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Dossier
Studi Culturali
- Maria
Cristina Paganoni
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- ZADIE
SMITH'S NEW ETHNICITIES
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The cultural diversification of postmodernity - and
especially of postcoloniality within it - entails the
coexistence of a multiplicity of identities and of
overlapping social and discursive practices in the
domain of social life. In this highly mobile context,
which has disputed preconceived notions of identity
and hegemonic versions of dominance and
marginalization, hybridity emerges as a keyword for
the interpretation of culture and it is faced with the
challenge to find and to found an aesthetics seriously
able to encapsulate the complexity of the new
processes of signification without erasing difference
to surrender to local or global forms of indifference
(Vivan: 2002a, 148).
- In this regard, Zadie Smith's
literary production may help to illustrate the
potentialities - and, perhaps, a few of the
inconsistencies - of a narrative perspective which
engages in the representation of the political and
aesthetic issues which are related to
multiculturalism. This young and successful black
British writer devotes great emphasis to the themes of
migration, the legacy of imperialism, national
affiliation, multicultural society and hybridity
(Vivan: 2002b, 37-42; Head: 2003, 106-119), in
particular as they are perceived and elaborated by the
young generation. Such emphasis, which confirms the
role played nowadays by ethnic and cultural conflicts
as dominant historical dynamics and, also, by the age
factor in these conflicts (besides race, class and
gender), makes of her writing an ostensibly emblematic
site of representation of what the critic Stuart Hall
has defined "new ethnicities"(1988) and an appropriate
case study of that poetics of re-inscription of
cultural values which is being carried out by
postcolonial novelists.
- Born in London in 1975 and
author to date of two novels - White Teeth (2000) and
The Autograph Man (2002)1
- the London-based Anglo-Jamaican writer has been
widely acclaimed for her original mapping of the new
subjectivities emerging out of the unprecedented
connections which have seen the light in the human and
cultural mosaic of postcoloniality. Such narrative
focalisation, which pushes to the foreground some
fundamental questions regarding the problematic social
construction of the self, is well in accordance with
the ongoing debate on what should constitute national
identity. The incessant dialectic between self and
other has progressively moved the boundaries of
Englishness - in itself a historically exclusive
notion - towards the inclusiveness and open
indeterminacy of Britishness. Both of Smith's novels,
in fact, investigate the issues of hybridisation in
multicultural Britain, trying to show, in a sense, all
the possible extension of cultural miscegenation.
Indeed, the unpredictable developments which may open
up to individuals and communities in the crucible of
postcolonial society can be credibly selected as the
macrotheme of Smith's novels, though hybrid identity
is investigated in the two works under different
perspectives and with varyingly successful aesthetic
results 2.
- White Teeth explores a
sector of the so-called Black Britain - a now
fashionable and culturally-emergent definition
identifying that part of the British population of
non-white origins that has proudly reclaimed
Britishness throughout decades of racial
struggles3
- for the span of three generations, focussing on the
complex interrelationships, established through ties
of family and friendship, between West Indians,
Bangladeshis and Britons. A story of "helpless
heterogeneity that Zadie Smith recognises and
celebrates" (Phillips: 2000, 11), weaving together the
histories of several generations across the globe, the
novel is interspersed with historic retrospectives:
the 1857 Great Indian Mutiny, British Jamaica in the
early twentieth century, the British army in Bulgaria
during the Second World War. Its main setting,
however, is contemporary London and, more precisely,
those multi-racial areas of London that have been
inhabited by the subsequent waves of immigrants in
recent decades after decolonisation. One of them,
Willesden Green, is also the neighbourhood Zadie Smith
herself grew up in. The city functions, therefore, as
the structuring backdrop to the story.
- The Autograph Man, on
the other hand, deals with the existential angst and
the professional qualms of a few spiritually-exhausted
young London Jews, with a mixed background, having
African and Chinese origins. This time the setting is
polycentric, since the story takes place in London
again and also in New York, both cities being hubs of
the fragmented postcolonial world. Resorting to "a
pastiche of forms and philosophies" (Olson: 2002,
online) and to a New Age ambience playing with a
diffusive and unfocused spiritual search for
authenticity, the novel quotes unconvincing bits
borrowed from several cultural codes, especially from
Judaism, introduced into the text in an intellectually
minimal version which is neither ironic nor
irreverently subversive. "It suffers less from nerves
and more from embarrassment" (Greenlaw: 2002, 21); it
shows, perhaps, the dangers incurred by writers when
their creativity is colonised by the pressures and the
deadlines of the literary industry.
