The Critique of Fundamentalist Discourses in Zadie Smith's White

國立成功大學

外國語文學系研究所

碩士論文

A Thesis for the Master of Arts Department of Foreign Languages and Literature National Cheng Kung University

查蒂•史密斯《白牙》中基本教義論述的批判

The Critique of Fundamentalist Discourses in Zadie Smith’s White Teeth

研究生：孫玉玲

Advisee: Yu-Lin Sun

指導教授：張淑麗 教授

Advisor: Prof. Shuli Chang

中華民國一百零二年六月

June 2013

Abstract

Zadie Smith’s debut novel, White Teeth, is known as celebration of multiculturalism which also presents fundamentalist discourses and a problematic and ambivalent view of cosmopolitan London. This thesis thus argues that Smith examines and criticizes two different fundamentalist discourses in her novel—religious fundamentalism and rational/scientific fundamentalism—by situating them against the backdrop of multicultural

London to render precarious their claims to redemption, be it redemption by a divine act of grace or by the genetic improvement of mankind. Given that the novel exposes the multiplicities of these two fundamentalist discourses, the first chapter thus examines two rather different expressions of religious fundamentalism, those of Samad and Millat. It points out the deployment of such discourses by ethnic minorities is one way to resist racial discrimination. The second chapter focuses on the Chalfenist fundamentalism, which insists on the omnipotence of modern science and human intelligence. It articulates how this approach comes into conflict with religious fundamentalism and conservative groups. On the one hand, these fundamentalist discourses represent Smith’s awareness of the emergence of counter movements to resist the hegemony of multiculturalism and globalization. The failures of these fundamentalist discourses, on the other hand, point out the impractical fantasy of religions insistence on racial and ethnic purity, and also the blindness of scientific fundamentalists’ obsession with progress, development and human intelligence. Accordingly,

White Teeth uncovers a very simple fact that humans can never reach the ultimate and eternal truth, because of the inherent finitude of the human condition and the innate flaws of humanity.

Key words: Zadie Smith, White Teeth, fundamentalist discourses, globalization, multiculturalism, transgenic experiment

中文摘要

查蒂•史密斯壯麗的小說初航——《白牙》，被譽為是一部多元文化主義的慶典。

而作者史密斯在小說中，對於多元文化與基本教義論述的混合辨證，凸顯了英國倫敦這

一世界大都會所存在的人文問題和認同矛盾。小說呈現兩種極端的基本教義派之意識形

態：狂熱的宗教者企圖從神聖律法中尋找人類的救贖的解方；以及激進的科學家企圖以

科技改造人類的先天缺陷。因而，本研究認為史密斯透過小說《白牙》呈現了「宗教式

基本教義」和「理性／科學基本教義」這二類極端論述。從小說人物的處境和倫敦多元

的文化背景，以角色人物追求救贖的過程，隱喻了宗教性的恩典或科學性的遺傳改良這

兩種極端論述的失敗結果，藉此檢視和批判這兩類基本教義論述。有鑒於作者對此二類

基本教義開展了創新的多重性辯證，因此本論文第一章探討小說人物——山曼德和米列

特二人，以呈現兩種對宗教式基本教義截然不同的立場表述，表達少數族群以宗教式基

本教義論述作為一種反抗種族歧視的部署。第二章著重於喬分式基本教義論述，描述其

堅信現代科學和人類智慧的無所不能；探討喬分主義如何面臨保守團體和宗教式基本教

義論述的挑戰。小說中對兩類基本教義論述的陳述與隱喻，代表著作者史密斯對基本教

義的霸權論述作出反抗與針砭，並展現其多元文化觀點和全球化意識。小說中描述基本

教義論述之失敗，諭示了宗教式基本教義堅持純粹種族根源的不切實際與空幻，以及批

判理性／科學基本教義論述對於現代科技和人類智慧的癡迷與盲從。於是，《白牙》這

一部小說最終揭示了一個非常簡單的事實——由於人類生存條件下的有限性和先天的

缺憾，使得人類永遠不能達到那個最終且永恆的真理。

關鍵字：查蒂•史密斯、《白牙》、基本教義論述、全球化、多元文化主義、基因改造實

驗

Table of Contents

Introduction...... 1

Chapter One: ...... 21

The Religious Fundamental Discourses of Samad and Millat Iqbal

Chapter Two: ...... 48

The Rational/scientific Fundamentalist Discourses of Marcus, Magid and Joyce Chalfen

Conclusion ...... 74

Works Cited...... 78 Sun 1

Introduction

Written in 2000, Zadie Smith’s debut novel White Teeth gains enthusiastic responses from readers across the world. Painting a lively portrait of the multicultural, immigrant society of London city in the late twentieth century, Zadie Smith ushers post-colonial and diaspora writing into a new era. White Teeth presents the complexity of a hybridized metropolitan city by featuring characters from diverse races, ethnicities, social status, and cultural and economic background. Smith examines the hybridization of identity in the postcolonial context when western and eastern nations, or former colonizing and colonized cultures, came into active contacts.

The novel focuses on the interactions between three main London families from different races and cultural backgrounds, the Jones, the Iqbals and the Chalfens. Archibald

Jones (Archie Jones), the father of the Jones, is a white British middle-age man married with a Caribbean woman, Clara, the mother of his daughter, Irie Jones. Samad Miah Iqbal (Samad

Iqbal), a former soldier in the War from Bangladesh and a waiter in an Indian restaurant with a crippled right hand. Samad and Archie become best friends during the War. After settling down in London, Samad met his wife, Alsana, a Bangladesh woman, and bears two children,

Magid and Millat, the twin brothers. The Chalffen family is a typical middle-class British family and also the third generation of Jews. The father, Marcus Chalfen, is a scientist and the leader of a controversial transgenic program, the FutureMouse. Joyce Chalfen, wife of

