The mouseness of the mouse: The competing discourses of genetics and history in White Teeth

Abstract

Zadie Smith’s 2000 novel White Teeth has often been hailed as a progressive vision of a multicultural Britain. Employing the discourses of genetics and describing Smith’s use of genetics in the novel’s theme of teeth and the FutureMouse©, this paper argues that Smith’s vision of multiculturalism is made complex by genetic discourses. These discourses are contrasted with personal and familial history as the source of identity for the characters of the novel. Teeth are used metaphorically to represent the rootedness of characters and the effect that migration has on first and second generation immigrants. The text highlights the difference in certainty and uncertainty experienced by characters, contrasting the certainty of white English characters with the uncertainty in the lives of the immigrants and their families. This uncertainty is contrasted with the genetic determinism that informs the life of the FutureMouse©, as well as the lives of the second and third generation immigrants depicted in the novel and Smith’s narrative provides no easy answers to the question of whether or not one’s DNA dictates one’s place in life.

In his study of twentieth-century genre, Science Fiction After 1900, Brooks Landon suggests that the increasingly technological society of the twentieth century has resulted in a world that “has itself grown science fictional” and that it is possible to say that “something we might loosely call ‘science fiction thinking’ has clearly overflowed the formal bounds of literary genre to sustain both an identifiable science fiction subculture and a broad complex of science fiction-shaped cultural assumptions about science, technology, and the future” (2002: xiii). While Zadie Smith’s White Teeth is unlikely ever to be classified as a science fiction novel, it does reflect this broader complex of assumptions about science, technology and the future that Landon identifies as “the new realism of technological society” (2002: xiii). This new realism includes the growing importance of biotechnologies that catalogue and control the human body; their significance is reflected in the structure, characters, and plot of Smith’s novel. As Jennifer Gustar suggests regarding White Teeth, “for all the consolation the novel may offer in terms of human potential to transcend differences, in the end, there is also, a ticking bomb: science in league with the god-trick — the dream of modernity” (2010: 342).

We can begin to understand Gustar’s statement in a telling scene from the novel in which Marcus Chalfen, a geneticist and author of a popular science book, is confronted by one of his readers as he waits in an airport lounge. His reader first describes the book as “weird”, then scary, because the biotechnologies described in it are “messing about with the body” (Smith, 2000: 345). ¹ She explains,

I mean, I’m a politics student, yeah, and I’m like: what are they creating? And who do they want to wipe out? You’ve got to be seriously naive if you don’t think the West intend to use this shit in the East, on the Arabs. … things are getting scary. I mean, reading this shit you just realize how close science is to science fiction. … I mean, if you’re Indian like me you’ve got something to worry about, yeah? (345-346; emphasis in original)

The concerns expressed by the girl in the airport echo the increased awareness of science and technology in contemporary culture, while her fears about how such technologies will be used on Easterners, Arabs, and Indians suggest this awareness does not erase the age-old perils of racial and ethnic division and discrimination. The science-fictional thinking inherent in genetic discourses challenges the celebratory view of the novel in which “White Teeth appeared at just the right time, when Smith’s brand of undemanding multiculturalism could serve as an anthem for the complacent self image of London as the harmonious melting pot” (Thomas, 2006: n.p.). This article argues that the struggles of the Iqbals, Joneses, and Chalfens demonstrate how genetic discourse can sometimes subvert, and sometimes reify, personal and familial history.

The novel’s title and chapters use a body part — the teeth — to structure the narrative, connect its multiple stories, and contemplate the relationship between the body, its genetic heritage, and the social lives of the novel’s characters. In the chapter entitled “Canines: The Ripping Teeth”, the violent action of the canines, meant for tearing and ripping, is suggestive of both the upheaval of immigration and the violence that might meet immigrants in their new home. In the narrative, we are told “this had been the century of strangers, brown, yellow and white. This had been the century of the great immigrant experiment” (271), but this experiment also generated a great deal of resentment as demonstrated in Enoch Powell’s “Rivers of Blood” speech of 1968; however, the narrative also tells us that: “it makes an immigrant laugh to hear the fears of the nationalist, scared of infection, penetration, miscegenation, which is small fry, peanuts, compared to what the immigrant fears — dissolution, disappearance” (272; emphasis in original). For Alsana, this means that her and her family’s “Bengaliness [will be] thoroughly diluted, genotype hidden by phenotype”; while Hortense thinks about how she “hadn’t put all that effort into marrying black, into dragging her genes back from the brink, just so her daughter could bring yet more high-colored children into the world” (272). What both women fear is the disappearance of their ethnic identity; framed in genetic terms, they fear genotype will be hidden by phenotype. ²

