Abstract
This article explores the features of narrative space in Zadie Smith’s White Teeth by drawing on the notion of diaspora space, which is based upon Avtar Brah’s theory in Cartographies of Diaspora, with a view to defining diaspora subjectivity. The analysis asks how such spaces are imbued with the multiplicity of border crossings, such as metaleptic intrusions of the heterodiegetic narrator, pluralization of perspectivism, the intermingling of the narrator’s and characters’ own spaces with the use of free indirect speech and the problematization of internal and external spaces. The narrator’s engagement with issues of diaspora, subjectivity, ethnicity, multiculturalism and roots/routes as well as their narrative manifestations are traced throughout the novel with recourse to ideas of ‘post-postcolonialism’, a concept that corresponds to the everydayness and ordinariness of migrant experience. Consequently, space proves to be a constitutive element of both the novel’s narrative and the characters’ subjectivities.
Zadie Smith’s turn-of-the-century novel, White Teeth (2000), deals with the second and third generations of the multicultural British diaspora with its exploration of two-generation immigrant families – the Iqbals, the Joneses and the Chalfens – of Asian, Jamaican, English, German and Polish origins living in the Willesden district of North-East London. Locating her characters in the big city, Smith intertwines the question of diaspora subjectivity with history, culture and ethnicity as well as the notion of space. The emphasis on the everyday multicultural experience of Willesden’s inhabitants brings into view challenges to British subjectivity reconfigured within the 1990s’ discourses of diasporic populations in the United Kingdom. For Tariq Moodod (2013: 36), multiculturalism refers to ‘the forms of accommodation in which “differences” are not eliminated, are not washed away but to some extent recognized’. It is this theme of the recognition of racial, ethnic and religious diversity that Smith’s novel is particularly concerned with. The existence and partial acceptance of multiplicity do not mean an unproblematic integration within the multicultural society, as witnessed in Smith’s Willesden. In this sense, the novel provides an elaborate and satirical picture of multiculturalism – without recourse to an over-optimistic attitude – by contesting an essentialist view of diaspora identities.
Avtar Brah (1996: 183) claims that ‘the identity of the diasporic imagined community is far from fixed or pre-given. It is constituted within the crucible of the materiality of everyday life; in the everyday stories we tell ourselves individually and collectively’. In White Teeth, the everydayness of multicultural experience brings the question of diaspora subjectivity to the fore, which is addressed in narrative space through the informal style of an all-knowing heterodiegetic narrator who keeps an eye on the day-to-day discourses of the novel’s characters and their spatial relations. With its emphasis on everyday hybridity, White Teeth is associated with a new term – post-postcolonialism – because it interlaces centralizing and marginal discourses with each other and thus goes beyond definitions of post-colonial. McLeod (2004: 161) proclaims that ‘Smith’s novel offers a version of London in which the depressingly familiar social conflicts of previous decades are no longer primarily determining the formation of character and fortunes of plot’. In this sense, it deals more with post-postcolonial everyday living in the metropolis than recalling postcolonial conflicts. According to Barbara Wohlsein (2008: 10), post-postcolonialism is specifically concerned with ‘the experiences of the second- and third-generation-immigrants living in a Western urban space’, where ‘hybridity is becoming more and more ‘ordinary’ or ‘normal’’. Laura Moss (2003: 15) also emphasizes everyday hybridity in White Teeth: ‘This novel draws the everyday – in a comic portrait of a hybrid community and in a portrait of quotidian racism – in order to show [. . . ] the legacy of the history of multi-cultural Britain’. Paul Jay (2010: 169) similarly views the novel as ‘a post-postcolonial world’ occupied by characters with ‘new identities’ shaped by ‘the combined effects of the history of colonialism and those of more contemporary forms of globalization’. White Teeth’s metropolitan London is a constitutive element in the construction of these new identities since the city itself becomes a liminal space that mobilizes its inhabitants – regardless of ethnicity, race and class – on an everyday basis.
Brah (1996: 208–9) defines diaspora space as the intersection of three key concepts, diaspora, border and dis/location, in which space is ‘where multiple subject positions are juxtaposed, contested, proclaimed or disavowed’ and ‘the point at which boundaries of inclusion and exclusion, of belonging and otherness, of “us” and “them”, are contested’. The idea of diaspora space can be applied to narrative space where borders are surmountable and reconstructible. Narrative space is imbued with a multiplicity of border crossings, such as those between the internal and the external world and between assumedly pure ethnic and cultural discourses. Within narrative space, it is never completely clear where one mental or linguistic representation ends and another begins. The centrality of the spatial dimension in the novel is underlined by Fernández (2009a: 143–4): ‘The metropolis is the backdrop that channels social interaction and becomes the primary space of possibility; a place where a homogeneous and united view of “Britishness” is challenged and where contesting spatial representations materialise’.