Marcus and the mother of four children, is a horticulturalist and a book writer. Her admiration of her husband and her needs for maternal pride make her a persuasive mother figure who forces the others to satisfy her expectation of perfectionism. The first half of the novel focuses on the first generation, the parents and their struggle against anxiety and frustration in multicultural London. Samad suffers from anxious fears of cultural assimilation and identity crises, ending with the miserable separation of the twins. Marcus, instead of being a Sun 2

victimized Jew, chooses to be a rationalist who believes in the intellectual power of humans, while searching for ways to transcend human’s limitation. Unfortunately, at the end of the novel, with a sudden twist of the plot, the mouse he uses in his experiment, the FutureMouse, escapes from the press conference, and its escape symbolizes Marcus’ downfall and the breakdown of the fantasy of the unlimited power of modern science to change the world. The other half of the novel illustrates the difficulties that the second generations confront. As

London inhabitants since their birth, the immigrant children, Irie, Magid and Millat, still experience certain degree of racial discrimination and struggle with identity problems every day. The different ways for these kids to choose to deal with their identical crises represent the conflictual interactions of multiple discourses and the various possibilities available in cosmopolitan London. The story ends with the untold story of the escaped FutureMouse,

Irie’s unborn child, whose father is unrecognizable due to the limits of science and also the unsolved conflicts between the twins, Magid, a modernist and Millat, a radical fundamentalist.

With the delicate and complicated plot, White Teeth has won various book prizes since it was published, which includes Ethnic and Multicultural Media Award for Best Book in 2000,

Authors' Club First Novel Award in 2001, TIME 100 Best English-language Novels from

1923 to 2005 and many others. As a young British female writer, Zadie Smith is honored as one of the best diaspora writer in Britian and also on Granta's list of the 20 best young authors in 2003 and 2013 after publishing her successful debut novel.

White Teeth is a novel which seems to celebrate multiculturalism and promise a bright future to the upcoming generations of immigrants. Smith, as many critics believe, narrates a

“sunny” London, where white and non-white citizens seem to get along with each other well.

The novel’s conclusion depicting Irie’s unborn child and the escaped FutureMouse again implies that the younger generations have chances to build a brighter and happier future than what their parents have promised them. For Smith, the feeling felt by the young about not being needed does not necessarily trap them to a dull and miserable life; nevertheless, Sun 3

“belonging ‘nowhere’ is neither comic nor wistful, but means instead that they can create their own ‘elsewhere’,” notes Phyllis Lassner (197). “[T]he children knew the city,” and they situate themselves well in the city, where they create and form their own identify (WT 145).

Yet, this does not mean that they are anxiety free. Instead, they do experience an acute identical crisis as they are caught in the web of multiculturalism, desperately desiring to find an anchor to root their fluid and hybridized identity. Focusing on the identical crisis of the younger generation, Smith writes White Teeth to ask crucial questions about the tension of roots and routes, multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism. Many critics may feel pleased with this fact for many of them repeatedly emphasize the importance of routes and the positive side of fluid identities and downplay the significance of history and roots. Jonathan P. A. Sell, for instance, argues that identities “metamorphose by chance” (33). That is, anything is possible. The shocking reappearance of Dr. Sick, who was supposed to be dead during the

War, proves the unreliability of history as well as the fickleness of truth. Irie’s child, whose very “biological determination is merged with indeterminacy” (Lassner 195) offers further evidence of the mutability of nature.

Unfortunately arguments mentioned above only show a partial reading of White Teeth whose complexity cannot be reduced or translated into one theoretical position. Lassner and

Sell pay scanty attention to Smith’s depiction of and critique of fundamental religious, non-religious, or political behaviors like Samad’s pursuit of pure blood, Marcus’ insistence in genealogy, Millat’s participation in radical Muslim group, and also Hortense Bowden’s strong belief in the Revelation. Even Magid’s westernization and Joshua Chalfen’s rebellions against animal experiments can be seen as subtle variations of fundamentalism. Indeed, to some critics, Smith seems critical of both multiculturalism and fundamentalism. In Global Matters,

Paul Jay points out White Teeth’s deployment of two contradictory discourses to examine the

“global character of modern existence, contemporary culture, and the identities they produce”

(9). To Jay, Smith on the one hand utilizes “[t]he juxtaposition of multiculturalism with Sun 4

fundamentalism” to present “the reader with two different contemporary discourses for handling diversity and difference” (172). On the other, Smith, as Jay mentions, also believes

“national identity and cultural belonging” are the products of “global economics,” which may have in their turn contributed to the emergence and prevalence of globalization (174). In

White Teeth, Smith builds up a conversation between these two opposite thoughts, multiculturalism and fundamentalism, seeking to figure out how modern English people, immigrants and non-immigrants, construct what they are, who they are, and also how people deal with “identity, truth, morality, and difference” in this complex late twentieth century

(174). Therefore, in Jay’s eyes, Smith writes a novel to criticize, not to celebrate, multiculturalism or “cosmopolitanism.” White Teeth is an “irony of the metropolitan world,” concludes Jay (175).

Nick Bentley also notices Smith’s blending of liberal multiculturalism and radical fundamentalism together as it tries to set into motion “a negotiation, rather than rejection, of more established constructions of Englishness” (498). On the one hand, Irie’s “complex

‘racial’ background” contributes a new meaning to Englishness (496). On the other hand,

Magid, Millat and Marcus somehow perfectly define what “‘fundamental’ and

‘fundamentalist ideology” are (498). Between Irie, who is an open-minded but racially complex character, and Magid, Millat, Marcus and Samad, who are paranoid in different ways, we find Archie Jones, who cannot be grouped into any kinds. Bentley so describes

Archie, “Archie’s characteristics are tolerance, apathy, rejection of any fundamental systems of politics or religion, philistinism, anti-intellectualism, enthusiasm for hobbies, a down-to-earth unromanticism, and yet, and inherent goodness” (498). Archie’s “goodness” and tolerance gives Smith a new model of how Englishness may be defined and performed.