- Doubtless, Zadie Smith's own
mixed background, resulting from an English father and
a Jamaican mother, her youth, and her profile as a
sophisticated Londoner, who graduated from Cambridge
with a first, have all contributed to establishing her
as a literary star at incredible speed and to giving
flair to a career which flavours - a bit too much, one
would suspect, after looking at the list of her
successes duly emblazoned on the two book covers - of
the efforts of literary agents, evidently aware of the
market appeal of hybridity and on the chase of a
suitable 'multicultural' spokesperson to launch. No
wonder, then, that Smith should have appeared to
publishers as the perfect prototype of the
multicultural writer, and for a number of reasons: her
indisputable literary talent, all the striking
personal traits listed before and also - in a culture
very reactive to visual images where writers' pictures
often appear on book covers - the fascinating
'indistinctness' of her looks, which do not
immediately reveal her origins (African, Asian, West
Indian?) and make of her an enigmatic and seductive
signifier4.
- The deliberate and
potentially very manipulative trespassing of the
boundary between Zadie Smith as a writer and Zadie
Smith as a charismatic multiethnic icon seems to have
characterised her career from the start. Thanks to a
skilfully-orchestrated marketing
campaign5,
Smith's reputation, which skyrocketed after the
exceptional success of White Teeth, had already
gained momentum even before its actual publication in
January 2000 in the United Kingdom and in April 2000
in the United States. In fact, White Teeth was
sold to Hamish Hamilton at a "heated auction", where
the writer received an officially unknown but
allegedly huge advance payment for two novels "on the
basis of a partial script of around eighty pages
(...). Because of this reputedly high advance level,
Smith's youth, and also her ethnic origins, attention
was already attracted to White Teeth before it
had even been written" (Squires: 2002, 14). Salman
Rushdie's commendatory remarks, after reading an
advance copy of the novel, were also very helpful to
create genuine interest.
- The evident pressures of the
literary market on this fashionable writer, then, make
the more necessary a lucid analysis of
multiculturalism as it is thematised in her works. The
two novels have elicited, in fact, quite a different
response from the reading public and critics. White
Teeth turned out to be a very pleasant read and it
was celebrated as such by a unanimous chorus of
enthusiastic reviewers. The Autograph Man,
however, has been received as a much more
disappointing novel than its predecessor, being
perceived as a strained story twisting around an
incoherent plot and trying to deal with too many
complicated issues simultaneously and superficially.
In particular, though the main character in the book
is an English Chinese Jew, Chinese culture is
practically neglected except for a few references to
alternative medicine, while the pedantic and
fragmented quotations from Judaism and Jewish lore
betray Smith's highly imperfect understanding of the
complexities of Jewishness.
- Nevertheless, it is
interesting to remark that Smith's achievements and
failures are both pertinent to the purpose of this
essay, since they help to illuminate a few intrinsic
ambiguities of a multicultural world and of the
innovative forms of aesthetics emerging from
hybridity. In particular, Smith's work is an excellent
introduction to the unavoidable ambivalence arising
from the conflicting coexistence of diverging cultures
and subcultures in local communities and to the
difficulties of fully grasping the emerging hybrid
culture with all its implications, as the
enculturation process involves one generation after
another along local as well as global
trends.
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- Negotiating
differences is simultaneously negotiating
identities - working out how I or we relate to
others is simultaneously working out who I am or
who we are. The radical disarticulations and
rearticulations of contemporary social life
radically unsettle social identities, and the
search for and construction of identities is a
constant process and a major preoccupation, but it
should be framed in terms of the problems of
learning to live with difference (Fairclough: 1999,
76-77).