The omniscient narrator interlaces the characters’ thoughts with her own intrusive commentary that touches upon commonly held misconceptions of multiculturalism. The narrator evades a Eurocentric form of representation through her variety of cultural references and multi-voiced method. According to Brah (1996: 246), thinking through multiplicity requires reconceptualization of ‘cultural difference’. Culture [. . . ] is a semiotic space with infinite class, caste, gender, ethnic or other inflections. [. . . ] [I]t is possible to hold non-essentialist and non-reductive understandings of ‘cultural difference’ which would defy and undermine ‘minoritising’ impulses.
Cultural difference or multiculturalism as well as British identity is challenged and reconceptualized by the narrator’s multiplicity of perspective. This pluralistic view exposes the limits of inclusion in the spaces of the multicultural society as well as novelistic narrative. As Fernández (2009a: 148) puts it, the novel ‘moves away from such a binary tendency of thinking about who is considered to be inside or outside the realm of British identity by further exploring the outcomes of multicultural interaction’. With the help of pluralization of representing perspectives in the novel, Britishness resists essentialism and reduction. Space thus becomes a definitive term in relation to the process of subjectivity.
Homi Bhabha’s (2004: 50) version of the term cultural diversity evokes a sense of liberation as ‘the recognition of pre-given cultural contents and customs; held in a time-frame of relativism it gives rise to liberal notions of multiculturalism, cultural exchange or the culture of humanity’. The version in the novel, by contrast, is far from seeing any form of culture as pre-determined, discrete and well-defined and cultural diversity as the coexistence and recognition of cultures in a broader multicultural community. It emphasizes the possible consequences of cultural interactions and amalgamations, and redefines culture as unstable and open to new formations. Smith’s divergence from earlier fictionalized versions of multiculturalism is detailed by Nick Bentley (2008: 53–4): Smith’s novel emphasizes that multiculturalism should accept a mixing of ethnicity identified at the level of the individual rather than nation. This suggests a model of race in which each individual is multicultural due to the cultural influences (and biological heritages) that are at play in contemporary Britain. This is distinctly and radically different from the model of multiculturalism that represents a series of monoethnic individuals who combine to produce a multicultural nation. It also moves beyond the idea of ‘hybrid’ identities, which again suggests a ‘mix’ of discrete races and ethnicities.
Ethnic mixtures are rendered as individualistic – not national – discourses. This runs in parallel to the idea of everyday hybridity as experienced by the second-generation immigrants whose sense of identity does not rest on a notion of ‘home’. Rather, it is within the spaces of the metropolis itself that their subjectivities are reconfigured. The concept of geographical space is, thus, central to conceptualize diaspora subjectivity. The second-generation children, Magid and Millat Iqbal, have more individualistic attitudes towards multicultural experience than their parents, Samad and Alsana Iqbal. Similarly, despite her obsession with her roots (as suggested by her association with white teeth, tooth canals and tooth decay), Irie Jones differs from her parents, Archie Jones and Clara Bowden, in that she finally recognizes that roots are neither actually accessible nor more responsible for her current social positioning than her spatial and multicultural relations. In this respect, the novel’s attitude towards multiculturalism is reflective of Moodod’s (2013: 36) definition of the concept as ‘a politics which recognizes post-immigration groups exist in western societies’, adding that ‘both they and others, formally and informally, negatively and positively are aware that these group-differentiating dimensions are central to their social constitution’.
In an attempt to distance the category of ‘immigrant’ from its restricted, monolithic and dominant meaning, the narrator accommodates more diverse perspectives and discourses that reflect the first-hand experience of migration. The narrator is capable of slipping into and out of the minds of mixed-origin characters with a view to articulating their subjective perceptions and individual experiences. The narratorial inquiries about the problem of the second-generation immigrant indicate generational distinctions: ‘[W]hat was wrong with all the children, what had gone wrong with these first descendants of the great ocean-crossing experiment?’ (Smith, 2000: 218). Although the first generation underwent this ‘great ocean-crossing experiment’ mostly out of obligation or in the hope of a new beginning, for the second generation, hybridity is not an experiment or a big change but a part of their ‘everyday’ life from the outset. The discrepancy between the first and the second generation is very much like the distinction drawn between the concepts of ‘exile’ and ‘migrant’: the exile identity has a clear sense of romanticized ‘homeland’, whereas the migrant remains ambivalent towards a nostalgic past as well as a newly constructed present (Mardorossian, 2002: 16). Hence, subsuming all these generations and all ethnic minorities under the title of ‘migrant’ is unproductive. This limitation is overcome in the novel through the employment of free indirect speech entangled with extra narrative discourses in which the narrator shows the diversity and multiplicity of the terms ‘migrant’ and ‘black’ to render these categories multidimensional with the integration of each character’s viewpoint in the face of challenges to their sense of ethnic, racial or cultural ‘purity’. In fact, the novel’s attitude towards the category ‘black’ fits into Stuart Hall’s (1996: 443) second phase of representation, marking ‘the end of the innocent notion of the essential black subject’ by putting the very concept of ethnicity into question.