When fundamentalism makes people start hating and fighting each other because of deep-seated antagonism and hostility, Archie and his flipped coin are like a sudden intrusion which “evades the imperatives of fundamentalism” (Bentley 500). Therefore, Bentley Sun 5

believes that Smith holds a complex attitude toward multiculturalism and fundamentalism.

White Teeth “celebrate[s] the possibilities of a harmonious range of new ethnicities,” but at the same time, it “remain[s] more skeptical about such an idealized construction of the nation,” concludes Bentley (500). Bentley does not blame Smith for swaying to and fro between two opposite views; instead, he points out that the reason why Smith withholds the expectation of the freely-opened and non-limited globalization and multiculturalism is that she notices the difficulties for people of different races, religions and cultural backgrounds to live together and for them to be subsumed under a generalized identity marker such as

“Englishness.” Using Englishness as a way to define ones’ identities can be subtle and difficult especially when the definition of “Englishness” has been reshaped as time goes by.

Here, it is imperative that we realize that, for Smith, to hold on to any essentialist definition of Englishness is to fall prey to the ideology of fundamentalism. Yet, what truly interests Smith is, despite the obvious pitfalls of fundamentalist ideologies, why people should so passionately hold on to it and what accounts for the fatal attraction of fundamentalist ideologies. To further explain the complexity of “Englishness” and its fatal attraction, we turn first to Jennifer Gustar who points out Irie Jones’ blindness or innocence when Irie misrecognizes the Chalfen family as a prototype of “Englishness” as well as Irie’s rashness when she, a half-British and half-Caribbean girl, tries to “merge with them”

(emphasis in original MT 272). “She wanted their Englishness. Their Chalfenisness. The purity of it,” says Irie (emphasis in original MT 272-73). This “Englishness” that Irie sees in the Chalfen’s is not only “a biological falsehood” but “a historical falsehood” since the

Chalfen are immigrants too, Gustar explains (338). It is obvious that Irie tends to draw an analogy between “Englishness” and middle-class whiteness. In this sense, Irie’s understanding of Englishness may be biased. However, Irie’s misreading of Englishness does expose the fact that among English people a confused, messed up recognition of Englishness does exist. This is why Jay, Gustar and Bentley all talk a lot about the necessity of reshaping, Sun 6

reconstructing and redefining Englishness in their works. They all make a lot of efforts to figure out how modern English people can negotiate new identities and then how immigrants can find their ease and peace in the new land. Pilar Cuder-Domínguez holds an even more progressive conception given that he reads White Teeth as a novel that is “full of irony, as it highlights the plight of characters…in search of an Englishness that remains an elusive, disembodies ideal, while those who are untroubled by their English heritage can hardly be described as role model” (186). Cuder-Domínguez here includes J. P. Hamilton, the old man whom the kids are sent to giving gifts and food for the Harvest, who is cited as a bad example of those who take “their English heritage” for granted. J. P. Hamilton reveals an ugly side of imperialism, ethnocentrism and xenophobia whose impacts are still felt so many years after the War has ended and the Empire has collapsed. By casting an ironic glance at conservative characters such as Hamilton, Smith exposes the ideological danger for people to stick to the discourse of the purity of Englishness on the one hand and underscores the multiple ways that

Englishness can be defined and performed as it is nothing but an imaginary construct, on the other hand. In other words, there are more than one fundamentalism that people who feel threatened by a changing world may subscribe to. Smith’s White Teeth stages a discursive contest of different kinds of fundamentalisms.

Gustar and Cuder-Domínguez both notice the changing definitions of Englishness since there are so many new comers of various ethnicities. Some new comers are just like the

Chalfen family posing themselves so properly and merging themselves into the new western culture so well that they even confuse both themselves and others into taking them as

“authentic” Englishmen and Englishwomen. No one treats them like outsiders and that is why

Irie Jones says she wants to become one of the Chalfens, merging herself into their

Englishness. Furthermore, Archie Jones, who supposedly possesses Englishness inherently, is so dull and so boring that his pale personality, which is like food without any taste, makes the

Englishness that he embodies undesirable for his own daughter. The abominating J. P. Sun 7

Hamilton makes the situation even worse and complicated because he proves the subscription to and performance of a fundamentalist notion of English can hurt and damage the harmony between ethnics. Smith, as many critics point out, recognizes the turbulence caused by any attempt to put into practice notions structured by binary oppositions even when people draw a beautifully perfect blueprint of a land without discriminations and full of hospitality feigning with bright and great vision of a global utopia of multiculturalism. Interestingly, fundamentalist ideology finds its expression not only in fanatics’ attempts to seek redemption through the ironed obedience of divine laws but also in scientists’ efforts to seek salvation of mankind through scientific endeavors. Marcus Chalfen’s excessive greed for controlling genetic codes and deleting randomness articulates a particular kind of fundamentalist discourse, the Chalfenist fundamentalism. This thesis thus argues that Smith examines and criticizes these two different fundamentalist discourses in her novel—religious fundamentalism and rational/scientific fundamentalism—by situating them against the backdrop of multicultural London to render precarious their claim to redemption, be it redemption by a divine act of grace or by the genetic improvement of mankind engineered by scientists.

Religious Fundamentalism and Rational/scientific Fundamentalism

Critics like Jay, Grahom Huggan simultaneously regard fundamentalism that Smith include in White Teeth as a sign or a prophetic word of the attacks of 9/11 (174; 761).

