White Teeth - Zadie Smith's Term Paper

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Her own daughter with Archie, although not beautiful, has her father's soul, and similarly seeks out love and friendship with members of other religions, races, and classes.

Thus, the ideological excesses of religious, class, and other forms of identity that hem individuals in within modern Britain are overcome through human elemental desires to enjoy sensuality and to take delight in beauty and other delights of the flesh. To take one small, personal example of desire and commonality -- Samal, for example, does not believe because of his Muslim heritage that he should drink. But because a frothy Guinness is such a delight in modern England, and such an important form of male social bonding, Samal comes to a rationalization that he can enjoy alcohol, though it is religiously prohibited, so long as he does not masturbate at night. Funny as this bargain is to the reader's ear, it is illustrative of Smith's view that life is a continual personal ethical negotiation, rather than obedience to a series of absolute prohibitions because of one's racial or religious background -- and as life is such a negotiation, there is still hope for commonality between the races and religious and multiethnic fabric of England.

Quite often, people are more tolerant than what their religion dictates in practice. For example, Samal fears that his son will marry white girls -- but he accepts Archie's multiracial marriage without question, as does Samal's wife. In fact, Archie's own daughter, half Black and half Cockney, secretly lusts after Samal's own sons, in defiance of Samal's expectations of the worst case scenario as well as his fears.

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And even Samal's wife Alsana, seemingly the most intransient of all still accepts her niece of so-called shame into the family home, continually condemning the young woman's lesbianism in her words without actually making the girl a cast off from the community through her deeds. Again, practice defies precepts in a positive manner, in Zadie Smith's world of White Teeth.

Smith's vision of happy British assimilation, of course, seems somewhat ironic in light of recent world events in England. However, both Archie and Samal clearly suffer defeated and dispirited dreams, disappointments in life that are common to all peoples and all Britons, regardless of religion or skin tone. The main male protagonist's middle-aged ends are not happy in an American sense. Not all of Smith's characters find a sense of complete success and joy in life, nor do they see themselves as tragic disappointments, either. But the end of the novel is still promising in terms of suggesting a form of racial harmony. It suggests that even when suffering disappointments in terms of how one's sons and daughters may chose to live and believe, there is always some form of common ground and some form of redemption for personal past mistakes and wrongs, even the wrong of fundamentalism exhibited by Millat.

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