Second-generation Millat Iqbal’s active participation in the Satanic Verses-affair is handled within a digressive commentary, which begins with one perspective critical of his actions, and then goes on with another, which is Millat’s own: Millat hadn’t read it. Millat knew nothing about the writer, nothing about the book; [. . . ] [b]ut he knew other things. He knew that he, Millat, was a Paki no matter where he came from; that he smelt of curry; had no sexual identity; took other people’s jobs; or had no job and bummed off the state; [. . . ] he knew that he had no face in this country, no voice in the country, until the week before last when suddenly people like Millat were on every channel and every radio and every newspaper and they were angry, and Millat recognized the anger, thought it recognized him, and grabbed it with both hands. (Smith, 2000: 233–4)
Through Millat’s consciousness, the narrator criticizes the reductionist discourses of multiculturalism, such as the tendency to see Millat and others uniformly as ‘Paki’, for example. This strategy of reflecting entangled multiple perspectives, moving from the general to the specific, is another narratorial device to absorb the implied reader (of whatever ethnic or social backgrounds) into the narrative. With this inclusive perspectivism, the narrator supports neither the fundamentalist act of book burning nor the prejudice against those who possess no other means than violence to show their face or express their identity. Yet, through an incursion into Millat’s consciousness, and his desire for recognition, the narrator implies that fundamentalism emerges as a consequence of racism. Tariq Moodod (2013: 14) claims that following the Satanic Verses-affair in 1989, multicultural thinking in the 1990s was reconfigured with a consideration of religion alongside race, especially with a view to the Muslim challenge. For Moodod (2013: 65), ‘the demand by Muslims not just for toleration and religious freedom but for public recognition is indeed taken to be philosophically very different to the same demand made by black people, women and gays’. Smith’s Muslim characters advocate for their public recognition, repudiating the view that ‘religion is a feature, perhaps uniquely, of private and not public identity’ (Moodod, 2013: 65).
Smith employs perspectival entanglement to manifest reductionist tendencies within multiculturalist thought. This reductionism is in fact caused by ‘intersecting modalities of differential racialisations marking positionality across articulating fields of power’ (Brah, 1996: 186, emphasis in the original). According to this idea of ‘differential racialisations’, diasporas are made up of ‘multiple modalities [. . . ] of gender, “race”, class, religion, language and generation’ (Brah, 1996: 184). They can be instantiated in the statement by the narrator: ‘Samad and Alsana Iqbal, who were not those kind of Indians (as, in Archie’s mind, Clara was not that kind of black), who were, in fact, not Indian at all but Bangladeshi’ (Smith, 2000: 54). The first relative clause indicates Archie Jones’ treatment of Iqbals’ Indianness, followed by Archie’s view of Clara’s blackness and the second relative clause designates the possible response of the Bangladeshi couple to Archie’s overgeneralization of ethnic stereotyping. The narrator represents two distinct forms of differential racialisations yet with a broader agenda of challenging an essentialist vision of ethnic identity. Both Archie and Samad’s notion of ethnic essentialism is undermined in the brief commentary, which paves the way for the narrator to challenge how multiculturalism is defined as unproblematically bringing together discrete and clearly demarcated ethnicities and cultures.