Catarina Kinnvall moreover discusses the downgrade of globalization and “the reaffirmation” of migrants’ self-identity which is basically constructed upon “patriotism and religion” (741,

745). However, in White Teeth, Smith does not illustrate fundamentalism with conventional and limited definition which is usually connected with notorious radical religious movements or even terror attacks; instead, with her narrations of religious fundamental discourses of

Samad and Millat Iqbal, White Teeth is able to present a sympathy for migrations and Sun 8

minority groups who, for a long time, have been suppressed, manipulated by the white dominant society and also to take religious fundamentalism to a new level. The growing of fundamental movements symbolize minority people’s awakening of social, racial and class inequality and also a counter reaction against the problematic cosmopolitan London and manipulations from dominant groups. To achieve their calls for equal treatments in religious, moral issues and many kinds of public issues, the fundamental communities sometimes may choose rather radical or even violent ways to protest against those who destroy the peacefulness and balance within society. For instance, to pursue one pure religion in Allah, the religious fundamental KEVIN intervenes Marcus’ FutureMouse conference, which ends up with Millat’s brutal act. The animal-rights group FATE, though not being as violent as

Millat’s religious fundamentalism, urges on the complete exclusion of animal experiment and eating meat. The Jehovah’s Witnesses and Hortense’s extreme firmness in the coming of the

End of the World exclude themselves from non-believers. Although holding different arguments, all these fundamental movements express their anger, sense of inadequacy and needs of equal treatments by speaking out and promoting their strong belief in either morality or religious criteria. Unfortunately, when these fundamental groups regard their arguments or doctrines as the One, the final salvation which can benefit all species, humans and animals alike, they meanwhile confine themselves by refusing to communicate with different others.

Z Esra Mirze defines these fundamental behaviors as “blind extremism” that “creates a threat beyond reckoning” (200). Samad’s insistence on maintaining pure blood and retrieving

Mangal Pande’s honorable historical status are his fundamental beliefs, which defines what he is and who he is. Millat’s participation in KEVIN not only reveals his needs of belongingness and recognitions; instead, only by transforming himself to a religious fundamentalist, can Millat redefine his identity and then reposition in cosmopolitan London.

With the story of Samad, Millat and people in fundamental groups, Smith shows her understandings of reasons that create pains, fears, anxiety and anger to immigrants and Sun 9

minorities. However, at the same time, she notices how “blind” these fundamentalists can be when they being confined with their beliefs in the ultimate answer, the final salvation in life.

Samad’s unusual obsession with pure genealogy, religion and family reputation “blind” his chances to accept new cultures and new identity and eventually brings his downfall. Millat’s fascination of heroism is one of the many reasons that transform him into a religious fundamentalist and in the end, because of not being able to reconcile with different others and the whole society, he becomes a cynical hater of his father, western cultures, and all the non-believers. Similarly, the Chalfen family and Magid Iqbal represent humans’ blind confidence in rationalism, modernity and progress of science. Mirze thus argues that rational/scientific extremists who “discard ethics for the sake of science” can represent another kind of fundamental discourses (200). The FutureMouse then becomes a symbol of

Marcus and Magid’s dream of crossing the boundaries of science and breaking the limitation of human intelligence. With their impractical envisions and paranoid confidence of rationality and power of modern science, the Chalfens and Magid fascinate themselves with the belief of dominating all species, humans and non-humans. Smith’s attitude toward transgenic science, however, is very subtle when being compared with her tolerance to Samad and Millat’s religious fundamentalism. She does notice the danger of transgenic science, which may connote the horror of human cloning or ethnic massacre; however, the ambiguous ending of the FutureMouse seems to suggest a possibility of the future of transgenic programs.

Fortunately, it is definite that, from these two kinds of fundamental discourses, Smith reveals their similar intolerance toward different others, nonbelievers of either God or infinite possibility of modern science and rationalism. Both of the two fundamental discourses, religious and rational/scientific, tend to eliminate uncertainty and to seek for ultimate truth, to decipher humans’ mysterious fates that cause fears and anxiety. The religious fundamentalism and rational/scientific fundamentalism eventually create “complete homogeneity (racial, religious, philosophical).” Mirze thus concludes that the “complete homogeneity” is “an Sun 10

impossibility” for that being lack of empathy, humanist and ethical concerns (200).

Eventually, through the inclusions and interactions with two different fundamental discourses,

Smith is able to present readers how dangerous “blind extremism” and “complete homogeneity” can be and what crises human beings can confront when ignoring the diversity and multiplicity.

Diaspora’s Romance with Fundamentalist Ideologies

James Clifford is a good example of scholars dreaming of a happy land of multiculturalism without national boundaries. He develops his theory based on his strong belief in the transferability and flexibility of identities. For a long time, a man’s original root and mother land decide what he is and who he is. Nonetheless, during this age of post-coloniality, Clifford seeks to open up more possibilities for those diaspora and immigrants crossing and traveling between different cultures. “[I]t is not possible to define diaspora sharply,” notes Clifford in his essay “Diasporas” (310). The complexity of diaspora can be the result of the rapidly developing technology in the late twentieth century. Traveling becomes easy and fast; therefore, foreign workers and immigrants move from one nation to another. These “border crossings” (304) ultimately changes the “pure forms” of diaspora, a classic definition that William Safran once concludes. That is, traditionally, in Safran’s notions, the trajectory of diaspora is determined by “a teleology of return,” and thus its movement follows a discernible pattern and can be traced back to a “source” and an “origin”

(306). This notion of diaspora is now challenged by those more and more complex transnational trajectories, which entail the formation of fluid and hybrid identities. Briefly said, Safran’s diaspora is constructed around the notion of a pure root or autochthonism.

However, Clifford finds such notion problematic. “How long does it take to become

‘indigenous’,” asks Clifford (309). Since the “natural connection to the land” (308) cannot be easily identified anymore, Clifford seeks to view diaspora and diasporic identities from a Sun 11

wider spectrum. In Safran’s historical viewpoint, history is linear because there is one specific origin or homeland which every diaspora can return to or can trace back to. However, to Clifford, one’s origin cannot be clearly, absolutely defined because of one’s “multi-locale attachments” to those places that one claims as one’s homes. Since it is impossible to categorize one’s original and historical identity, to trace back or to return to the first and only homeland becomes unnecessary. Therefore, Clifford starts to view history not as a linear succession of events but as a network of “[d]ecentered, lateral connection.” “[A] shared, ongoing history of displacement, suffering, adaptation, or resistance may be as important as the projection of a specific origin,” thus notes Clifford (306). In spite of his focusing on the question of how and where diaspora choose to return back, to look for their absolute origin,

Clifford places more emphases on the processes of ongoing movement in diaspora experience.