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- What marks a step forward in
Zadie Smith's fiction in comparison with previous
postcolonial literature is - one would be tempted to
say - the effort, no matter how successfully carried
out, to give voice to the peculiar experience of a
young generation of mixed-background British citizens,
born and bred in the United Kingdom, influenced like
their peers all over the world by the homogenising
global trends of mass culture and, at the same time,
encumbered with the conflicting needs of their
cultures of provenance.
- It is understandable that the
generation gap should entail very different responses
to histories of dislocation and migration: every
generation meets different challenges and, quite
naturally, time enfeebles the harsh impact of past
experiences and emphasises the pressing relevance of
new others. It is also understandable that
communities, whichever their ethnic backgrounds,
should be similarly affected by their youngsters'
rejection of tradition with its roles and its
expectations, an attitude which is doubtless a
powerful factor in the social dynamics of the
Westernised world.
- Zadie Smith's White
Teeth describes, among other things, how young
people, divided as they are between peer pressure and
senior values, manage to negotiate their identities
and to invent their own founding narratives in
Britain's multicultural society, a space they quite
naturally recognise as theirs from birth, but where
they need to reposition themselves while growing up.
Attention is given to the conflict between religious
traditions and contemporary Western culture and to the
ways different generations experience it. While
guilt-ridden adults cling to traditional faith
reluctantly and confusedly and are unable to make
their beliefs sound meaningful in the changed cultural
context, the young people all react to conformist
observance in ways which range from outspoken
agnosticism to virulent fundamentalism. Choosing
attitudes which appear superficially different but are
in fact strikingly similar in their common rejection
of parental values, all the teen-agers in the book -
Magid and Millat Iqbal, Joshua Chalfen, and Irie Jones
- resist their seniors' expectations with oppositional
strategies which, by being extreme as is
characteristic of adolescence, show the dubious
quality of their alleged autonomy.
- The black Iqbals are
religiously indifferent but respectful of tradition.
Of their two twins, Millat, who is brought up in
Britain, turns out to be a pot-smoking disreputable
guy and a militant Muslim fundamentalist, burning
Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses. Magid, who would like
to be called "Mark Smith" instead of "Magid Mahfooz
Murshed Mubtasim Iqbal" and is sent back to Bangladesh
by his father to get detoxicated from his Anglophilia,
becomes a lawyer mimicking old-fashioned English
mannerisms to the point of ridicule.
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- There is
something peculiar about him. When I told him
Millat was in Chester, he did not say a word. Just
a stiff-upper lip. He hasn't seen his brother in
eight years. But not a little squeak, not a
whisperoo. Samad says this is some clone, this is
not an Iqbal. One hardly likes to touch him. His
teeth, he brushes them six times a day. His
underwear, he irons them. It is like sitting down
to breakfast with David Niven (WT,
424).
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- Joshua Chalfen, a white kid
who is the son of two intellectual snobs - the father
is a genetic engineer who is breeding the prototype of
the perfect FutureMouse, the mother a plant biologist
- joins an animal rights movement and decides to help
to set free his father's inbred mouse.
Mixed-background Irie Jones intends to study dentistry
in spite of her parents' opposition, then she gets
pregnant by one of the two Iqbal twins, after having
sexual intercourse with both in the course of a few
hours, and ends up happily, years later, as Joshua's
lover.
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- Irie's child can
never be mapped exactly nor spoken of with any
certainty. Some secrets are permanent. In a vision,
Irie has seen a time, a time not far from now when
roots won't matter any more because they can't
because they mustn't because they are too long and
they are too tortuous and they are just buried too
damn deep. She looks forward to it (WT,
527).
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- The same extended metaphor of
the teeth, which provides the title of Smith's first
novel, alludes, on the one hand, to the trauma of
eradication and displacement experienced by the first
generation of migrants, on the other, to the
inevitable act of emancipation from the colonial past
carried out by the young. It is a painful process
which Smith narrates, however, without self-indulgence
and with great comicality:
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- (...) immigrants
have always been particularly prone to repetition -
it's something to do with that experience of moving
from West to East or East to West or from island to
island. Even when you arrive, you're still going
back and forth; your children are going round and
round. There's no proper term for it - original sin
seems too harsh; maybe original trauma would be
better. A trauma is something one repeats and
repeats, after all, and this is the tragedy of the
Iqbals - that they can't help - but re-enact the
dash they once made from one land to another, from
one brown mother country into the pale, freckled
arms of an imperial sovereign. It will take a few
replays before they move on to the next tune (WT,
162).
