Zadie Smith's White Teeth
Zadie Smith’s novel, White Teeth, is chock full of potential deconstruction ideas; however, an exciting scene to deconstruct is in “The Final Space” chapter when the Iqbals and the Jones are on the public bus heading towards the FutureMouse exhibit. The most obvious binary opposite is that of parent or adult and child. Adults are without doubt the privileged binary. They signify knowledge, wisdom, teaching, and training of young ones along with patience and selflessness, and are allowed to use bad words without penalty. They have all the answers. Children signify selfishness, constant bickering, needing to be taught to not interrupt, to share, to play nicely with others, and are always contrary. In fact, the first word many children learn is “no.” In this scene, though, Smith turns this idea completely upside down. As the adults are bickering, interrupting each other, insulting each other and unable to get along Irie Jones suddenly becomes the parent. She yells at everyone to shut up in much the same way a mother might yell at her bickering children in the backseat on the way home from the grocery store. Irie is suddenly the voice of reason. Her source of irritation is the childish and petty display of the adults in a public setting who have raised her and yet not raised her. Her exasperation and embarrassment come to a head and she explodes into foul language. Her mother tries to reprimand her, but Irie is beyond being told what to do. She goes on to rebuke the adults for acting like children, for their selfishness; she informs them that there are other people in the world, people who aren’t “relishing the fact that they are utterly dysfunctional” (426). Irie’s role reversal continues...
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...na exhorts, not only to Irie, but to all women whose ideas of who and what they should be are based on men’s concepts, and not their own. “The Afro was cool,” Neena continues. “It was wicked, it was yours” (237). She encourages Irie to determine her own ideas of who she is and how she should look.
In many ways, Irie does get a life. She continues living, learning to accept herself, trying to separate herself from Millat, and the ideals that evoke such self-criticism. This process takes a very long time, as does any process, but it’s a start. It’s a step in the right direction, and hopefully through the example of Irie, Smith has changed more than just Irie’s life. She has exposed the tragedy of relying on men’s notions of beauty and the ideal figure instead of our own as women who are capable of charting our own courses and deciding our own ideals.
In the article, “The Fashion Industry: Free to Be an Individual” by Hanna Berry, Berry discusses how for decades women have been told to use certain products and that if they used those products they would be beautiful. Women over the years have believed this idea and would purchase items that promised to make them prettier, thinner, smarter and even more loved. However, in reality it was never what they wore on their bodies that helped them be any of those things; but what it did help with was to empower women to become fearless and bold by what they chose to wear on their bodies as a form of expression.
In J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher In The Rye, Holden Caulfield, a seventeen-year-old boy, transitions from childhood to adulthood. The death of Holden’s little brother signifies the beginning his loss of innocence and growth of maturity. As he enters adulthood, Holden views society differently from his peers by characterizing most of his peers and adults he meets as “phonies.” Thus, Holden takes the impossible challenge of preserving the innocence in children because he wants to prevent children from experiencing the corruption in society. The Catcher In The Rye embodies Holden’s struggle to preserve the innocence of children and reveals the inevitability of and the necessity of encountering the harsh realities of life.
There is something about seeing or hearing about an upset child that seems to move people. In his famous poem, “Incident,” Countee Cullen tells of an experience he had as a boy that upset him. While Cullen was visiting Baltimore, another boy called him a nigger, an experience that would completely change the next several months of Cullen’s life. It was such a significant event that 20 years later (Peters) it still bothered Cullen enough that he wrote a poem about it. This story has a way of tugging at readers’ heartstrings and is not an easily forgettable poem. Cullen’s “Incident” connects with readers because of its focus on how one word completely changed a child’s experience in a new city.
...ce political and socially, the harsher the beauty myth is used against them. In this case, the punishment for rebelling against the majority culture by adapting a ‘subversive’ hairstyle, the thinner you have to be in order to still be considered beautiful. Furthermore, thinness in the Black community is difficult to achieve. Typically, Black body structure, food and eating culture doesn’t easily result in thinness. This is the price Black women pay for this new expression of self.
A woman’s hair is often referred to as her “crown and glory.” Hair is a salient physical characteristic of one’s self concept and how others view their level of attractiveness. One of the major intra-prejudice amongst African Americans is hair texture. This stigma is especially prevalent among African American women. For African American women, hair carries an even greater psychological complexity. Starting from slavery, African Americans were judged by the texture and curl pattern of their hair. For example, Blacks with lighter skin color and straight/wavy hair had certain advantages oppose to those Blacks who possessed more afro-centric features, such as darker skin and kinky hair (Myrdal, 1962; Neal & Wilson, 1989; Parrish 1944; Poussaint, 1975; Reuter, 1917). While a plethora of commentaries have been written on black hair, few empirical studies exist that have examined the reverberating consequences of slavery, as it relates to the western indoctrination of hair and its impact on racial identity/self-concept among African American women.
Evelyn is fascinated with the many stories Ninny has to tell about the people she used to know. She quickly learns the power of friendship as she hears the story of Idgie and Ruth and how their friendship shaped the rest of their lives. Evelyn also learns about courage and independence through these stories. She soon realizes she can feel good about herself and not rely on her husband for everything. Evelyn still takes care of her husband and wants to be his wife, but she realizes that her needs as an individual are just as
These kids feel out of place and do not know how to act because they are out of their element. Sylvia could hardly walk through the front door when she got there and once they were all in there Sylvia says they all were “walkin on tiptoe and hardly touchin the games and puzzles and things” (Bambara 59). This “geographical separation of the poor from the rest of an area” is an example of residential segregation within “The Lesson.” The segregation of neighborhoods usually carries a “racial connotation as well” (Ferris and Stein 206), keeping black neighborhoods separated from white ones in the nineteenth century. Sylvia’s chance to demand her “share of the pie” (Bambara 59) is now harder just because of the separation and lack of equality that surrounds
middle of paper ... ... ity going in the last paragraph. The structure of the passage helps the responder to clearly see the changed perspective of the author. The passage starts with the child’s perspective; the writing has almost a curious and flighty feel to it. This feeling is empathized through the use of verbs, adjectives, similes, metaphors, imagery and descriptive and emotive language.