To Clifford, diasporic history and identity can be more flexible, fluid and also changeable.

Based on this hypothesis, he aims to articulate diaspora in a more comprehensive way by synthesizing and analyzing various arguments from diverse critics such as Paul Gilory, Daniel

Boyarin and Jonathan Boyarin.

While he agrees with the argument Gilroy advances in his The Black Atlantic, Clifford singles out and zooms in on Gilroy’s notion of “copresence” in diaspora experience. For diasporas, the “here” and “there,” where they live now and where they came from then, can exist at the same time. “[T]he present [is] constantly shadowed by a past,” notes Clifford

(318). Because of the interwoven copresence of space and time, the diaspora experience of how the old (cultures and traditions) struggles with and blends into the new (nations) become what critics like Clifford mainly seek to focus. The copresence of the here and there, now and then, can well explain the unsettlement and displacement in diasporas’ state of mind.

Cliffford defines this diaspora experience as “dwelling-in-displacement” (310), which underscores the diasporas’ in-betweenness, of their “living here and remembering/desiring another place.” For diaspora, their mental status can be totally separated from their physical Sun 12

status. In other words, the “here” always reminds diaspora that they should belong to the place of “not-here” (311). This consciousness of unsettlement represents that, to diaspora, they are always in the middle of becoming someone else or of going somewhere else. The concept of this in-betweeness, therefore, proves the diaspora’s situatedness in ambivalent temporality and spatiality. Taking a cue from Gilroy, Clifford also argues that “diaspora identifications” with the current situation are the fundamental tenet of diaspora culture and tradition in spite of the changing faces of diaspora identities. For Gilroy and the Boyarins, culture and tradition, the same as identities, are the “process rather than an end” and can be

“remade” (321, 323). Diasporas nowadays, in Clifford’s point of view, need to confront that possibility that their “inter-cultural, transnational” (323) situatedness creates not only hybridization but also uncertainty because “tradition” and culture now can be “displaced and reinvented” (321).

Other than the notion of “copresence” elaborated by both Gilroy and Clifford, the

Boyarins also believe that for the Jewish people it is impossible to connect diaspora with one specific land and culture. To the Boyarins, the “mixing” of languages, cultures and people creates the hybridized identities of Jews and because of their hybridized or “diasporized” identities, their culture as well as their identities are “constantly being remade.” In other words, it is their identification with their “difference (here)” which forces the Jewish people to renegotiate or to recognize their “connection” with “elsewhere” (qtd. in Clifford 323). In

Clifford’s words, “Difference… is a process of continual renegotiation in new circumstances of dangerous and creative coexistence” (327). The Boyarins note, to the Jewish people,

“…copresence of those others is not a threat, but rather the condition of our lives” (qtd. in

Clifford 322). The Jews’ recognition of their diversity, hybridity and coexistence proves that in diasporic discourse returning to or connecting with a centered and specific land is not what

Clifford cares about anymore. Instead, Clifford tends to perceive diaspora in a more flexible way. He pays more attention to how diasporic people confront their ambivalent identities and Sun 13

how they communicate with the reality of the coexistence or the copresence of the past and the present. Furthermore, he goes one step further and tries to rearticulate a diaspora discourse that is structured not by the binary opposition between center and periphery or between a before and an after.

The fluidity, hybridity and diversity of diaspora discourse are also represented in

Clifford’s notions of the mobility of culture. In “Traveling Culture,” he “questions the conventional anthropological model of culture as something fixed and local” and “stresses the dis-location of culture” (qtd. in Jay, “Beyond Discipline” 37). Culture is not located anymore, which means it can be changed, or, in Clifford’s word, it can be remade and reinvented. This mobility of culture is made possible by global economic and technological development.

Globalization accelerates not only the travel of population but also the travel of culture and knowledge with the help from diaspora writers, global media, films and arts. Those who celebrate globalization and cosmopolitanism believe that they can redraw the boundaries between classes, cultures and even between nation-states.

However, in Question of Travel, Caren Kaplan points out the paradoxes of positive and joyful cosmopolitanism. She points out that cosmopolitanism is in fact “just another manifestation of imperialism” (127) and cosmopolitan writers and critics are the

“bourgeoisie” who can travel freely and “accrue and control knowledge in the name of multiculturalism” (126). Cosmopolitanism and globalization do not bring the migrants or the diaspora the justice and equality that they expected when dwelling in new lands; instead, the traveling and the displacement proves the existence of “capitalist development and accumulation,” “imperialist expansion” and also “inequities of numerous kinds” (131). In

“World without Boundaries,” Kaplan questions “the myth of a world without boundaries.”

Entrepreneurs of trans-national companies and global economic systems create “fantasies of boundarylessness,” wishing or expecting that their products, advertisement and promotion can “travel” to any destination in the world on the basis of the growth of transnational Sun 14

consumption. Yet the binary oppositions are not being eroded; contrarily, the “homogenizing globalization,” claims Kaplan, “ensures further exploitation” of local culture and domestic economy (59-60). Moreover, Kaplan points out that transnational capitalism expands the inequality between classes because only “bourgeois” customers who have higher consumption ability can afford new products. There is no difference whether those potential customers are in the First World or in the Third World (55). Our world is “composed of center and periphery,” and, because of the development of global economy, the periphery can one day become the center (59). However, it does not mean the disappearance of periphery. That is, “the power” of the nation state, along with the boundaries between different “oppositional representations of the world…is never eliminated but differently organized and maintained,” concludes Kaplan (60-61). “A world without boundaries” is, after all, a dream and globalization do not break boundaries but reinforce the discrepancy between classes.