In Smith’s chapter titles, the shorthand “root canals” connects the cleaning out of a diseased root in a tooth to the immigrant experience. The chapter “The Root Canals of Alfred Archibald Jones and Samad Miah Iqbal” describes how their unlikely friendship formed and then was damaged by the fate of “Dr. Sick”, the geneticist who re-emerges at the end of the novel along with the genetically modified mouse. “The Root Canals of Hortense Bowden” relates how Hortense’s mother was both educated and impregnated by Captain Charlie Durham who loved her “just as the English loved India and Africa and Ireland; it is the love that is the problem, people treat their lovers badly” (295-300). “The Root Canals of Mangal Pande” tell one part of that story of love, connecting the history of Pande’s role in the Indian Mutiny of 1857 to Samad’s personal quest to make sense of his family’s history. ³ In this “root” chapter Archie suggests that some men are not capable of killing and could spare the lives of even those they despise, to which Samad replies, “A man is a man is a man. His family is threatened, his beliefs attacked, his way of life destroyed, his whole world coming to an end — he will kill. Make no mistake. He won’t let the new order roll over him without a struggle” (216-217), even though he impotently struggles against the new order that his sons represent in their paired embrace/rejection of Englishness.

Samad’s defense of violent action in the face of a threat to his family and beliefs is echoed in his wife’s critical appraisal of the family’s problems. The narrator tells us:

it’s all very well, this instruction of Alsana’s to look at the thing close up; to look at it straight between the eyes; an unflinching and honest stare, a meticulous inspection that would go beyond the heart of the matter to its marrow, beyond the marrow to the root — but the question is how far back do you want? How far will do? (71; emphasis in original)

This paper’s argument that Smith’s novel uses the discourses of history and genetic determinism to complicate her exploration of multiculturalism draws upon Smith’s use of “marrow” and “root” here. It recognizes the common metaphor of roots as explanation of migration, such as Salman Rushdie’s suggestion that “to explain why we become attached to our birthplaces we pretend that we are trees and speak of roots. Look under your feet. You will not find gnarled growths sprouting through the soles. Roots, I sometimes think, are a conservative myth, designed to keep us in our places” (1983: 84). It is only when we transcend this conservative myth of becoming “new types of human being: people who root themselves in ideas rather than places, in memories as much as in material things” (Rushdie, 1991: 124) that roots become a positive vision of migrancy. The metaphor of roots connects to Smith’s teeth metaphor, drawing our attention to the body, which can act as a marker of race or ethnicity, which in turn evokes the genetics that underlie those markings.

In Smith’s novel, Samad Miah Iqbal and his wife Alsana are trying to raise their twin sons, Magid and Millat. However, when Samad sends Magid back to Bangladesh in an attempt to provide him with a sense of his heritage, Magid comes back a “pukka Englishman”, while Millat joins a radical Islamist group, the Keepers of the Eternal and Victorious Islamic Nation, whose acronym — KEVIN — Smith uses to deflate the significance of such groups and movements. Samad’s best friend Archie Jones lives his life by the toss of a coin. His daughter Irie along with Millat and Magid become involved with the Chalfen family, third generation Jewish, Polish immigrants who Irie thinks are “more English than the English” (a sentiment originally applied to Irish soldiers in the British army during WWII). Marcus Chalfen, a genetic scientist adored by his wife Joyce, is working on a FutureMouse©, ⁴ while his son Josh joins an animal rights group (again with a playful acronym — FATE — Fighting Animal Torture and Exploitation) that seeks to interrupt the press conference about the FutureMouse© in the final scene of the novel.

