White Teeth

White Teeth by Zadie Smith

It took me a really long time to read this book… or should I say “tome.” My copy of it is 448 pages long in what has to be 10 point font. I think I picked it up for the first time about a month ago, and then had to start over again when I decided to really read it. Plodding is a great way to describe my interaction with this book. It was nothing like what I expected it to be after reading and immensely enjoying Swing Time but I shouldn’t be suprised by that because it was published first. White Teeth follows the lives of two families (and their family’s families) in both the past and the present, and, set in London, ponders the unique experiences of immigrant families, race, class, religion, and identity. What begins as the sordid ordeal of a man named Archie Jones who is so unhappy and at a loss for direction and fulfillment that he very nearly commits suicide on New Years Eve unravels into a many threaded story of family that leaves you wondering what it is that makes us believe that we’re all so different from each other after all.

The night after his suicide attempt, Archie meets a beautiful (and toothless) Jamaican woman named Clara who is several years his junior, and under the influence of his only friend, a Bangladeshi man named Samad Iqbal who has just taken his own much younger wife, Alsana, he falls for her and they marry. Archie and Clara give birth to a girl named Irie; Samad and Alsana have twin boys named Magid and Millat.

I think a lot about how I believe that we are the sum of our experiences both past and present, ancestral and lived. That is central to this work; Smith devotes several chapters to outlining to the details of Irie, Magid, and Millat’s ancestors — Archie and Samad’s time in the Great War; Clara’s ordeals with her first love who was converted to Jehovah’s Witness by her mother, Hortense, after converting her away; Hortense’s birthing story in the midst of an earthquake; Samad’s brief but intense affair with one of his children’s teachers. Somehow, all of these things have an impact on the kids. Their struggle is with sorting through their own sense of identity and belonging while being a part of this big, messy, jumble of lifetimes. Near the end of the novel, this comes to a head for Irie as she rants about other families that are quieter and less dramatic:

“What a peaceful existence. What a joy their lives must be. They open a door and all they’ve got behind it is a bathroom or a living room. Just neutral spaces. And not this endless maze of present rooms and past rooms and the things said in them years ago and everybody’s old historical shit all over the place” (pg. 426).

Both Clara’s and Samad and Alsana’s families immigrated to London from Jamaica and Bangladesh, respectively, and Smith remarks a few times without the story how much immigrants keep. They carry the history of their past lives in thier attics and kitchen cabinets. Samad never gets rid of anything. As parents, these characters pressure their children to live up to the ideas that they have of them. Caught between the insecurity of adolesence and a never ending cloud of the past, it’s not suprising there’s a great deal of conflict here.

I put this quote up on my Instagram page a while ago, but to read it in context here gives it increased weight:

“But surely to tell these tall tales and others like them would be to spread the myth, the wicked lie, that the past is always tense and the future, perfect” (pg. 448).

The story comes full circle because it ends as it began with Archie facing death on New Years Eve, stepping in front of one of Samad’s son’s bullets. We get a fast-forwarded dream sequence of what the future could be from Archie’s imagination. If you read the whole book, you’ll see how it most certainly is a tall tale. But it also illuminates the idea that these parents have of their children being their opportunity to correct all their past mistakes and usher in new future.

I want to say that the book is titled White Teeth as a signifier to the one thing that all people have in common — teeth. But that seems a but to trite and on the nose… So, I’ll be honest and say I don’t really know. Teeth do come up here and there throughout the text, I mean Clara has no top teeth and eventually uses dentures to hide this fact, but it’s not immediately apparent what this means as a motif in the story. Perhaps you can tell me what you think?

Past and present are tethered to us all. White Teeth unravels the history of the Jones and Iqbal families and leaves you pondering the baggage you may be carrying from your own bloodlines. I may have plodded through, but at it’s conclusion, I think all the history and context were necessary. It frames the present more clearly.

Have you read this book? If so, tell me what you thought! I want to know if everyone else struggled to keep pace like me. Let’s chat in the comments below!

 

Reading and Discussion Guide: What We Lose

What We Lose by Zinzi Clemmons

Wow. This is Clemmons’ debut novel, and if this is her just getting started, I can’t wait to see what the future holds for her. Told through a series of short vignettes, this story is aptly titled. I felt the entire time that I was reading that I had been dropped into the middle of something, and that something important had been left out. I don’t mean this in a negative sense, rather, it adds to the overall emotion of the book. Thandi, the main character, loses her mother to cancer, and we are taken with her as she struggles with the depth of that loss. Grief is a tricky thing, and her grieving process is long and ever-changing. She finds herself in an precarious situation with Peter, her “lover,” as she introduces him in the text, and the outcomes of that relationship are forever marked by it and their response to it. After the death of her mother, her relationships with friends and family are different; her life goals and drive are called into question. Throughout the novel,Thandi also grapples with questions of identity and belonging. She identifies one way in America and another in South Africa where her mother is from. She’s really the same thing — a light skinned black woman — in either place but that carries a different social and cultural weight in South Africa than it does in the US. In this book, Zinzi Clemmons challenges us to consider: What do we lose when we lose a loved one? It’s more than simply that person’s physical presence in our lives… it’s everything as we had come to know it.

Reading and Discussion Guide 

• Consider your own experiences with loss. What does loss feel like? How do process grief? Do you relate to Thandi’s reaction to the loss of her mother?
• Storytelling is an art. Clemmons’ choice to unfold this one via vignettes that span time without always clueing the reader in to as when they take place was a particularly potent one. Some vignettes are only a single line and almost as if they were lines from Thandi’s journal; others are longer tellings of a trip back to South Africa or how she met Peter. Sometimes there are pictures and graphs or diagrams. What was that experience like for you? I found it to be destablizing much like the way that a major loss is destabalizing so it worked for me.
• While this book might seem slim and unassuming at first glance, as we read, we find that Clemmons wraps a great deal around the central question of loss: friendship, racial identity, racism, family, community, love and relationships, and pregnancy to name a few. Were you able to follow the many threads of the story? Or did you feel that you were left unable to connect the threads into one continuous story?
• Thandi poses this question:
  

  “But why do ‘African’ and ‘contemporary’ have to be incomensurate? Why (and to whom) is it appealing to think you are in another city besides the one, in Africa, that you are in?” (pg. 131)

  How would you answer this? I think about the way in which the only image that still to many Americans have of Africa is that of naked people living in huts. But I also wonder how colonization and the encroaching of Western ideals on the continent has impacted the way in which countries like South Africa have tried to advance.

• Racial identity is a large concept that that Thandi wrestles with throughout the story. Light-skinnedness is to esteemed in South Africa; her cousins tell her not to call herself “black.” Her school friends don’t think of her as a “real” black person. Her mother warns her that dark-skinned black women will always be jealous of her. Thandi says:
  

  “I’ve often thought that being a light-skinned black owman is like being a well-dressed person who is also homeless. You may be able to pass in mainstream society, appearing acceptable to others, even desired. But in reality you have nowhere to rest, nowhere to feel safe.” (pg. 31).

  I’ve never considered this as an idea. It seems to not take into account the way that colorism has functioned in the US for centuries now. Even today, as dark-skinned black women have made some inroads to being seen as equally beautiful and desirable, the damage has already been done and will take many years of intentional work to repair. What do you think of Thandi’s statement? Does this align with your own lived experiences if you are a light-skinned black woman?

I hope you find this guide helpful in taking in What We Lose. Grab a friend and talk about it! I really enjoyed this book, and I hope you will too! Let me know what you think in the comments below!