What may be more surprising for defenders of cosmopolitanism is that not only do the global economic systems, transnational capitalists and entrepreneurs produce and celebrate cosmopolitanism, but cosmopolitanism also infiltrates into cultural criticism and literary studies. A fantasy of a world without boundaries or of crossing the boundaries is also present in many works written by diaspora writers and critics. To Edward Said, for example, “The exile…is a romantic figure that can be readily identified and positional in an aestheticized world of creativity and loss” (qtd. in Kaplan, Questions of Travel120). Drawing from the notion of Adorno’s “the impossibility of dwelling” and “the possibility of writing,” Said views exile writing from a more spiritual and artistic way, regarding writing as “a place to live.” Only through writing about “home” can diaspora writers situate themselves in a comfortable state (qtd. in Kaplan, Questions of Travel 119). Adorno believes the “distance” between home and away, past and present, can “bring understanding,” and help writers write and discover truth and reality. Adorno calls these exile writers as “the intellectual in emigration,” who possess knowledge and also multiple and diverse cultures and languages Sun 15

(qtd. in Kaplan, Questions of Travel 118); therefore, Kaplan uses Salman Rushdie as an example of those diaspora intellects who see exile as “a primarily literary and bourgeois state” (Kaplan 120). Kaplan casts doubts on this kind of cosmopolitanism which thrives on the basis of the inequality of classes caused by imperialism and capitalism.

Critics like Adorno, Said and also Clifford believe that a positive cosmopolitanism can give diaspora and our world a more peaceful and joyful future, one that allows the crossing and breaking of the boundaries between nation-states, cultures, ethnics and languages.

However, in Kaplan’s essays, she proves the impossibility of eliminating or ignoring boundaries. By examining the economic discrepancy between classes, Kaplan reveals the limits of cosmopolitanism and questions too optimistic an investment in exile or diaspora writing. Sharon Todd engages with similar issues in “Rethinking cosmopolitan,” but enters into a dialogue first with Kant about his notion of the “right of humanity” (33), then with

Kristeva about her idea of universal otherness (41), and also with Derrida about “the impossibility of unconditional cosmopolitan” (45). In so doing, Todd seeks to “rethink” the universal experience of how people deal with “humanity, rights, citizenship” (49).

Kant defines the “cosmopolitan right” as “the right of the stranger not to be treated with hostility when he arrives on someone else’s territory.” The hospitality that a stranger receives when he/she is in a foreign land is presented as a universal right by Kant (qtd. in Todd 33).

Kant believes that this universal right of hospitality is the practice of how people should show their respect to “diverse cultures and individuals” (qtd. in Todd 35). If it is out of his wish to build a world with absolute peace and freedom that Kant should want to recognize cosmopolitanism as human’s universal right, then to Kristeva, cosmopolitanism symbolizes the blurring of the boundary between self and others. Studying the issue of difference from a psychoanalytical view, Kristeva recognizes “a foreigner” as an inner but a separate part inside every one of us. The “unconscious aspect human existence,” to her, can help we humans discover the “strangeness’” within us; furthermore, by identifying the “uncanny strangeness” Sun 16

within us, humans can learn to respect those unfamiliar others because “[W]e are all foreigners…if I am a foreigner, there are no foreigners” (qtd. in Todd 41). It is due to this notion of “universal otherness,” so Todd points out, that brings Kristeva to believe that cosmopolitanism can “enable us to discover paths of negotiation between our conscious selves and the unconscious dynamics that infuse our social and political relationships” (42).

To Todd, however, Kristeva overestimates the reciprocity of the self and the other, while underestimating the complexity of humans’ tangled inner landscapes. In short, for Todd,

Kristeva’s “universality of otherness” cannot fully account for our relation with and encounters of social, political and cultural “others” in our daily life (42). Since Todd questions Kristeva’s universal others and also Kant’s unconditional cosmopolitanism, she, therefore, turns her attention to Derrida. Todd believes that Derrida holds a “less optimistic” and more prudent attitude toward Kant’s universal right of humanity (43). When the unconditional hospitality confronts “the realm of laws, regulations, and political institutions of justice,” according to Derrida, “one can no longer exercise hospitality unconditionally”

(qtd. in Todd 43-44).

By elaborating notions proposed by Kant, Kristeva and Derrida, Todd points out the difficulties and paradoxes of cosmopolitanism and the universal right of humanity that are once believed and defended by many. Clifford’s notion of the fluidity of diaspora identity, to some degree, represents his belief in the rights of cosmopolitans to travel freely. Nonetheless, in Kaplan’s point of view, those diaspora writers and critics somehow symbolize the remaining power of imperialism and capitalism. She, therefore, notices the impossibility of neglecting the boundaries between the self and the others, and those between the nation-states.

Also, by observing class differences, Kaplan reveals the limitation of globalization. She believes those cross-national entrepreneurs are overly positive and they also overestimate the influence of globalization when the diverse cultures of the third or the fourth world actually become the products of consumption promoted and sold by western companies. Sun 17

Fundamentalism as Symptom of Globality and Cosmopolitanism

For years, critics all want to find solutions to erase or at least to reduce the barriers between discrepant races, religions, cultures, and nations. Proponents of globalization and cosmopolitanism believe that fluidity and flexibility are the answer to the problems of differences. They usually neglect and undermine the importance of origins, roots and history.