Within diaspora space, not only the identities of ethnic minorities but also Britishness, which is supposedly beyond ethnicity, is at stake with the repudiation of essentialist views of ethnic purity. Brah (1996: 194–5) avers that ‘all kinds of old and new diasporic identities in Britain [. . . ] challenge the idea of a continuous, uninterrupted, unchanging, homogeneous and stable British identity’. This misconception of Britishness is perhaps the primary target of the narrator’s critical and satirical engagement with the concept of multiculturalism. With Moodod (2013: 40), the novel calls for ‘an appreciation of the fact that the societies in question cannot be conceived in mono-identarian terms’. Within the narrative space dealing with diaspora space, the notion of purity is clearly problematized by the direct speech representation of one character, Alsana Iqbal, who counters her husband’s sense of their ‘own culture’ by reading the entry ‘Bangladesh’ from the Reader’s Digest Encyclopaedia: The vast majority of Bangladesh’s inhabitants are Bengalis, who are largely descended from Indo-Aryans who began to migrate into the country from the west thousands of years ago and who mixed within Bengal with indigenous groups of various racial stocks. Ethnic minorities include the Chakma and Mogh, Mongoloid peoples who live in the Chittagong Hill Tracts District; the Santal, mainly descended from migrants from present-day India; and the Biharis, non-Bengali Muslims who migrated from India after the partition. (Smith, 2000: 236)
The entry evinces that there is no such concept as either pure Bengaliness or pure Britishness, which is again voiced by Alsana: ‘you go back and back and back and it’s still easier to find the correct Hoover bag than to find one pure person, one pure faith, on the globe. Do you think anybody is English? Really English? It’s a fairy-tale!’ (Smith, 2000: 236). Decentralization also takes place within the narrative space, where authority can no longer be attributed to the omniscient narrator or any single ethnic or racial group of characters. For Paul Gilroy (1993), it is through the juxtaposition of both roots and routes that English identity can be constructed. It is made evident that both roots and routes define Irie Jones’s sense of subjectivity since she intermittently hovers between a commitment to her racial origins back in Jamaica and her attachment to Britishness as a second-generation immigrant to attain self-identification. Thompson (2005: 128) avers that ‘[d]esire for a body that denies its African-ness could be symptomatic of this clash of roots which challenges Irie’s social and cultural location’. Travelling through the mind of Irie to reveal her irresistible attraction to the Chalfens and their Britishness, the narrator then ends up refuting her idealizations: She has a nebulous fifteen-year-old’s passion for them, overwhelming, yet with no real direction or object. She just wanted to, well, kind of, merge with them. She wanted their Englishness. Their Chalfishness. The purity of it. It didn’t occur to her that the Chalfens were, after a fashion, immigrants too (third generation, by way of Germany and Poland, née Chalfenovsky), or that they might be as needy of her as she was of them. To Irie, the Chalfens were more English than the English. When Irie stepped over the threshold of the Chalfen house, she felt an illicit thrill, like a Jew munching a sausage or a Hindu grabbing a Big Mac. She was crossing borders, sneaking into England; it felt like some terribly mutinous act, wearing somebody else’s uniform or somebody else’s skin. (Smith, 2000: 328)
The narratorial italicizing of the words merge and purity indicates the target of deconstruction in relation to ethnicity with the use of two mutually exclusive terms. When something merges with something else, it loses its purity, or the notion of purity does not presuppose an act of merging. Thus, the narrator introduces her own more explicit refutation of the assumption that both Chalfishness and Britishness are pure categories by revealing the Chalfens’ mixed immigrant identity. And finally, her act of border crossing is made analogous to specific cultural or religious references, such as the Jewish law of kashrus and the Hindu law of the inviolability of cattle. This has two functions: Irie’s merging with the Chalfens is ironically put on the same plane as ‘illicit’ or ‘mutinuous’ acts, with the irony resting on her unawareness that the Chalfens are as impure as herself. Second, the very religion- and culture-bound references to Jewish and Hindu beliefs once more underline the narrative inclusivity of the narratees from a diversity of backgrounds. It is, thus, through such narrative commentary that the conceptions of pure ethnicity are interrogated. Dominic Head (2003: 114) summarizes Smith’s conviction in the novel: ‘we are all hybrid post-colonials, biologically as well as culturally, and the pursuit of pure ethnic origins is a pointless objective’.
Within the narrative space, the narrator inclusively addresses a global audience. One important aspect of narratological implications of multiculturalism in the novel is the inquiry about the narratees’ identity indicated in the references to ‘you’ and ‘we’. The novel is meant to be read by a multicultural audience including all disparate groups of the diaspora alongside the white British. The narrator’s continual cultural references including local music, food, habits, and imitation of English dialects – especially with foreign accents – rather than official British English show that the reader is apt to understand these specific references and share this hybrid experience with the characters.
