Zadie Smith's White Teeth

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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.

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