In White Teeth, Smith illustrates the difficulties that the first and second generation immigrants experienced when trying to find a proper position in land of strangers. From the view of globalization and cosmopolitanism, it is believed that White Teeth celebrates a promising new world in which people can move and travel freely between visible and invisible boundaries. However, Smith has presented this happy multicultural land as a symptom of diasporic fantasy to render an incisive diagnosis of diaspora as the uneven mixture of the fundamentalist ideology of purity on the one hand and the cosmopolitan ideology of hybridity on the other hand. Moreover, obviously, arguments made by Clifford,

Kaplan, Todd and many others create paradoxical views on these two seemingly dichotomized ideologies. On the one hand, White Teeth seems to imply the possibility of eliminating and ignoring the roots and the origins because they are too deep and too far to identify with. Irie Jones and her unborn child is one obvious case promising a happy ending for people who just want to let go and let live. In addition, the escaped FutureMouse destroys the calculations of science and Marcus’ wish to reduce uncertainties. The surprising escape of the FutureMouse at the end symbolizes the power of nature or the power of randomness which no one can predict. On the other hand, the fundamentalist pursuit of good blood, pure genes and one righteous religion bring out the horror of racism, Nazism or even terrorism at the same time.

Of course, critics do recognize Smith’s sarcastic tones in White Teeth, and they do point out that the novel does more than exposing the limitation of globalization and Sun 18

cosmopolitanism. “White Teeth is never a blind celebration of cultural syncretism,” notes

Raphael Dalleo “The novel explores the ramifications and outcomes of cultural mixing, aware of dangers and possibilities of a globalized world in which purity is impossible” (93).

However, many of them put a lot of efforts trying to give one specific answer to the question about why immigrants suffer and how they can stop suffering that much. They seem to believe it is important for all immigrants to find peace both within their inner beings and with the new society. For example, Sell concludes that “identity” is “a space we can play in and whose contours change from one moment to the next in response to the subject’s relation to.”

To put it more simply, identity recognition is more like a “performance by an actor responding to environment and audience” (37). Millat Iqbal, in this sense, is a good actor.

Girls all adore Millat and he knows the reason well when he says, “They need to me to be

Millat. Good old Millat. Wicked Millat. Safe, sweet-as, Millat. They need me to be cool. It’s practically a responsibility” (WT 224). He was preforming because “He had to please all of the people of the time” (WT 225). Before recognizing his “Paki” identity and positioning himself comfortably in the ethnic group, KEVIN, Millat is totally fine with satisfying all those girls’ exotic imagination. The huge difference between the two generations of immigrants hence suggest to readers that the younger generations are supposed to accustom themselves to new cultures better than their parents did. “Now, the children knew the city”

(WT 145) because they can behave so well and are so comfortable within the city that they actually claim everything that meets their own eyes as their own property. Still, many other critics notice the unceasing mental anxieties experienced by Samad. As what have been mentioned in previous passages, Samad is an incarnation of fundamentalism. This does not mean that he stops making efforts to adapt himself to the new culture. White Teeth creates a noxious circle in charting out the emotional turbulence of migration. Second-generation immigrants like Milliat and Irie may look happy in the multicultural urban landscape of

London, but they are actually quite confused about who they are and where their home is. Sun 19

First-generation immigrants such as Samad may seem quite out of place in London, but

Samad can ironically be more attuned to the multicultural London than his two sons.

Smith does an excellent job confusing and troubling readers by illustrating the mingling of cosmopolitanism and fundamentalism, while subjecting both to a careful scrutiny. While the younger generations may look liberal and open minded, they probably encounter racial discrimination and feel depressed of being outsiders no matter how hard they try to mix and mingle. Similarly, when the older generation, like Samad Iqbal, with his insistence in genealogy and religious doctrines because of the fear of elimination, may articulate the most incisive critique of the ideology of fundamentalism. Moreover, from the previous passages, the limitation and disadvantages of globalization and cosmopolitanism are so obvious that more and more critics turn to question the violation of imperialism and the entitlement of bourgeoisie. They take fundamentalism as a proof of the failure of cosmopolitanism and also as a threat of globalization. White Teeth not only supports this viewpoint and also implies that the standstill of fundamentalism is just right in the corner. Then readers start to think “what is the ultimate truth eventually?” and “what is the final destination for immigrants and diaspora?” This thesis aims to put these two questions into a dialogue to arrive at a new way of approaching such questions as “by the end of the long story, does White Teeth answer both questions?” or “Does White Teeth satisfy those immigrants who are suffering from identical crises and fear of assimilation?”

Thesis Structure

Given that the novel exposes the multiplicities of fundamentalist discourses, the first chapter thus examines the fundamentalist psychology of Samad Iqbal and Millat Iqbal because they give two rather different expressions to religious fundamentalism. By analyzing these two expressions of religious fundamentalism, this chapter points out that the deployment of religious fundamentalist discourse by ethnic minority is a way for them to Sun 20

resist racial discrimination. The second chapter focuses on the Chalfenist fundamentalism which insists on the omnipotence of modern science and human intelligence. This chapter analyzes the birth of Chalfenist fundamentalism and discusses how it tackles with religious fundamentalism and faces the challenge from conservative groups. The founder of

Chalfenism, Marcus Chalfen and two important adherents of it, Maigd Iqbal and Joyce

Chalfen, will be the three main focuses. Marcus and Joyce Chalfen and Magid Iqbal symbolize the belief in the ultimate power of science. Marcus Chalfen’s FutureMouse, of course, is the focus of my study for it embodies Marcus’ fundamentalism in science and genealogy. Joyce’s belief in species cloning through cross-pollination, and also in the power of education in civilizing the deviants such as Milliat and Irie, strongly suggests she is just another arrogant person who thinks herself as the One, the savoir for those who are in pain.