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- Though trying to "move on to
the next tune", The Autograph Man lacks the
creativity and the emotional range of White
Teeth, a signal, perhaps, of the actual
difficulties of repositioning one's culture in the
commodified anonymity of the global village. In
White Teeth it is Irie Jones who gives eloquent
voice to this generational misunderstanding, as in
this exchange with her father's long-time Bangladeshi
friend, the Muslim Samad Iqbal:
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- "These days, it
feels to me like you make a devil's pact when you
walk into this country. You hand over your passport
at the check-in, you get stamped, you want to make
a little money, get yourself started... but you
mean to go back! Who would want to stay?
(...)
- 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?
What do you do? What does anything
matter?"
- As Samad
described this dystopia with a look of horror, Irie
was ashamed to find that the land of accident
sounded like paradise to her. Sounded like freedom
(WT, 407).
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- The exchange is a wonderful
example of how the question "Where is postcolonial
identity situated?" can be answered very differently
according to different psychologies and personal
histories, since "human agents are made and make
themselves rather than being born in one already
finished form" (Gilroy: 1996, 227).
- Actually, this is the main
appeal of White Teeth. From the yet unvoiced
perspective of migrants' children and grandchildren,
the novel mirrors the face of a nation which has
rapidly become multiethnic and multicultural, is
interrogating itself about its changed identity, and
is looking for new narratives since the canonical ones
are found inadequate. While the Empire was based on
the hegemonic assumption that there existed a stable
national self and the colonised other, and that they
were clearly divided by invisible but palpable
borders, the postcolonial, post-imperial experience
is, on the contrary, of endless miscegenation and
mutations, of thousands of different faces in the
urban crowds, of a myriad of different voices,
colours, flavours, and sounds, bringing to the senses
as well as to the brain a universe of new impressions.
Border-crossing implies the search for new forms of
representation of hybrid identity, through voices
which now speak up from the centre itself of the
former Empire and no longer from the
margins.
- No wonder, then, that these
voices inhabiting the in-betweenness of cultures
should be resonant with an often jarring polyphony,
mixing feelings of surprise, excitement and, also,
displacement in the face of a fast-changing and
unrecognisable world. In fact, though differently,
both of Smith's novels deal with the search for
identity and seem to emphasise the perplexing gap
which opens between discordant modes of belonging, no
longer authorised or censored by a credible cultural
consensus, in so far as it is homogenous. For example,
Muslim religious tradition is represented in evident
conflict with Westernised individualistic needs of
gratification and self-fulfilment. But, at the same
time and not so paradoxically, even Western egocentric
self-development results in alienation. In The
Autograph Man successful celebrity Kitty Alexander
is a victimised product of the international motion
pictures industry. The film icon has devoured the life
of the real person, so that she has ended up being a
captive in the hands of her psychotic agent Max. Like
her flimsy celluloid existence, where images count
more than actual experience, the actress's rare
autograph, which is however easily imitated, has
become a marketable simulacrum to be exchanged at the
Autographicana Fair in New York, a 'meta-media' event
where, it would seem, any surviving boundaries between
life and its fictionalisation are removed.
- Possibly, part of the faults
of The Autograph Man lies with the insufficient
comprehension of the dilemmas of identity in
postmodernity and of its relevance as a central site
of political struggle, a struggle of which the
enervated young people, unconvincingly portrayed by
Smith, seem now totally oblivious, as if hybridity had
already lost all the vitality deriving from cultural
cross-fertilisation and its power of subversion.
Significant issues such as multiculturalism, mass
culture, and their overlapping areas of influence are
oversimplified to the detriment of active engagement
with the complex challenges facing the Third
Millennium. Cultural deterritorialisation is, instead,
the predominant attitude in the novel, an attitude
which implies that "production, consumption,
communities, politics, and identities become detached
from local places" (Kearney: 1995, 552). Autograph
trading, the improbable job referred to in the book
title, is an extreme example of the loss of meaningful
communal and professional relationships.