The activist group acronyms, chapter titles, and FutureMouse© that Chalfen is working on highlight how the discourses of genetics contrast with personal or immigrant history to affect the novel’s characters. For example, during one of her lessons at the Chalfen home, Irie learns from Marcus that creating transgenic mice — mice that have genes from other species as well as their own — allows one to control their development (282-283). The operative word here is control: Irie’s attraction to the hybridity of transgenics is that it offers the promise of control, a promise implicit in the rhetoric used to describe efforts like the Human Genome Project. ⁵ Irie thus imagines herself as a transgenic creature. She wants to be one with the Chalfens, to separate “from the chaotic, random flesh of her own family and [be] transgenically fused with another. A unique animal. A new breed” (284). In Irie’s imagination, the hybridity of a transgenic animal is attractive, allowing her a fantasy of escape from the tyranny of her family life and her part-black, part-white bodily traits because she imagines a blended identity will transcend the limits of either black or white. But as Homi Bhabha observes, the “hybrid object…retains the actual semblance of the authoritative symbol but revalues its presence by resisting it as the signifier of Entstellung — after the intervention of difference” (1994: 115; emphasis in original) because the power of hybridity lies in its function as a metonymy of presence. Just as the “cultural inheritance of slavery or colonialism … brought before modernity … [does] not resolve its historic differences into a new totality” (1994: 242; emphasis in original), so the transgenic creature cannot resolve the problem of control. Irie’s attraction to hybridity is a desire for control; however, for Samad, hybridity represents the loss of identity that Alsana and Hortense fear and a loss of control over his sons. For example, Millat infuriates him because “Millat was neither one thing nor the other, this or that, Muslim or Christian, Englishman or Bengali” (291).

At the same time, the control that the science of genetics promises through a creature like the FutureMouse© is a kind of rhetorical trick since the unit of genetics — the gene — is only a representation of something that is more abstract than its “realness” implies. As Lennard Davis suggests, the gene “is a prosthesis — a human-made artifact that stands in for, replaces, and thus becomes the location of inherited traits” (2006: 95). In genomics, that is, the science of understanding DNA to produce genetic-dependent therapeutics, the gene is constructed as a prosthetic through which the body can be replicated infinitely. The inability of genetics to pinpoint the place on the DNA strand that influences most human characteristics means that the gene is “an endlessly deferred location” and “the human body, as a construct, could not have an entirety and an identity if there were no addition, now called genetic, that was the place of origin, the real place for being human, and for being a certain kind of human — whether Caucasian or Negroid or Semitic” (Davis, 2006: 96). As a supplement, or displacement of the body from the real to the abstract, the gene also enters the realm of language and the social. As Lakoff and Johnson (1980; 1999) suggest, the body is crucial to our conceptualization of the human, so that different bodies are constructed socially in visible ways. But as Sheryl Vint argues, subjectivity is both material and abstract so that posthuman visions that transcend the body (including those that describe it only in genetic terms) are “merely fantasies about transcending the material realm of social responsibility” because the body is crucial to our concept of being human (2007: 8). ⁶ The danger of genomics and its understanding that the DNA in every cell is a prosthetic blueprint for the whole body is that it fosters a genetically deterministic view of the individual.

Smith uses teeth as a means for working through this relation of body to genetics and cultural heritage. Teeth are a distinctive feature of the human body and do not regenerate, so damage results in their ultimate loss. At the same time, they are one of the most enduring and hard components of the body. ⁷ Like bones, they are the last part of the body to decay, and have a hollow centre that nourishes the calcified tissue. Unlike bones, the centre of the tooth (including the root) can die without affecting the tooth’s function, and the centre will actually slowly disappear in response to chronic trauma and age. ⁸ The root canal procedure happens when the centre of the tooth is cleaned out after it has died. The roots of the tooth bind it to the jawbone, making extraction of teeth difficult, hence the expression that something is as hard as “pulling teeth”. All these characteristics make teeth ideally suited as metaphors for migrant experience, and allow Smith to connect the migrant experience of rootlessness to the racism that often emerges out of recognition of bodily difference.

Mr. Hamilton, although a minor character in the novel, conflates genetics and race in a mixed metaphor of difference as he muses about the Congo and wisdom teeth. Mr. Hamilton suggests wisdom teeth are passed down from father to son, telling Magid, Millat, and Irie,

one sometimes forgets the significance of one’s teeth. We’re not like the lower animals — teeth replaced regularly and all that — we’re of the mammals, you see. And mammals only get two chances, with teeth…. Because they’re your father’s teeth, you see, wisdom teeth are passed down by the father, I’m certain of it. So you must be big enough for them. God knows, I wasn’t big enough for mine…. (144-145)

Mr. Hamilton’s strange explanation of the genetic basis for wisdom teeth (an erroneous assumption about the third molars (a.k.a. wisdom teeth) more reminiscent of Darwinian thought than twenty-first century genetics) is interrupted by his own description of his time in the army and how “when I was in the Congo, the only way I could identify the nigger was by the whiteness of this teeth, if you see what I mean. Horrid business. Dark as buggery it was” (144). Hamilton’s assertion that one’s teeth might betray one — either rotting in Hamilton’s case, or revealing one to the enemy in the case of the Congo (the stereotype of white teeth contrasting sharply with black skin) — suggests that, at least for a character like him, there is no way of escaping one’s genetic heritage. ⁹ As Kris Knauer suggests, “the root canals of Irie Jones, Magid, and Millat Iqbal are inextricably rooted in and routed through the history of the British Empire” (2008: 182; emphasis in original).

