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Saunders, G. ‘Love Me or Kill Me’: Sarah Kane and the Theatre of Extremes. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2002.
Simko, J. ‘Plastikovä Drama. Neskol’ko poznämok na margo dräme “Shopping and F***’” // Labyrint Revue 7-8: 178-180, 2000.
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Will May Southampton University
On the Multi-Cultural Novel, Zadie Smith, and Literary Origin
In Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, origin is likened to a series of Russian dolls. A story that is concerned with roots and genealogy must always trace itself backwards, putting ‘Irie back in Clara, Clara back in Hortense, Hortense back in Ambrosia’.1 Family traits re-echo down the generations, individual choices are magnified and repeated, inheritances are grappled with, rejected, or embraced. Our past is how we make sense of ourselves. Yet this is also a novel which embraces the accidental, the contingent, and the deviant. Irie longs to merge with the Chalfens, and her baby, raised with Joshua Chalfen and fathered either by Millat or Magid, seemingly offers the ‘neutral space’ (WT, 514) she has dreamed about. Here is a new life which will not be defined by its genetic imprint, its familial history, or narrow cultural reference points. Even the genetically-engineered
1 Smith, Zadie. While Teeth. London: Penguin, 2001. P.365. A!) subsequent pages references are to this edition, parenthesised in the text.
mouse, bred for a specific scientific purpose, escapes in the novel’s final scene, suggesting an individual will which can defy, as well as be defined by, its family legacy. Here are two competing ways of reading our inheritance, one which sees us fatalistically destined to repeat the mistakes of our ancestors, and another which rejects the notion of genetic or cultural determinism. Yet if the contested paternity of Irie’s child makes genealogy into an impossible guessing game, how might we classify the literary origins of the novel itself? How far do the traditions of immigrant writing inform its narrative strategies and devices?
White Teeth was greeted with almost universal critical adulation on its publication in 2000, the only criticism emerging from a self-penned review by the author, which appeared in the literary journal Butterfly. Here, she compared her talent to the child star Shirley Temple - it was precocious, grating, and too eager to please. The analogy was echoed in an Observer interview, where Smith remembered going as a young girl into a sweetshop, when she was on holiday in rural England. In an all-white community for the first time, she found herself performing her identity:
My instinct as a child was always to over-compensate by trying to behave three times as well as every other child in the shop, so they knew I wasn't going to take anything or hurt anyone. I think that instinct has spilled over into my writing in some ways, which is not something I like very much or want to continue.2
This childhood memory finds Smith on her best behaviour and on the defensive, second-guessing her audience and how best to please them. She accuses herself of ‘over-compensation ’, of inhabiting a voice that is both self-conscious and guarded. Her comments might serve to complicate our reading of White Teeth as a sprawling, generous comic novel, or an easy celebration of melting pot London. If Irie’s disastrous trip to the hairdresser suggests the dangers of
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2 Zadie Smith quoted in Stephen Moss, ‘White Teeth’, The Guardian, 26 January 2000. tfrvj - rft w
subjugating identity to cultural norms, might Smith’s literary voice be involved in the same struggle?
The twentieth century, White Teeth informs us, is the century of the ‘great immigrant experiment’ (WT, 326). The Anglophone novel, particularly in the postwar period, has tracked this same experiment through a variety of literary forms. A series of texts find in the identity struggle of the immigrant the possibility of parody, performance and play. G.V. Desani’s novel All about H. Hatterr (1948) is a dazzling mock-biography, and an often overlooked influence on Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981). Desani’s novel makes a parody of origin in its depiction of a bragging Anglo-Indian. The eponymous Hatterr dismisses the absence of his mother with a dismissive ‘who cares?’, fascinated instead by the ‘clowning and vaudeville-turning’ of his own literary project. He situates himself in the ‘frisky fraternity of autobiography-makers’3 rather than trace an anxious point of descent; hybridity for Hatterr is a cause for celebration more than concern. Similarly, Moses Aloetta, the narrator of Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners (1957), a West Indian immigrant to London in the 1950s, attempts to find a jostling humour in his fellow immigrants’ tales of hunger and racial discrimination. His friend is forced to eat a dead pigeon he finds in a public park; the incident is farcical rather than tragic. Critics of the time read it as a comic celebration of Trinidadian culture and story-telling - nowhere did they see a poignant depiction of immigrant poverty or discrimination. Certainly, we find literary starting points for Smith’s characters in these texts. Alsana’s pragmatic humour diffuses or deflects many of the tensions of immigrant London, just as Moses’ did in The Lonely Londoners. For her, repression is a ‘nonsense silly-billy word’ (WT, 77) rather than a call to arms for female equality; she can barely remember the name of Enoch Powell, the conservative MP who delivered the inflammatory ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech in 1968, calling for an end to immigration to Britain. The novel’s laughter continually puts its characters, and its readers, at ease - even Millat’s turn to
33. Desani G.V.AUAboutH. Hatterr. Harmondsworth: Penguin* 1969. P.47.
Islamic fundamentalism is mined for comedy, deflating his self-righteous bravado to impotent, adolescent, confusion. In this way, the novel pacifies its targets, mollifies its tensions, and is reluctant to let loss, danger, or cruelty, get in the way of its comedy. The Holocaust, fleetingly evoked when Alsana finds herself laughing at the Jewish park attendant, is the only thing which seems beyond the pale.