- While the local setting of
the novel, the depressing suburb of Mountjoy - a
"commuter village on the northernmost tip of the city
of London" of "cheap houses sitting directly in the
flight path of an international airport"(AM, 8) - is
connoted by anonymity and shabbiness, the rest of the
world has turned hyperrealistically global. Alex-Li
Tandem, a half-Chinese and half-Jewish 'autograph
man', is on the chase of the signature of star movie
Kitty Alexander, whose 1952 film The Girl from
Peking has left an indelible trace on his boyish
imagination. His peculiar mixed background and his
unusual profession put him in contact with a crowd of
eccentric people "who give voice to Smith's musings on
the confluence of popular culture and religion. (...)
Within this layered text, Smith uses the language of
religion to describe the commonplace - and the effect
is to suggest the spiritual emptiness of modern life"
(Olson: 2003, online).
- Opting for all verbal
clichés of mass culture and, as if it were not
enough, also for non-verbal ones - a stereotypical
body language made of what Smith calls 'International
Gestures'- the young people in the novel give an
overall impression of absurdity and seem to have
substituted the delusory sensations of movies for
first-hand experience. Every now and then, however,
they are still forced to grasp some bits of the
reality principle, as it surfaces in banal exchanges
such as these: "You are not the world. There are other
people in this film we call life" (AM, 61), or "But
you don't get no rewind in this life, as the black
grandmothers in the movies like to say" (AM,
161).
- The dominant practice
narrated in The Autograph Man is not even
cultural diaspora, since diaspora has after all
resisted disappearance and saved difference through
the creative interpretation of tradition in alien
contexts. It is, rather, cultural dyslexia, that is,
the inability to forge a new meaningful synthesis, no
matter how provisional, out of a cultural system. It
is an attitude in sharp contrast with the opposite
acts of spatial and metaphorical appropriation which
represented the typical founding gestures of migrants
and shaped the main themes of their literature.
White Teeth, contrariwise, is openly indebted
to, and enriched by, what is now regarded as a
well-established postcolonial literary tradition -
V.S. Naipaul, Buchi Emecheta, Salman Rushdie, Hanif
Kureishi, and many others, of course - whose
iconoclastic vitality has indeed rejuvenated English
literature.
- This is to say that Smith's
new ethnicities are not 'so' new. The weighty presence
of multicultural heritages surfaces in her fiction in
a surprising mix of old and new. In a metafictional
sense her narrative, too, is hybrid, since what
Fairclough defines "semiotic hybridity" shapes her
novel design and discourse.
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- Working across
differences entails semiotic hybridity - the
emergence of new combinations of languages, social
dialects, voices, genres, and discourses.
Hybridity, heterogeneity, intertextuality are
salient features of contemporary discourse also
because the boundaries between domains and
practices are in many cases fluid and opened in a
context of rapid and intense social change
(Fairclough: 1999, 76).
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- Intertextuality, a general
characteristic of postmodern writing, contributes to
the workings of that poetics of re-inscription,
specific to postcolonial writers, which involves the
irreverent appropriation of the canon and the
contestation of imperial hegemonic values. The great
literary tradition is deprived of those sacred,
canonical qualities that congealed its ideology out of
the flow of history, but the most vital aspects of its
aesthetic are nevertheless reclaimed and made
functional to alternative imaginary architectures and
communicative intents. The areas of the canon which
are revitalised are those perceived as flexible enough
to carry the burden of new signifying
processes.
- The re-inscribing attempt of
such a poetics is more evident in White Teeth
than in The Autograph Man since, as has already
been observed above, the latter is not concerned with
the issues of decolonisation but, rather, with those
of mass culture and globalisation. The plot and the
design of White Teeth, on the other hand, are
clearly modelled - hybridised - after the
nineteenth-century multi-plot, metropolitan novel,
especially Charles Dickens's. Here is what the black
British writer Mike Phillips writes about his
encounter with London and about the city working as an
imaginative filter shaping his mental
maps:
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- I set out to
learn about London (...). I began travelling by bus
to the West End, then walking back by various
different routes (...). What I remember was the odd
sense of everything being unexplored and
mysterious, but at the same time somehow already
part of my memory. Walking on Waterloo Bridge for
the first time I recognized the view immediately. I
had read about all this, in textbooks, in novels,
especially Dickens's novels, and although it wasn't
very much like the way they described it,
everything seemed half-familiar, like something
emerging from my imagination (Phillips: 2001,
17).