But the legacy of Mr. Hamilton’s Conradian terms did not end with Heart of Darkness, which is invoked for the reader in Hamilton’s description of the Congo. In the late twentieth century, the mapping of the human genome through the Human Genome Project, completed in 2003, has increased the tendency of both the public and scientists to address individual, and to some extent group behaviours, through recourse to genetic explanations. ¹⁰ Scientists who promote a deterministic view of genetics point to genes as the explanation for a wide range of not only physical features, but complex social behaviours; ¹¹ they can do so because the language of genetics moves “images of pathology… from gross to hidden body systems” (Nelkin and Lindee, 2004: 102). The problem with this kind of genetic determinism, as Elizabeth Shea notes, is that “genes are often invoked to close debate, to forestall deliberation, to ward off alternative interpretations” (2008: 3). They can do so because the gene as a rhetorical figure is extremely powerful. In medicine, for example, Judith Roof describes how “attributions made to the power of genes are quite similar to the kinds of triumphs credited to miracle cures” because they confirm the public’s belief “in a more powerful and instant science that gives humans shamanistic control over complex phenomena” (2007: 66). It is this kind of belief that is reflected in Mr. Hamilton’s declaration that his problems lie in the wisdom teeth he inherited from his father.

While a character like Mr. Hamilton might be rather forthright in his explanation of how genes affect human lives, other characters use the language of genetics more subtly as a replacement for other discourses. For example, when Samad meets Magid and Millat’s teacher, Poppy Burt-Jones, she tells him that everyone just loves Millat, “such a beautiful boy, as well. Of course,’ she said, giving him a wink and a knock on the shoulder, ‘good genes,’ [to which Samad thinks,] Good genes? What did she mean, good genes?” (113; emphasis in original). Poppy’s flirtation employs genetics to make an indirect reference to his attractiveness, but the reference to Samad’s genes also reminds us how ideas about genetic determinism regarding race and ethnicity are still part of a popular conception about differences between people.

The Chalfen family is also represented through the language of genetics, primarily since they employ that language themselves. Joyce and Marcus use genes as a kind of sexual flirtation. Joyce would show off something new that baby Josh does to her husband with the phrase: “just like you,” to which he’d reply “good genes… patting her behind and luxurious thighs” (259; emphasis in original). Joyce admires Marcus because

he created beings. He went to the edges of his God’s imagination and made mice Yahweh could not conceive of … mice who year after year expressed more and more eloquently Marcus’s designs: from the hit-or-miss process of selective breeding, to the chimeric fusion of embryos, and then the rapid developments that lay beyond Joyce’s ken and in Marcus’s future … all processes by which Marcus manipulated ova, regulated the over- or under-expression of a gene, planting instructions and imperatives in the germ line to be realized in physical characteristics. (259-260; emphasis in original)

The technical description of Marcus’s work, although mysterious to Joyce, is connected to Joyce’s more traditional reproduction: “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” (260; emphasis in original). When we find ironies like these expressed in the text, it reminds us that absolutes like “truth” or “genius”, are not the same as the genetic lottery of reproduction, and Joyce’s validation of Marcus’s contribution to their children reduces complex traits like intelligence to genetic markers that set off the Chalfens from everyone else.

The Chalfens may come from “good genes”, but their celebration of those good genes has cut them off from any non-Chalfen influences and runs the risk that all breeders know arises from too little variety in the genetic line: inbreeding. Thus, “the Chalfens had no friends. They interacted mainly with the Chalfen extended family (the good genes that were so often referred to…)… Bottom line: the Chalfens didn’t need other people” (261; emphasis in original), but “the century was drawing to a close and the Chalfens were bored. Like clones of each other, their dinner table was an exercise in mirrored perfection, Chalfenism and all its principles reflecting itself infinitely… there was no one left to admire Chalfenism itself. Its gorgeous logic, its compassion, its intellect” (262). The “mirrored perfection” of the “gorgeous logic” of Chalfenism emerges from their similarity, but as perfections of one another, these clones pay the price in boredom. No wonder the Jamaican-English Irie’s fascination with the Chalfen lifestyle and even the Bengali Millat’s rebellious rejection of their values (but not their money) offer the admiration that Joyce desires.

