity; instead, she cunningly uses a set of buck teeth to describe Clara, as well as Irie, Clara’s daughter. Through Smith’s portrayal, Irie is described in her adolescence as “not a pretty child”; as Smith writes, “she had got her genes mixed up, Archie’s nose with Clara’s awful buckteeth” (149).
It is in the chapter entitled “the Miseducation of Irie Jones” that Smith again deals with the issue of identity, and yet the biological factor which troubles Irie Jones is not her teeth, or her skin colour, but instead, her hair. Like Faith Jackson in Andrea Levy’s
Fruit of the Lemon, as a black woman struggling for her identity in white British
10 Considering the ways in which race and ethnicity are used to decide “the norms and limits of the nation’s imagined community,” John McLeod points out that theories of racial difference usually take “skin colour” as the “primary sign of racial difference and frequent target of racialising discourses” (Beginning 110).
society, Irie Jones also has a problem with looking into a mirror.11 However, from the mirror that is England, what Irie sees is a non-reflection. Instead of seeing herself as an English person, she finds her Jamaican frame “loaded with pineapples, mangoes and guavas” (Smith 265). Irie Jones also has the same battle as Faith; that is, the desire to define herself through the looking glass.
Discussing the character of Irie in an interview with Kathleen O’Grady, Zadie Smith herself admits that Irie gets to the centre of the book, but that it is “not really about her,” but instead, about “a certain idea of indeterminacy” and about “the centre always being slightly displaced, and there are a whole myriad of reasons for that”
(O’Grady 107). Thus, the novel is not merely about the construction of Irie’s identity;
it is more about the way in which her identity is constructed in relation to that of her parents’ generation or her childhood mates, Magid and Millat Iqbal, and the Chalfens.
Irie’s sense of self, as Smith explains in the interview, has always been displaced, and indeed, there are many reasons for this displaced self-identity.
Being the child of a white English working-class father and a Jamaican mother, Irie has inherited mixed physical features; however, as a young girl with a troubled period of pubescence, Irie has a rather diffused identity, essentially because she lacks
11 Andrea Levy’s third novel, Fruit of the Lemon tells the story of Faith Jackson, with one part of the novel describing Faith’s desire to evade seeing herself as black: “A black girl lying in a bed. I covered the mirror with a bath towel. I didn’t want to be black any more. I just wanted to live. The other mirror in the room I covered with a tee-shirt. Voilà! I was no longer black” (160).
any clear and defined sense of her identity. During her pubescence, like most other teens, Irie Jones occupies herself more with school or with her friends than with her family. The family of young Irie exists only as the providence of her mixed racial heritage and the providers of a house to live in, but her personal relationships with Magid and Millat, who she grows up with, are much more significant; they have a
“shared history” of growing up as the children of immigrants.
Being very much aware of the way that Irie suffers as a result of following Millat, but receiving no attention from him, Alsana’s niece-of-shame, Neena, reminds Irie that she shares too much history with Millat, and as a result, knows him very well; thus, these are good reasons why Millat would want to shun her. However, what Irie imagines her self-image to be in Millat’s eyes is an Irie who is fat and ugly, “with an Afro” (Smith 284). Irie therefore sets out to change her hairstyle in the hope that Millat will look at her and like what he sees. From the heading of this chapter, “the Miseducation of Irie Jones,” which tells of the satirical episode of Irie changing her hairstyle for Millat, one can almost hear the critical voice of the author, Zadie Smith, chiding Irie’s obsession with her false identity.
As a result of her predisposition with following Millat’s every movement and her fixation with his flirtation with the girls, Irie notices that the “nice oboe-playing, long skirted middle-class girls” seem to adore the lady-killer Millat, and that these girls
were “hair-flicking” and “fugue-singing” (Smith 269). With her racially mixed background, Irie feels desperately out of place growing up with wiry hair and a “full figure” in a nation full of thin white girls with straight hair. Irie proclaims her wish for
“straight, straight, long, black, sleek, flickable, tossable, shakable, touchable, finger-through-able, wind-blowable hair” (273). For Irie, straightened hair is beautiful.
Analyzing this episode involving Irie changing her hairstyle, Thompson points out that her hair, like Clara Jones’ gapped teeth, has “roots” which are determined “by its genetic composition that is ‘rooted’ in one’s ancestral heritage” (126). Thus, she holds the view that Irie’s decision to change her “Afro” hairstyle is a political act, essentially because she desires to minimize her African characteristics and to make herself capable of fulfilling the “norms” of white ideological values.