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- Better than other novelists
of the Victorian age, Dickens creatively understood
the role of the metropolis of London as the imperial
heart and the dominant icon of modernity, with all its
hopes and ambiguities, captured the extraordinary
social chemistry of the urban setting, and managed to
infuse his insights into highly successful books whose
appeal cut across class lines. The democratic quality
of Dickens's fiction, addressed as it was to both a
learned and a popular audience, should not be
downplayed if one tries to understand in depth why he
is still so influential - 'effortlessly' influential,
because deeply rooted in the language - in
English-speaking cultures.
- A historic battlefield and,
at the same time, a fascinating and disquieting
oneiric image surfacing from the secret dreams of the
master narratives of modernity, the urban space is
refigured by postcolonial writers through the lenses
of contemporary complexity, a complexity they have
fully experienced in their lives and in their
poetics:
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- London lurked in
our language like a virus, carried on a stream of
words and ideas which had acquired the power of
myth (Phillips: 2001, 30).
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- This mythical and escapist
image of London has to be incessantly attuned to the
responsible, political engagement with the actual city
and with the needs of the real communities which
inhabit these places, overdetermined by multiple
histories:
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- By the end of
1960s it was clear that if there was a way of being
black in London we would have to create it
ourselves (...). Necessity had been the source of
our reinvention. The music, the black-run
organizations, the churches, and the social life
which went with them, were both expressions of our
own identity and essential tools of survival
(Phillips: 2001, 56, 58).
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- Not surprisingly, then,
thanks to the revitalising process of cross-cultural
osmosis and to affirmative action, London - the core
of the former Empire - still stands as a vibrant
nucleus for postcolonial writers. The overlapping
discourses of multiple cultures and, therefore, of
multiple symbolic and imaginary worlds - imperial,
colonial, postmodern and postcolonial - weave
unpredictable imaginative synapses, while readers find
themselves situated in estranged and estranging
fictional cities along the fragmented paths of
postcoloniality and feel all the extent of the loss of
previous references, a loss which is both exciting and
depressing and is ambivalently experienced as
emancipation and anguish. As has been seen, Smith's
fiction veers between these two moods.
- White Teeth is openly
indebted to the Dickens world, and not only for the
choice of the urban setting. Explicit references are
made to Dickensian characters, for example to Uriah
Heep the notorious hypocrite in David
Copperfield: "Round and round the kitchen he went,
bending his head and rubbing his hands over and over
like Uriah Heep" (WT, 57). Indirect allusions are
evident in the theme of the double, so exquisitely
Victorian and Dickensian: the two physically identical
Iqbal twins, Millat and Magid, turn out to be the
mirror-like opposite of each other in terms of
personality, to their mother's utter
surprise:
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- She confided to
Clara: By God, they're tied together like a cat's
cradle, connected like a see-saw, push one end,
other goes up, whatever Millat sees, Magid saw and
vice versa! (WT, 220).
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- As in Dickens, insanity is
understood as a disease of an entire society, not as a
personal idiosyncrasy. Funnily, then, and quite
unsurprisingly, given the present composition of
British society, Zadie Smith portrays insanity as
multi-racial:
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- Now, the
children knew the city. And they knew the city
breeds the mad. They knew Mr White-Face, an Indian
who walks the streets of Willesden with his face
painted white, his lips painted blue, wearing a
pair of tights and some hiking boots; they knew Mr
Newspaper, a tall skinny man in an ankle-length
raincoat who sits in Brent libraries removing the
day's newspapers from his briefcase and
methodically tearing them into strips; they knew
Mad Mary, a black voodoo woman with a red face
whose territory stretches from Kilburn to Oxford
Street but who performs her spells from a bin in
West Hampstead; they knew Mr Toupee, who has no
eyebrows and wears a toupee not on his head but on
a string around his neck (WT, 174).
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- The creative energy of
Smith's language recalls that of the Victorian writer.