Yet the immigrant experience has, more often, produced narratives of anxious displacement, full of characters struggling to find a familial or literary origin. On arriving in a wintry London in the 1950s, the characters in Caryl Phillips’ The Middle Passage (1985) have ‘nothing to declare except their accents’.4 Echoing Oscar Wilde’s famous aphorism on arriving in America that he has nothing to declare but his genius, Phillips replaces Wilde’s dandyish confidence in literary excellence with a resigned admission of an inevitability. These people own nothing, and will always be viewed via their otherness. The journey narrative is an eye-witness account but one which continually interrogates its own authority. Zulfikar Ghose’s autobiography Confessions of a Native-Alien (1965) is, as its title suggests, similarly conflicted. In a narrative which moves from Bombay to Keele to London, even the point of origin remains contested. As Ghose notes, his first seven years were spent in part of India which would become Pakistan, and suggests ‘the distinction between the two countries of my early life has been the schizophrenic theme of much of my thinking: it created a psychological conflict and a pressing need to know that I do belong somewhere and neither the conflict nor the need has ever been resolved’.5Second-generation responses to the immigrant journey are similarly complex. In Caryl Phillips’ novel State of Independence (1986), the protagonist Bertram returns to his native Jamaica after twenty years in England as it prepares to celebrate its independence. However, he is looking for home, rather than self-determination, and struggles to find it in either place.
These works might tease out more troubled response to White Teeth. Tellingly, Caryl Phillips’ review of the novel in The Observer
4 PhiIIips„Catyl. The Middle Passage. London: Faber, 1985. P. 145. . .'T* T7
5 Ghose, Zulfikar. Confessions of a Native-Alien. London: Routledge, 1965. P.2.
saw it not as a comedy, but a reflection of a mongrel nation ‘still struggling to find a way to stare into the mirror and accept the ebb and flow of history that has produced this fortuitously diverse condition and its concomitant pain.’6 If the novel’s women tend to make a farce from history, Archie and Samad construct a shared narrative of heroics and sacrifice, even if it is based on the lie of killing the French scientist. The narrator might poke fun at Alsana’s inconsistent racial prejudice, but is less forgiving of the white youths who label Millat a Paki. This is a novel of kidnap, attempted suicide and murder, as well as misguided hairdressers and unreliable weather forecasts. Hortense’s Armageddon never quite comes, offering up more bathos in the face of proclamations or absolutes, yet it might also serve as a corrective to notions of history which see the future as perfect. Horror is never extinguished, only comically deferred. Things keeps interrupting characters inconveniently from tragedy, just as stories from the past interrupt the narrative itself. Even the much-quoted paragraph which celebrates a Willesden full of strangers ‘brown, yellow, and white’ (WT, 326) and is sure that ‘we have all slipped into each other’s lives with reasonable comfort’, ends with the threat of violence, mindful of the young white men ‘who will roll out at closing time into the poorly lit streets with a kitchen knife wrapped in a tight fist’ (WT, 327).
This tension, which situates the novel between competing genres, modes and traditions, is epitomised by Irie’s baby. If its hybridity shows a way out of the contested battle of origins, it also places the novel itself squarely within a British canon. Smith’s novel opens with an epigraph from E.M. Forster, and the baby is a knowing reference to his novel Howards End (1910). His novel, more acute in its tragedy than Smith’s, traces the muddle of the British class system. Just as Irie ends up giving birth to a child that will, symbolically, unite all the disparate family narratives so far, Forster’s novel finds the upper-middle class Helen Schlegel giving birth to a child fathered with Leonard Bast, the lower-middle class clerk. Here is a deliberate gesture to a secular, British tradition. There are other, more subtle,
6 Zadie Smith quoted in Stephen Moss, ‘White Teeth’, The Guardian, 26 January 2000.
nods throughout the narrative to Forster’ work.7 His novel begins with the narrative equivalent of a shoulder shrug - ‘one may as well begin with Helen’s letters’.8 Exactly the same apparently detached indifferent marks the final paragraph of Smith’s novel -
It would make an interesting survey (what kind would be your decision) to examine the present and divided the onlookers into two groups: those whose eyes fell upon a bleeding man, slumped across a table, and those who watched the getaway of a small brown rebel mouse. (WT, 541)
Here the narrator, like Forster’s, is apparently omniscient, but happy to leave the important decisions up to us. Tellingly, the narrator refuses to divide the onlookers into two groups, and so to collude in the social, cultural, and racial differences that have defined their lives so far. Far from being a refusal to accept responsibility, this narrative intrusion opens up the work to the reader. The slumped man here is also an echo of Archie’s failed suicide attempt in the first paragraph of the novel, ending the narrative in a gesture that is both generous and cyclical. The choice is left to the reader as to whether this cycle is progressive or repetitive. Perhaps the narrator’s refusal to choose is a hard-won privilege, rather than a failing of nerve. It might equally suggest that Smith can be both a British writer, and informed by the tradition of immigrant writing, without accusations of compromise.
7 Smith mimics a series of narrative styles in White Teeth, dropping momentarily into George Eliot’s intrusive moralising to remark ‘how fragile Clara’s atheism is!’, (WT, 394).
8 Forster E.M. Howards End. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974. P. I.