What is interesting in these examples is that genetics is invoked by Poppy, the Chalfens, and Mr. Hamilton, all of whom clearly are identified as white English characters. Given the advantages that being white in England has, and continues to, confer, the use of genetic discourse primarily by white characters contrasts with the personal and familial history that non-white characters like Samad and Irie can claim.

While Irie thinks that she would like to be a transgenic creature, framing her hybridity in genetic terms, Samad’s concerns about his sons suggest he views hybridity as primarily cultural. He suggests that his disappointment in his sons: a “white-suited” “pukka Englishman” and a “green-bow-tie-wearing fundamentalist terrorist” is a result of raising them in England rather than Bangladesh (336). For Samad, immigration disconnects him and his family from their roots. You make “a devil’s pact when you walk into this country…. where you are never welcomed, only tolerated” so that “your children are unrecognizable” and “then you begin to give up the very idea of belonging” (336-337; emphasis in original). In his own displacement and his disappointment in his sons, Samad turns to the only thing he knows to be certain: his connection to his ancestor Mangal Pande and that ancestor’s role in imperial history.

For Samad, history matters, and one cannot ignore the past. Samad criticizes the eugenics of the Nazis because it is both an attempt to ignore the past and to control the future. Criticizing Perret, he tells Archie “Choosing who shall be born and who shall not — breeding people as if they were so many chickens…. He wants to control, to dictate the future…. But it cannot be done in a laboratory. It must be done, it can only be done, with faith!” (100). Years later, Samad also explicitly connects Nazi eugenics with Marcus Chalfen’s FutureMouse© when he urges Magid to give up his support of Chalfen’s work:

Marcus Chalfen has no right. No right to do as he does. It is not his business. It is God’s business. If you meddle with a creature, the very nature of a creature, even if it is a mouse, you walk into the arena that is God’s creation. You infer that the wonder of God’s creation can be improved upon. It cannot. Marcus Chalfen presumes. (376; emphasis in original)

Samad objects to the FutureMouse©, Nazi experimentation, and the manipulation of DNA on religious grounds. While Samad is not a religious man, as he feels he is losing control over his life, he begins to embrace both his ancestry and his faith so that Magid’s work with Marcus Chalfen appears to him a rejection of his religious faith, and by extension, the personal and imperial history of Mangal Pande which informs that faith.

In contrast to the growth of Samad’s uncertainty about his faith, his family, and his sons’ futures, his best friend Archie inhabits relatively solid ground, even as he relinquishes control over his life by making decisions, both large and small, based on the toss of a coin. The story begins as Archie is preparing to gas himself in his car. But, as the narrator tells us “the thinnest covering of luck” was on Archie and his attempt is disrupted because “life wanted Archie” (6); as the novel progresses, Archie continues to be characterized by his reliance on chance in making choices.

However, we also see how, for Archie, “being a father was such a solid genetic position in his mind (the solidest fact in Archie’s life), it didn’t occur to him that there might be any challenger to his crown” (285). Archie’s certainty about parenthood at least partly arises from his ethnicity and his class, similar to the Chalfens’ certainty in the superiority of Chalfenism. Millat recognizes the role of class in the Chalfens’ certainty because “where Irie saw culture, refinement, class, intellect, Millat saw money, lazy money, money that was just hanging around this family not doing anything in particular, money in need of a good cause that might as well be him” (268). This certainty sharply contrasts with the novel’s suggestion that immigrants like Alsana and Samad live more precariously, products of their history and residents of unstable geographies:

People who live on solid ground, underneath safe skies, know nothing of this …. Born of a green and pleasant land, a temperate land, the English have the basic inability to conceive of disaster, even when it is man-made. It is different for the people of Bangladesh, formerly East Pakistan, formerly India, formerly Bengal. They live under the invisible finger of random disaster, of flood and cyclone, hurricane and mudslide. (176)

Archie’s certainty in his position as a father might indeed arise from having been born in a green and pleasant land, but his certainty contrasts with that of his mixed-race daughter.