The concept of diaspora space becomes a subtext of the novel’s much-quoted ‘the century of strangers’ passage, which is marked by the plurality of perspectives, those of the general audience, the immigrants and the narrator’s own, respectively: This has been the century of strangers, brown, yellow and white. This has been the century of the great immigrant experiment. [. . . ] Children with first and last names on a direct collision course. Names that secrete within them mass exodus, cramped boats and planes, cold arrivals, medical checks. It is only this late in the day, and possibly only in Willesden, that you can find best friends Sita and Sharon, constantly mistaken for each other because Sita is white (her mother liked the name) and Sharon is Pakistani (her mother thought it best – less trouble). Yet, despite all the mixing up, despite the fact that we have finally slipped into each other’s lives with reasonable comfort (like a man returning to his lover’s bed after a midnight walk), despite all this, it is still hard to admit that there is no one more English than the Indian, no one more Indian than the English. There are still young white men who are angry about that; who will roll out at closing time into the poorly lit streets with a kitchen knife wrapped in a tight fist. (Smith, 2000: 326–7)
For the all-colourful and diversified audience, not only the colours ‘brown’ and ‘yellow’, but more unusually the colour ‘white’ also designates ‘strangers’ of the century, which reveals the identity of the reader addressed as ‘you’ as non-white, non-western, as well. The immigrant names carry within themselves their history of travelling, according to the second perspectival point, that of the first-generation immigrants who have first-hand knowledge of ‘cramped boats and planes, cold arrivals’. The cross-referential names of Sita and Sharon may represent each other’s identity. Finally, the narrator’s own point of view renders problematic the idea of national purity as well as celebratory perception of multiculturalism (with ‘it is still hard to admit’). The narrative cues in the end also show that those angry young white men are unhappy about the contamination of their Britishness. The narrator’s underlying critical tone again hints at the reader’s identity as non-white. This denunciation is also implied in parenthetically given, comparatively different motivations of Sita and Sharon’s mothers for their choice of names: the white mother chooses an Eastern name just because she likes it, whereas the Pakistani mother chooses for her daughter a very English name to make her life easier. The same narratorial comparison involves the uneven relation between the fears of nationalists and immigrants: ‘[I]t makes an immigrant laugh to hear the fears of the nationalist, scared of infection, penetration, miscegenation, when this is small fry, peanuts, compared to what the immigrant fears – dissolution, disappearance’ (Smith, 2000: 327). Thus, the change in perspective can be ascribed to a motive on the part of the narrator to unravel less advantageous, more alienated points of view in an insightful engagement with the diaspora space, by simultaneously rejecting all essentialist notions.
The concept of space is characterized by border crossing as a narrative strategy of the novel where the chapters allocated to different families as indicated in the titles are constantly mixed. Magid Iqbal’s becoming ‘more English than the English’, for instance, is covered in the chapter ‘Chalfenism versus Bowdenism’ contrary to the expectation that the chapter with the same title (‘More English than the English’) would deal with it; Samad voices the errant results of his twin sons’ translocation: ‘The one I send home comes out a pukka Englishman, white suited, silly wig lawyer. The one I keep here is fully paid-up green bow-tie-wearing fundamentalist terrorist’ (Smith, 2000: 407). In the chapter ‘More English than the English’, by contrast, not Magid, but Millat’s transformation (obviously the chapter title does not refer to him!) takes up more space. This narrative cross-spatial juxtaposition of the immigrants’ experience hints at the ethnically as well as culturally entangled subjectivities of diasporic London. In other words, their personal experiences cannot be rendered mutually exclusive within the diaspora – or in the narrative – space. This narrative space thus functions as a connective device for Smith’s ‘polyphonic narrative’ (Pirker, 2016: 65). Likewise, in this strategy, a distinction between British and non-British families is ruled out with ‘a break with the notion of the good “normal family” – nuclear, middle-class, white family – versus the “faulty”, “deteriorated” other kinds of family – lone-parent, un-educated parent, disadvantaged families’ (Fernández, 2009b: 154).
Yet another transgression of narrative space with the evocation of the idea of diaspora space is the narrator’s treatment of Magid’s identity in stark contrast to Millat’s gradual absorption into the fundamentalist Islamic organization, KEVIN. The twin brothers Magid and Millat’s inversely proportional development in Bangladesh and England, respectively, is significant in terms of challenging the notion of space in the novel. First, Magid fails to live up to his father’s expectations when after raising him as a proper Muslim-Bangladeshi he sends him back to his roots Magid ends up ‘more English than the English’ on his return. Millat, by contrast, tries to cling more onto his roots – ethnic and religious – despite his spatial distance from them, unlike his brother. Not only formerly colonial space but also diaspora space resists monolithic definitions that can be correlated with the pure space, just like pure ethnicities. In this sense, diaspora space cannot be considered a neutral site that the immigrants enter unloading their cultural baggage. It is not a space where an unproblematic intermingling or coexistence of self-sufficient, diverse cultures takes place.