Kobena Mercer also argues that black hairstyles are political, essentially because
they connote racism and negative meanings:
Alternatively, I suggest that, when hairstyling is critically evaluated as an aesthetic practice inscribed in everyday life, all black hairstyles are political in that they each articulate responses to the panoply of historical forces which have invested this element of ethnic signifier with both social and symbolic meaning and significance. With its organizing principles of biological determinism, racism first politicized our hair by burdening it with a range of negative social and psychological meanings. (Jungle 104)
Black hairstyles, as Mercer notes, have been invested with negative social and psychological meanings as a result of the white ideology dominating the aesthetic
standard, such that white people’s hairstyles are accepted as the norm, while non-white people’s hairstyles, such as Dreadlocks, are devalued, essentially by being regarded as ugly. Thus, in Mercer’s opinion, Michael Jackson’s altered image, achieved by engaging in skin-bleaching cosmetics and curly-perm hairstyle is a way of “becoming white” – a “deracializing sell-out” and a “morbid symptom of a psychologically mutilated black consciousness” (Jungle 98).
Irie’s wish to change her Afro hairstyle and her decision to have “flickable” hair similarly resemble Mercer’s idea of a “diseased state of black consciousness” (Jungle 97). The act of straightening her hair is, in Mercer’s view, a cultural practice that she chooses to follow; however, such cultural practices demonstrate a willingness to kowtow to the aesthetic white-biased standard, which regulates that white hairstyles have a naturally privileged position over black hairstyles. Thus, as Thompson suggests, Irie Jones is found to be inhabiting “a body that is physiologically rooted in two places,
‘belonging’ to both England and Jamaica in a sense” such that she experiences “a kind of corporeal nomadism or not-at-homeness in her skin” (127).
As in many other parts of the novel where Zadie Smith demonstrates her penchant for presenting stories of false identities or false histories, Irie Jones’ recognition of her negative body image is also depicted as being false, with the end result being that her attempt to straighten her hair turns out to be a total, abject failure. Smith concludes this
episode with a playful and satirical result, with Irie’s hair horribly damaged as a result of her long ordeal at the hair salon. Irie is therefore forced to accept some poor Paki’s hair woven into her own. In such a way, Zadie Smith is telling readers that Irie’s pursuit of white-bias aesthetics is due to mis-education and that her effort to define her identity by taking what she knows about the British idea of beauty is mistaken. Irie’s attempt to fight her genes has been unsuccessful. Irie thinks of England as “a giant mirror” through which she sees “no reflection,” such a mirror, to Irie, cannot reflect a person like her. “There was England, a gigantic mirror, and there was Irie, without reflection. A stranger in a stranger land” (Smith 266).
An artificial identity has been cast upon both Clara Bowden and her daughter Irie;
since Clara now has her false teeth, and Irie is forced to wear a wig. The way in which the novel articulates the identity of the second- or third-generation immigrant emerges with a rejection of their inheritance as a way of fighting against their genes. Just as missing teeth can be replaced by false teeth, so Afro-textured hair can either be straightened or replaced by a wig; however, their roots, which reveal their biological traits, such as race, ethnicity or inheritance from their families, are not easily replaced.
What lies behind Clara’s and Irie’s intentions in taking on some sort of artificial identity is a gesture of rejection that they, in Debbie Weekes’ viewpoint, “wish to move away from the position of other” As Weekes continues, “Black people who do so wish
to redefine themselves as subject in order to exert some control over their lives” (123).
It is clear, in the case of Irie in particular, that she refuses to be considered unattractive just because of the texture of her hair; however, her identity crisis develops more from her specific wish to redefine herself as a subject.
Thus, when reading a Shakespeare sonnet at school, Irie interprets the allusion to the “dark lady” as a literary reference to a black woman.12 Irie’s reading of the sonnet represents her desire to move from the object to subject, to define reality not only for the dark lady in Shakespeare’s sonnet, but also for herself. Such movement resembles
the proposition which bell hooks offers:
As subjects, people have the right to define their own reality, establish their own identities, name their history … as objects, one’s reality is defined by others, one’s identity created by others, one’s history named only in ways that define one’s relationship to those who are subject. (Talking 42)
Yet, Irie’s attempt to redefine her own reality fails when her exertion is gently denied by her teacher and laughed at by her classmates; “Irie reddened. She had thought, just then, that she had seen something like a reflection, but it was receding”
(Smith 272). For Irie, a girl in her puberty, lacking in self-confidence and extremely self-critical, any dissent in public would make her attempts at self-assertion even more problematic. Nevertheless, she will ultimately turn to re-examine her identity and to
12 The discussion in class in which Irie and her classmates take part, follows the lines of Shakespeare, citing “For since each hand hath put on nature’s power, Fairing the foul with art’s face borrow’d face”;
this is taken from Shakespeare’s sonnet number 127. Irie’s teacher, Mrs. Roody, later attempts to oppose Irie’s claim by citing another of Shakespeare’s sonnets, number 131, saying “In nothing art thou black save in thy deeds.” See Smith 225.
attempt to move from object to subject when, in the later part of the novel, her close association with the Chalfens once again causes her to dwell on the notion of identity, and further, on the notion of “Englishness.”