Have you ever stopped to think about what your beliefs truly are? Are they what they “ought” to be? Do you ever wonder about the cultural history of your family? Zadie Smith brings up both of these topics in her book White Teeth, portraying many different sides of each. The story takes place in England in an area with many different cultures coming together, mainly English, Jamaican and Bangladeshi, for purposes of this story. All have different religious beliefs and cultural differences but not everyone follows their historical beliefs throughout their life and certainly not faithfully. Religious moralities and race, ethnicity and multiculturalism are two moral theories that can shed some light onto the messages within
Throughout centuries in the United States as well as across the globe African American women has been demoralized through European hair standards. Over centuries stereotypes has limited black women to be subject to follow the European beauty standards.. There has been comments and gestures made that black women’s hair are unmanageable, dirty and not appropriate sociably or professionally. This creates a negative outlook upon women that are people of color because judgement over the years found black women hair to be unacceptable. In different articles interviews and random sampling it is discussed from several
Being a Southern Black girl, Maya’s life was already hard especially after her parent’s divorce which caused her to move to her grandmother in stamps. Maya’s life was unstable and being away of her “displacement” made it even harder for her to be happy. One way single stories have affected her life was when she develops an excruciating toothache. The nearest black dentist practices twenty-five miles away, so Momma takes Maya to see Dr. Lincoln, a white dentist in town. When they arrive, Dr. Lincoln states that he does not treat black patients. He says “My policy is I’d rather stick my hand in a dog’s mouth than in a nigger’s.” (Angelou 189). The rudeness towards the black community is just shocking. some white people still have the same image of black people as in the past because of the single stories they have heard. They demean the black community because of the past stories told about slavery and power. Another event that degraded African Americans was during the eighth-grade graduation, which was a great event. The white speaker, Mr. Edward Donleavy, gives a speech about the improvements in the local schools. The white school has received new lab equipment for science
Just as their male counterparts often do in a barber shop, American and non American black women utilize the hair salon as a sounding board for mundane woes, social and political opinions, and of course, relationship problems. her hair natural among other things. Ifemelu’s Auntie Uju states that “[when] in a country that is not your own, you do what you have to do.” By further persuading Ifemelu to relax her hair, she is stressing the empirical importance of “economic security and assimilation” (Barnett 73). Straight hair does not threaten affluent whites and is professional enough under Eurocentric standards; It is the ultimate representation of fitting into the “mainstream”. As Ifemelu alludes to in her blog, black women who have mainstream support (to a certain extent) like Michelle Obama and Beyonce Knowles are never seen wearing their hair as it most likely grows out of the scalps. Black women have co-opted European ideology to the point that “going” natural is perceived as having something (negative) “done” to your hair, when it is simply leaving your hair unaltered. It is the process of straightening or “forcing your [natural] hair to do what it was not made to do” (Adichie )that is more labor intensive. Ifemelu felt that by relaxing her hair she had
...r lose the attention of the reader. In the conclusion, the speaker ends more definitively than she began, telling the audience the most valuable lesson she was taught by her mother, “that if our [the speaker and her sisters] classmates came to cruelty…we were expected to take, and would be each separately capable of taking, a stand” (p. 79) By doing this, the speaker causes the audience to look back on the rest of the story to learn the mother’s lessons, and it becomes clear that everything the speaker was taught, confidence in herself, fearlessness in the face of adversity, a respect and love for the abnormal, and a sense of protection for the needy have contributed to the lesson the speaker refers to.
The process of determining the subtext of a piece theatre reminds me of analyzing a piece of literature—as theatre is driven by dialogue. The Stanislavski system, however, relies often on expression through action and movement, and, therefore, this analysis had to occur in separate pieces: firstly, I needed to find the mood of D.M. Larson’s piece, Pearls of Wisdom, and secondly, I needed to examine my own emotional memory in relation to the piece. Tyranny strikes me firstly as tired: she has lived more than her numbered years, and because she gave birth as a teenager, she was not able to age in a normal progression. She would hit an assailant with a “pickup truck” or “buy [her daughter] a butcher knife” in order to hide from reality. This is, in every sense, childish: as one grows into adulthood, they learn that it is absolutely necessary to face reality in all its forms. Tyranny refuses to accept reality because it is simply too painful for her to assimilate into everyday life. She cannot accept her own rape, and so she jokes that, around her hometown, it is only ever referred to as “courtship.” In her deeply sarcastic and macabre sense of humor, it is evident that she cannot grow up, as she is trapped eternally into childhood. It appears multiple times in the text, from her “courtship,” to the lullaby, she demonstrates the vindictive qualities of a child, undeveloped and inexperienced in the mature
...concept of beauty. Ignoring that the universe of women is not constituted just by those women who have clambered up to leading positions –western, white, educated women- she fells in a hasty generalization. Neither black, Hispanic, nor the 99% of poor women wear makeup to conquer nobody else than their own fear to the ugliness of everyday life. They need to wear the mask of beauty to forget the dirt in their fingernails. A play of mask which does not allow playing with words (concepts), just to use them. From that feminine existence, it seems like there is not a way out through critical distances, through the invention of neologism. Maybe the only way of getting out is shutting down the walls of language.