The notions of closeness and distance – or inside or outside – are not inherent in the meaning of space although they traditionally have spatial connotations. This has important implications for making sense of the diaspora space; immigrants cannot get rid of their cultural heritage in the metropolis although they are distant from their cultural roots, or outside their ethnic or national boundaries. Likewise, they cannot easily fit into the diaspora even if it is where they are physically close or inside now. In a fashion similar to Jacques Derrida’s dismantling of the centre–periphery binary by showing that what is outside is also inside, diaspora boundaries are contested in the novel’s framework. By the same token, physical inclusion within this diaspora space does not guarantee a smooth diaspora-ization, to use Hall’s (1996: 447) term, which signifies ‘the process of unsettling, recombination, hybridization and “cut-and-mix”’. Ulrike Tancke (2014: 30) calls the traumatic nature of the migrant experience the ‘original trauma’, a condition that is caused by settlement in Britain. The narrator’s commentary on the misconceptions about the migrant experience similarly undermines the idea of free metropolitan space: Because we so often imagine that immigrants are constantly on the move, footloose, able to change course at any moment, able to employ their legendary resourcefulness at every turn. We have been told of the resourcefulness of Mr Schmutters, or the footloosity of Mr Banajii, who sail into Ellis Island or Dover or Calais and step into their foreign lands as blank people, free of any kind of baggage, happy and willing to leave their difference at the docks and take their chances in this new place, merging with the oneness of this greenandpleasantlibertarianlandofthefree. (Smith, 2000: 465)
As part of the dominant narratological strategy in the novel, the narrator intermingles the generally held fallacy about immigrants’ unproblematic transition into another space, one which is assumedly promising freedom to the newcomers, with her own ironic undertones. The implicit criticism is targeted at subsuming the category of ‘immigrants’ under the stereotypes like Mr Schmutters or Mr Banajii, and under the label ‘blank people’. Moreover, the ironic treatment of the notion of happy and free multicultural space is visible in the narratorial stylistics, such as the constructed word of ‘greenandpleasantlibertarianlandofthefree’, the misspelt ‘footloosity’ and the exaggerated ‘legendary’. Hall (1996: 446) asserts that ‘[t]he term ethnicity acknowledges the place of history, language and culture in the construction of subjectivity and identity’. It is impossible, thus, to be free of any historical and cultural legacy as a diaspora subject.
Multicultural subjects are conspicuously far from being blank people or tabula rasa, as idealized by a utopian sense of multiculturalism where their blankness would ideally lead to a unity in diversity, which manifests itself as a myth. Attachment to roots emerges as one of the coping mechanisms for this problem. As Matthew Paproth (2008: 15) puts it, ‘Smith demonstrates the important but fractured relationship between past and present, as her characters approach their relationship with history from various perspectives’. Some of the characters, Samad Iqbal in particular, foreground their roots to disavow this sense of blankness. The preoccupation with ‘roots’ is rendered more visible with the tooth imagery throughout the narrative. The characters’ quest for their roots has a broader implication for their need for subjectivity formation. Unable to align their new hybrid identities with the demands of diasporic alterity, and having failed to cope with this sense of alienation, they struggle to cling onto another form of self-definition with recourse to their ethnic, racial or religious roots. Yet this strategy is far from static as it is subject to change in the process of definition, redefinition and ultimate disillusionment. This on-going process is most obviously discernible in the experience of Millat and Samad Iqbal as well as Archie and Irie Jones, all of whom wrestle with their sense of history, and fail to come to terms with their own sense of self. Samad’s understanding of roots or home undergoes a mutation in the course of in-the-making subjectivity. He is perhaps the character who is attached to his home most forcefully and the one with the most devoted sense of roots, but his radical transformation is made manifest in his self-revelatory speech in the conversation with Irie: In a place where you are never welcomed, only tolerated. Just tolerated. Like you are an animal finally house-trained. Who would want to stay? But you have made a devil’s pact [. . . ] it drags you in and suddenly you are unsuitable to return, your children are unrecognizable, you belong nowhere. [. . . ] And then you begin to give up the very idea of belonging. Suddenly this thing, this belonging, it seems like some long, dirty lie [. . . ] and I begin to believe that birthplaces are accidents, that everything is an accident. But if you believe that, where do you go? (Smith, 2000: 407)
Samad’s questions the very ideas of belonging, home and roots and thus instantiates the instability of diaspora subjectivity. He comes to the awareness of such big ‘lies’ of his life as the belief that his roots give him a clear sense of belonging and home that can be supposedly achievable. On the contrary, his roots epitomized by his great-grandfather, Mangal Pande, fail to provide him with a sense of recognition he has sought for so long. Even more significant in his alteration is the belief in ‘accident’, an idea that is normally antagonistic for a man whose life is directed by religious determinism. Samad, and like-minded characters, as Childs (2005: 211) suggests, strive to eliminate the indeterminacy and impurity that seem to threaten the consistency of their senses of self; however, it seems impossible to achieve ‘consistency and continuity’ in the course of identity formation in the spaces shaped and controlled by globalization (Bauman, 2012: 13). Samad eventually gives up the utopian identification with roots and hopes of a unified self-conceptualization.