Some of Irie’s uncertainty expresses itself though her discomfort with her body (particularly her hair), which displays characteristics of both her white, English father and her biracial, Jamaican mother. Irie’s grandmother is herself the daughter of a Jamaican and an Englishman, though she rejects such hybridity as wrong, even disowning her daughter Clara for marrying an Englishman. She tells Irie:

Black and white never come to no good. De Lord Jesus never meant us to mix it up. Dat’s why he made a hol’ heap a fuss about de children of men building de tower of Babel. ‘Im want everybody to keep tings separate… When you mix it up, nuttin’ good can come. It wasn’t intended. Except you,’ she added as an afterthought. ‘You’re about de only good ting to come out of dat.’ (318)

No doubt Hortense would not approve of Irie’s Bengali-Jamaican-English child. However, Irie is less concerned about the genetic heritage of her child than what her personal and familial history offers her. For her, Jamaica is a “place where things simply were. No fictions, no myths, no lies, no tangled webs” (332; emphasis in original), a space where her genes or those of her child don’t matter. Irie holds on to the possibility that Jamaica offers the freedom to forge her own unique identity that she craves. It’s in this desire for freedom that we see reflected Philip Tew’s observation that “both narrator and various characters find significance in repeated behaviour… and in people’s sense of their genetic inheritance” (2010: 55) and that the novel’s “genetic and other multiple doublings reinforce” (2010: 57) this sense of repetition and return. Irie’s desire to escape history and genetics by returning to the homeland conflates the two in the kind of doubling Tew identifies within the novel; however, it may merely be wishful thinking on her part. Nick Bentley suggests there is a connection between the genetic heritage (or history) of Irie’s child and the genetically engineered FutureMouse© in that both may, or may not, be able to transcend the history built into their genes. Like Irie’s child, the FutureMouse© is “pre-programmed in its moment of artificial creation, and its genesis and confinement in laboratory surroundings emphasize the predetermined nature of its existence” (500). In this programming, it reflects

a predeterminism that evokes much older forms of containment and authority. However, it ultimately manages to evade its predetermined narrative by escaping from the genetic scientists that have created it. This does not mean that it can evade its genetic codes (or by extrapolation) its genealogical heritage, rather that in claiming its stake for freedom it defies those who wish to contain it. (Bentley, 2007: 500)

Jamaica represents Irie’s evasion of what she sees as her predetermined narrative, which is echoed in Archie’s thought — “Go on my son!” — as he watches the FutureMouse© escape, as the narrator tells us that “surely to tell these tall tales and others like them would be to speed the myth, the wicked lie, that the past is always tense and the future, perfect. And as Archie knows, it’s not like that” (448; emphasis in original). In this final moment, the narrative attempts to reconcile Archie’s ambivalence about making a decision with the precariousness of the Iqbals’ lives through the narrative uncertainty regarding the mouse’s fate and the multiple endings Smith suggests are possible.

Some critics have suggested that White Teeth presents a positive vision of multiculturalism, pointing to the final scene with Irie and her mixed Bengali-Jamaican-English child as an optimistic vision of the future. ¹² This characterization directly challenges the declarations of some, like Bhikhu Parekh, who suggests that conservatives “systematically resist” the description of Britain as multicultural (2000: 6) in favour of a Britain of “universal and permanent value” (2000: 160), a Britain that would not have room for hybrid identities like Irie’s or her child’s. ¹³ White Teeth also questions this positive vision of a multicultural Britain through its depiction of the burden of history that weighs on the immigrants and their children in the novel. We see the legacy of history when Magid and Millat are reunited after Magid’s years in Bengal. Although the brothers meet in a “blank room”, they fill that room with personal, scientific, epistolary, religious, and recorded history until they leave “that neutral room as they had entered it: weighed down, burdened, unable to waver from their course or in any way change their separate dangerous trajectories. They seem to make no progress” (382-384).

At this point in the narrative, the narrator describes the “Happy Multicultural Land” that “we” imagine resourceful immigrants enter as they leave their homelands, “free of any kind of baggage, happy and willing to leave their differences at the docks and take their chances in this new place, merging with the oneness of this greeanandpleasantlibertarianlandofthefree” (384). Jonathan Sell argues this imagined adaptability suggests it is possible to gain freedom from the past which replaces “the usual cast-iron sequence from cause and effect” that the past can impose on the present with a “more liquid and arbitrary relationship of analogy or serendipitous contingency” (2006: 29). He argues that Smith’s novel presents us with a vision of a society in which the heterogeneity of multicultural identity expressed by its members becomes itself a kind of homogeneity that empties signifiers like “British” of specificity beyond geographic identification because “the more multicultural and heterogeneous a society is, the more scope there is for a variety of different spurious identities to be defined and identified as belonging to that society” (Sell, 2006: 41). Just as a tooth that has undergone a root canal procedure remains but is devoid of a centre, it may be that the hybrid nature of multiculturalism also lacks a clearly anchored centre.