Puns have a Dickensian flavour and a disquieting
contemporary tinge, as in this reference to the
violent racist riots ignited by right-wing leader
Enoch Powell, here ironically rebranded 'E-knock',
after his 1968 notorious speech 'Rivers of Blood'
where he stirred popular hostility towards immigrants
to the point of aggressiveness.
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- Willesden was
not as pretty as Queens Park, but it was a nice
area. No denying it. Not like Whitechapel, where
that madman E-knock someoneoranother gave a speech
that forced them into the basement while kids broke
the windows with their steel-capped boots. Rivers
of blood silly-billy nonsense (WT, 62).
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- There are also a few easily
recognisable citations from Dickens's novels. The
narrator's aside - "Ah, you are not convinced by
coincidence? You want fact fact fact?" (WT, 220) -
echoes the opening lines of Hard Times, which
make fun of Benthamite obsession with
matter-of-factness in the classroom. Later in the
novel, however, readers find out to their amusement
that education has come a long way since Victorian
times: at Glenard Oak, the Victorian monstrosity which
was formerly a workplace, then an asylum, and now is
the comprehensive school attended by the young people
in the book, students are above all "passionate about
fags (...) just fags, any fags. Fags, fags, fags" (WT,
291). Dickens again whispers in Zadie Smith's ear when
she invents her insignificant micro-histories:
middle-age and depressive Archie Jones, who very much
resembles Arthur Clennam, the male protagonist of
Little Dorrit, a defeated dreamer like him, quotes the
phrase 'Nobody's fault' from Clennam's interior
monologue.
-
-
- Nobody's
fault (...), nobody's fault but my own, but he
wondered whether there wasn't some higher pattern
to it. Maybe there will always be men who say the
right thing at the right time, who step forward
like Thespis at just the right moment of history,
and then there will be men like Archie Jones who
are just there to make up the numbers. Or, worse
still, who are given their big break only to come
in on cue and die a death right there, centre
stage, for all to see (WT, 23).
-
-
- The last sentence anticipates
the discussion between Samad Iqbal and Archie Jones of
the episode igniting the Great Indian Mutiny and of
the role supposedly played in it by Samad's ancestor,
Mangal Pande, maybe a hero "fighting against the new,
holding on to tradition" (WT, 180), maybe "a drunken
fool" (WT, 254). The parody of history, whether it
involves the colonised Indian subcontinent, British
Jamaica, or the Second World War, is a recurrent
modality in White Teeth. Again, Smith's
irreverence for historic mythography, imperial and
colonial as well, seems to betray the impatience of
the young generation, pulled as they are by the
diverging forces of national heritage and tradition,
local appurtenance and global trends.
- In this thematic perspective,
then, The Autograph Man follows White
Teeth quite naturally. After leaving behind as
irrelevant the struggle for the appropriation of
physical and cultural spaces and the negotiation of
national identity, which are no longer such pressing
concerns for Zadie Smith's indigenous and hybrid
generation, the focus now shifts to post-national
identity, virtual reality, immaterial jobs and
deterritorialised areas, where depleted selves, such
as Alex-Li Tandem, wander overburdened by an excess of
cultural codes. It is a set of attitudes which can be
labelled, quite effectively, narcissistic
"globo-claustrophobia", as in the words of no-global
spokesperson Naomi Klein:
-
-
- Of course it's a
classic symptom of teenage narcissism to believe
that the end of history coincides exactly with your
arrival on earth. (...) Still, there is a part of
my high-school globo-claustrophobia that has never
left me, and in some ways only seems to intensify
as time creeps along. What haunts me is not exactly
the absence of literal space so much as a deep
craving for metaphorical space: release, escape,
some kind of open-ended freedom (Klein: 20012,
63-64).
-
-
- The hope remains that the
incredible human potentialities of a world turned
global will not be sold out as debased multicultural
commodities at the supernational, post-imperial
shopping-mall of marketable goods. Where Zadie Smith
will situate herself as a novelist, which place she
will occupy between self-centred narcissism and
political involvement, which creative acts of
signification she will invent out of the multiple
traditions and discourses of hybridity, is still an
open question.
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