In fact, roots are somehow associated with culture for the narrator, and both are prone to mixing or contamination. Within another digression, the narrator creates an approximate equation of the terms ‘tradition’, ‘roots’ and ‘culture’ by adopting the perspective of those who adamantly believe in the value of each and make them their ‘untainted principles’. After relating a story about the Thai’s adherence to unquestioned tradition, the narrator assumes her usual progressive and perspective-shifting narrating strategy: If religion is the opium of the people, tradition is an even more sinister analgesic, simply because it rarely appears sinister. [. . . ] To Samad, as to the people of Thailand, tradition was culture, and culture led to roots, and these were good, these were untainted principles. That didn’t mean he could live by them, abide by them or grow in the manner they demanded, but roots were roots and roots were good. You would go nowhere telling him that weeds too have tubers, or the first sign of loose teeth is something rotten, something degenerate, deep within the gums. Roots were what saved, the ropes one throws out to rescue drowning men, to Save Their Souls. (Smith, 2000: 193)
The narration is blurred since the focalized view of characters like Samad and that of the narrator are juxtaposed. The warning against the ‘sinister’ nature of the tradition is the narrator’s, which is then followed by the character’s perspective whose vision of the roots is revealed by the adjectives ‘good’ and ‘untainted’. Manifest in the negative words and phrases, ‘weeds’, ‘loose teeth’, ‘rotten’, and ‘degenerate’, the deconstructive voice is again the narrator’s. Finally, the focalization once more returns to the character, but with an underlying irony by the narrator in the statement where the roots are seen as saviours or rescue boats. By oscillating between distinct points of view, and the free indirect speech, the narrative voice succeeds in problematizing the generally held perceptions and convictions about the purity of roots as well as culture within a multicultural space.
Just like diaspora space, narrative space resists boundaries. The Perret Institute emerges as a space that is assumedly ‘neutral’ but revealed soon in the extra narrative commentary in the chapter ironically named ‘The Final Space’ to be ‘pared down, sterilized, made new every day by a Nigerian cleaning lady with an industrial Hoover and guarded through the night by Mr De Winter, a Polish nightwatchman [. . . ] protecting the space, walking the borders of the space’ (Smith, 2000: 517–8). The chapter is an evident challenge to the concept of space as neutral, sterile, closed and imporous. In particular, the ending paragraph of the chapter is stylistically peculiar to draw attention to its overall concern of dissolving space boundaries: They know what they want, especially those who’ve lived this century, forced from one space to another like Mr De Winter (né Wojciech), renamed, rebranded, the answer to every questionnaire nothing nothing space please just space nothing please nothing space. (Smith, 2000: 518–9)
Imbued with idiosyncrasies, ungrammatical sentences, over-recurrence of the word ‘space’ and without capitalization in the beginning, or a full stop in the end, the one-sentence paragraph tells more than the actual words it contains. The open-ended beginning and ending imply the porousness and open-endedness of the concept of space, a multicultural one in this instance. This is also indicated with reference to a particular immigrant, Mr De Winter, who is relocated and renamed, and in the end left with ‘nothing’, with perhaps no home, no sense of belonging. Interchanging the words ‘space’ and ‘nothing’ in the end signals the shift in the former’s meaning from connoting a place to a ‘blank’ area. In the previous paragraph, the narrator makes a comic connection between the design of the institute with the use of harmonious colours, and its facilitating effect on people’s ability to answer questionnaires. The questions oddly range from the interior design to Britishness: ‘something is being rebranded, a room/furniture/Britain (that was the brief: a new British room, a space for Britain, Britishness, space of Britain, British industrial space cultural space space)’ (Smith, 2000: 518). With a parody of the questionnaires of scientific research, the narrator also problematizes the treatment of the multicultural British diaspora space as something to be ‘rebranded’ as if it was a room or furniture with a mixture of colourful immigrants, just like mixed colours of the institute: ‘salt & vinegarblue, cheese & oniongreen’ (Smith, 2000: 518). Such a happy hybridity of colours in the interior design of the building fails to define ‘space of Britain’, ‘Britishness’ or multicultural Britain in contrast to the narrator’s ironic idealization of hybridity. The narrative evidently subverts ideas of London as a locus of neutralized mixings. Rather, as Ball (2004: 243) puts it, ‘London uproots people and brings them and their worlds together to encounter each other, create new entanglements on top of old ones, and produce new mixtures and identities. Always emergent and transformative, the metropolis can never be a neutral, final space’.