At the same time, the Iqbals are tied as intimately to their histories as they are to the genes that make up their bodies. Like their father,

the brothers [Magid and Millat] will race toward the future only to find they more and more eloquently express their past, that place where they have just been. Because this is the other thing about immigrants (’fugees, émigrés, travelers): they cannot escape their history any more than you yourself can lose your shadow. (385; emphasis in original)

It seems that there may be a maximum capacity of heterogeneity that British society is capable of incorporating. Unlike the Chalfens, who can appear to be “more English than the English” after only a couple of generations, various Iqbals are repeatedly labelled with the erroneous “Paki” by people they encounter as they go through their day (167; 192), suggesting that identity might indeed be “consubstantial with pigmentation, or the culture which a particular skin colouring might metonymically stand for” (Sell, 2006: 31).

The connection between the fate written by the Iqbal boys’ histories as sons of immigrants and their genetic history is made explicit, ironically, by the character in the novel who seems to have the most practical grasp of genetics: Joyce. In an excerpt from Joyce’s book, The New Flower Power, she warns against monocultures, cloned species that contain no variety and are thus susceptible to disease. She writes: “cross-pollination produces more varied offspring, which are better able to cope with a changed environment” so that such cross-pollinated plants “must be hardy and ever at hand, something only the truly mothering gardener can ensure” (258). Unfortunately Joyce does not apply her knowledge of what works in the garden — cross-pollination — and what one must avoid there — monoculture — to her own children. In neglecting her own son’s development for a misdiagnosis of Millat’s religious activity as ADHD (358), she lavishes unnecessary attention on the cross-pollinated child while ignoring the one who is a “smaller version” of his father (260). While the Chalfen children are the product of an English Christian mother and an Eastern European Jewish father, making them hybrids of sorts, their appearance as “more English than the English” and the narrator’s suggestion that they are clones of each other would indicate that superficially (or phenotypically, in the language of genetics), at least, they are monocultural if not monocultures themselves.

Joyce really only expresses interest in mothering other people’s children, and one might speculate this is because she believes her own children to be geniuses like their father because they share his genes. She suggests to Irie that Magid and Millat need each other “like Laurel and Hardy, like Crick needed Watson —” (358), but pairing the classic comedy duo with the discoverers of DNA suggests Smith might be poking fun at the idea that genetics can explain either Joyce’s children or the Iqbal brothers’ relationship with each other. The desire of critics like Jonathan Sell or Tracey Walters to read the text as a positive vision of multiculturalism is undermined by this sub-current of genetic determinism that suggests that genetic heritage (including phenotypic skin colour) can be used to explain the fates of the characters.

What the novel reveals in its depiction of the problems of three families: the Iqbals, Chalfens, and Joneses, is that Irie’s desire is only that, and no one escapes their family history. Although Irie’s desire to be free of family history emerges from her claim that it is so often trotted out as a means of understanding the present, her attitude makes it difficult to agree with Jonathan Sell’s claim that Zadie Smith “slip[s] the bonds of causality, by emancipating herself from historical determinism” in order to “inscribe identities which are no longer hung-up on historical injustices or immersed in somber, unproductive introspection” (Sell, 2006: 33). Irie moves out of the family home in protest at “a long list of parental hypocrisies and untruths… secret histories, stories you never got told, history you never entirely uncovered, rumours you never unraveled” (314). She finds this secret history at her grandmother’s house and

She laid claim to the past — her version of the past — aggressively, as if retrieving misdirected mail. So this was where she came from. This all belonged to her, her birthright…. X marks the spot, and Irie put an X on everything she found, collecting bits and pieces … and storing them under the sofa, so that as if by osmosis the richness of them would pass through the fabric while she was sleeping and seep right into her. (331; emphasis in original)

She imagines that the “land of accidents” Samad views with horror would be “like paradise to her” (337; emphasis in original), so she takes her child to Jamaica “clipped of paternal strings” (448). Irie’s ambivalence about her past, her embrace of her family’s Jamaican history, and simultaneous rejection of that history as a tool for analysing the present, suggests that Smith’s vision of a happy multiculturalism is more complicated than some reviewers have suggested.