Border-crossing can also characterize the moments when public and private spaces are inevitably entangled within the diaspora primarily because of the impossibility of erasing colonial histories. The colonial intrusion on both national and personal levels is discernible, making the distinction between the inside and outside again blurred. One instance among many in the novel: a very public event of book burning in Bradford becomes a domestic conflict when Alsana burns Millat’s personal belongings in the garden. In this sense, the public event that took place in Bradford is replicated in a domestic space. Similarly, Samad brings his personal connection with Mangal Pande, into a public space, O’Connell’s pool house, where he insists on putting his poster up. Likewise, the very public Trafalgar Square becomes a private space when Samad, and then Millat, carry the history of its statue – that of Henry Havelock (the English national hero who led to Mangal Pande’s death) to the very centre of their life in an attempt to come to terms with their personal history. The family name IQBAL written by Samad with his dribbling blood from his cut finger on the floor in Trafalgar Square manifests his anxiety about invisibility and personal need for recognition on a more public level. As Moodod (2013: 52) suggests, ‘the ideas of equal respect and recognition are essential to multicultural equality and multicultural integration’. Yet Trafalgar’s public space fails to provide Samad with such feelings necessary for multiculturalism. Moreover, the borders of the private households become porous as the children of each family establish ties with one another or the outside world. In this sense, there is not a clear sense of personal or public space, which is also reflected in the entangled narrative space.
Like space, temporality is also borderless, resisting fixity in relation to history. Past, present, and future temporalities are intertwined, as the epigraph of the novel suggests: ‘What’s past is prologue’. Claire Squires (2002: 44) is right in arguing that ‘[h]istory and the past are formative and inescapable for the novel’s characters’. The inescapability of colonial history shapes the present lives of immigrants. In the narrative space, this is indicated by the intermittent analepsis and prolepsis as well as the reversal of the chronology in titles: ‘Archie 1974, 1954’, ‘Samad 1984, 1857’. This theme is reinforced by the metaphor of Zeno’s Paradox and unmovable arrows, which is used to show Magic and Millat’s entrapment in the past temporality: Two brothers trapped in the temporal instant. Two brothers who pervert all attempts to put dates to this story, to track these guys, to offer times and days, because there isn’t, wasn’t and never will be any duration. In fact, nothing moves. Nothing changes. They are running at a standstill. Zeno’s Paradox. (Smith, 2000: 465–6)
The brothers’ encapsulation within a ‘standstill’ is an inevitable result of the colonial legacy as a burden on the shoulders of the immigrants. The metaphor then becomes an attempt to demythologize the idea of ‘Happy Multicultural Land’, a metanarrative as the capitalization suggests, because ‘immigrants (refugees, émigrés, travellers) [. . . ] cannot escape their history any more than you yourself can lose your shadow’ (Smith, 2000: 466). ‘Multiculturalism emerges here’, Bentley (2008: 60) asserts, ‘not as a panacea for the problems of Britain’s relationship with its own colonial past, but as a displacement of the legacies of colonialism that continue to impact on individuals in the present’.
From a narratological point of view, the post-postcolonial narrative of second and later generations’ ‘everyday’ diasporic experience gives rise to new, more hybrid narrative strategies. They include satirical intrusion of the omniscient narrator, the pluralization of perspectivism or focalization, the intermingling of the narrator’s and characters’ discourses within a single space to implicate diaspora space. The concept of space is further interrogated with a view to the assumption of happy and neutral multicultural areas. The strategies of addressing an inclusive narratee construct the latter as ethnically diversified and non-monolithic. The notion of subjectivity is shaped and reshaped within the framework of diaspora space where the novel’s diaspora subjects constantly undergo a process of self-definition under the impact of multiculturalism. Thematically contested concepts of the separation of the present from the past, and the division of the spatial outside and inside are also reflected narratologically as the conventional linear progression of narrative temporality as well as spatiality is, too, undermined. In this sense, traditional fictional conclusiveness and sequential ordering are absent in White Teeth as it refuses to eliminate the randomness of narrative space. The fluidity of space is seen to be an element that constitutes not only the fiction itself but also the way people relate themselves to their multicultural environment.