Irie imagines that her child will be free from the family history that constrains her in part because her child’s genetic identity is founded on the identical genetics of either of its potential fathers. But the paths that Magid’s and Millat’s lives have taken have marked their bodies differently despite the identical genetic heritage of the twins. When Millat sees Magid after the latter’s absence of eight years, “Millat is astounded by the differences. The nose, the line of the jaw, the eyes, the hair. His brother is a stranger to him and he tells him so” (382). Marcus Chalfen’s contemplation of genotype and phenotype divergence as he prepares to meet Magid for the first time is more nuanced than Millat’s, but it also imagines a similar fluidity inherent in genetic identity:

It was incredible and sublime, even to him, that a boy should walk out of that tunnel with precisely the same genetic code as the boy he already knew, and yet in every conceivable way be different…. It was Millat’s face, certainly, but it was cleaner cut, and somewhat younger in appearance…. These were all needles in haystacks; however, these were the differences you notice only because the similarity is so striking. (349)

Marcus’s recognition of Magid as he steps from the aircraft returning from Bengal arises from knowing his twin, while Marcus’s wonder at Magid’s unwavering stride across the floor toward him confirms his belief that the two of them must be “twinned like each side of an equation: logically, essentially, inevitably” (350). But Magid’s recognition of Marcus Chalfen is not because of some invisible link between the two; rather, Marcus is the only white person waiting for the flight full of brown people, coming to the metropole from the former colony. Here it is Marcus’s body that identifies him, not as a family member or friend, but as representative of the English capital at which the travellers have arrived. This moment of recognition (or mis-recognition) in the novel demonstrates how the phenotype (and thus genotype) of bodies are read and recognized by others.

It is just before this moment of recognition/mis-recognition that the scene between Marcus Chalfen and his ambivalent reader, mentioned at the outset, takes place. ¹⁴ The girl in the airport tells Marcus that “you’ve got to be seriously naive if you don’t think the West intend to use this shit on the East.… if somebody knows how to eliminate ‘undesirable’ qualities in people, do you think some government’s not going to do it?” (345-346; emphasis in original). Her reaction confuses Marcus because he did not write about human eugenics in the book and he cannot understand how people “seemed unable to think of an animal as a site, a biological site for experimentation into heredity, into disease, into mortality. The mouseness of the mouse seemed inescapable” (346).

Marcus Chalfen’s inability to understand how his readers might extrapolate from his experiments on mice to human genetics highlights how ideas of fate and determinism, particularly the genetic determinism that controls the mouse’s lifespan and predicts its death, operate in the novel. At the same time that Smith’s narrative suggests its characters are not constrained by a predetermined fate, the structure of that narrative undermines the non-deterministic message. During the press conference announcing Chalfen’s FutureMouse© at the novel’s ending, Irie contemplates her pregnancy that resulted from sleeping with both Majid and Millat on the same day and realizes that “what she didn’t know, and what she realized she may never know… was the identity of the father. No test on earth would tell her. Same thick black hair. Same twinkling eyes.… Same deoxyribonucleic acid. She could not know her body’s decision, what choice it had made, in the race to the gamete, between the saved and unsaved” (426; emphasis in original). Not knowing the father of her child leads Irie to think that her child was “a perfectly plotted thing with no real coordinates. A map to an imaginary fatherland” (427). In Irie’s mind at least, her child’s genetics will no longer determine that child’s fate.

This final scene also highlights the conflict between popular responses to the FutureMouse© that Chalfen identifies — the inability to see the mouse as anything other than a mouse — and his own mis-characterization of the mouse as only “a biological site for experimentation”. It is Chalfen who is short-sighted in not being able to see the mouse as a mouse, not just part of his experiments with recombinant DNA. The “mouseness” of the FutureMouse© is the point, just as the humanness of a human is more than just the sum of that person’s DNA. What Chalfen overlooks in using the mouse as a site for experimentation is that the mouse must die for the experiment to succeed and to lose sight of the mouse, as when we lose sight of the human, opens up the possibility that either might be considered nothing more than a utilitarian site for experimentation, as the girl in the airport suggests. Ignoring the “mouseness” of the mouse is an instrumental view of the animal, so that the extrapolation of this view to humans in the popular imagination draws our attention to the danger of Chalfen’s reductionist view of the mouse and thus the reductionist effects of genetic determinism.

In the airport girl’s invective against human eugenics, we hear the echoes of our own anxieties about biotechnologies, anxieties that are exacerbated by the attitude of scientists like Marcus Chalfen, who can ignore the “mouseness of the mouse”, divorcing their experiments from the social and cultural implications of those experiments. White Teeth explores some of these implications, not just by introducing these biotechnologies, but by presenting us with ways in which those technologies affect the lives of Smith’s characters, just as they do the rest of us who occupy the increasingly science-fictional contemporary world.