Magid Iqbal, as the one who has been sent back to Bangladesh to learn Islamic traditions and religions, ironically fails to meet his father’s expectation as he turns out to a westernized man, a proponent of science and an opponent of uncertainty and unpredictable mystery. To analyze these three characters, the second chapter will be able to clarify another kind of fundamentalism, to figure out the reason why their fundamentalism eventually fails and what this failure suggests. As Smith says in the last page, “the end is simply the beginning of an even longer story,” (448), White Teeth uncovers a very simple fact that humans can never reach the ultimate truth, the eternal knowledge because of the limits of language and the innate flaws of humanity. To conclude the entire thesis, Irie Jones will be taken as an example of the blending of cosmopolitanism, multiculturalism and fundamentalism. Sun 21

Chapter One:

The Religious Fundamental Discourses of Samad and Millat Iqbal

The sense of uncertainty and fluidity feature importantly in the post-modern and post-colonial age. As Henk van Houtum and Ton van Haerssen note “[T]he boundaries between…home and away, between good and evil, between the known and the unknown have become arguably blurred” (127). In the post-modern and post-colonial era, in particular, the one and the only one answer seems to lose its necessity and legitimacy. Diaspora writers willingly accept and happily celebrate an age of uncertainty and a world without boundaries.

Bjarati Mukherjee, for instance, creates a typical heroine Jasmine in Jasmine. “Her

[Jasmine’s] identity is always in a flux of dislocation and relocation, always liquid, never fixed,” mention Houtum and Haerssen (132). Jasmine presents “[t]he celebration of fluid identities.” Jasmine’s ability in fluidly negotiating with her “past, present and futures” and her paths of freely, though illegally, travelling from countries to countries suggests the possibility of “re-writing,” re-identifying “of the self” and the fact that immigrants like

Jasmine are always in the middle pathway of “becoming” someone else, while looking forward to new possibility and new identities (Houtum and Haerssen 132). Globalization brings the birth of cosmopolitan cities to the world and also promises free and open spaces for world citizens traveling across national borders with less and less limitations.

Unfortunately, as what has been mentioned in the Introduction, though critics of globalism and cosmopolitanism attempt to blur barriers between differences, some other critics like

Kaplan and Jay still find it doubtful and regard a world without boundaries as utopian idealism which is impossible to achieve. Similarly, Houtum and Hearssen also point out the obstacles and limitation of the fluidity and mobility of borders. “[T]he many post-modern celebrations on and calls for heterotopia, involving the rejection of an order of sameness and repetition and the acknowledgement of ambivalences and differences, have not led to a Sun 22

reduction of claims on space and spatial fixations,” so they argue (127). When Clifford and diaspora writers dream about travelling around and crossing the national borders freely without difficulties, they, whether carelessly or purposely, neglect the fact that traveling without passports could be just an unpractical dream. Even when Kaplan observes the brilliant and outstanding successes of transnational enterprises for their adopting cultural differences fluently, she cannot ignore that the global economic development could meanwhile reinforce the dominating power left by the old imperialism. Needless to say, it is believed that the “national identity and cultural belonging” bring the disastrous attacks of

9/11 (Jay, “Multiculturalism” 174).

Critics nowadays gradually find it more and more difficult to overlook the tremendous influence of fundamentalism in cultures and religions. Kinnvall, for instance, aims to figure out why religions, nationalism and fundamentalism were once again catching the attention of the public after 9/11. In her “Globalization and Religious Nationalism,” Kinnvall notes that the rebirth of “patriotism and religion” (745) can be attributed to the need of “security” in the age of globalization (744). When migrants and refugees have been expatriated from their countries of birth, they all seek for a zone of safety hoping to reconstruct their new identities in new lands. Therefore, once they sense “an acute anxiety about their new circumstances and strong feelings of homelessness,” they retrieve their affection toward traditional cultures and religions which apparently represent what they are and where they come from (Kinnvall 747).

“[M]any expatriate South Asians in the West have become more aggressively traditional, and more culturally exclusive and chauvinistic,” accordingly explains Ashis Nandy (qtd. in

Kinnvall 746). Kinnvall’s observation on the relations between globalism and fundamentalism confirms that the doubts of cosmopolitanism and globalization are credible and reasonable.

Houtum and Haerssen therefore point out the dilemma between migrations, territorial borders and economic liberalization. Under the globalized economics, transnational Sun 23

enterprises and governments adapt human resource and immigration policy to attract more skillful or low-cost work force from other countries in order to maintain their competitiveness.

However, the importation of foreign work force raises problems of personal safety, hence arousing the suspicions of local inhabitants. The paradox of economic development, border safety and personal rights for both local inhabitants and new comers therefore becomes a debatable issue. “Complete closure and complete openness of the borders are generally seen as extremes on an imagined border continuum,” hence “the degree of openness” and “the degree of closure” rouse the debate on the “liberal economic[s]” and “the immigration of refugee” (Houtum and Haerssen 128). Based on arguments made by Kinnvall, Houtum and

Haerssen, we find out that binary oppositions do exist and it is hard to reduce, to destroy or even to blur the odds. Defenders of cosmopolitanism, globalization and post-modernism pursue a totally free world and believe in people’s good will and willingness to practice hospitability and acceptance. They face their failure when the religious fundamentalism takes over once again both before and after 9/11. Though it does not mean that the conservative group defeats the liberal one, the debates are sure to be roused from then on. It seems that it is never possible to find a balancing point in between these two opposite poles. A liberalist who believes in cosmopolitanism and globalization may probably find it hard to live under the confines of various borders and boundaries. Similarly, a fundamentalist who is conservative and works to protect cultural tradition and religions from disappearance and assimilation would also find it horrible if living in an age with uncertain and fluid identity. Hence, it is ineluctable for the two opposite kinds of persons to deny, ignore each other because the acknowledgement of the difference embodied by the “strangers” may cause “fear.” “The antidote to xenophobia, racism, and the marginalization of others is to recognize the foreigner within ourselves,” argues Kristeva (qtd. in Kinnvall 753). Such a recognition may, however, further the fear when the strangers are “suddenly recognized as a threat” from within rather than from without (753). Sun 24

In White Teeth, Samad Iqbal does express his fear and melancholy all the time especially when recognizing that he has been distorted and split by the West. Samad’s anxiety comes more from the fear of being assimilated by the western value than from the fear of the loss and disappearance of self-identity and origins. That is why he fights hard to preserve his cultural identity as a Bengali and an heir to the noble blood of the Iqbal family and his great grandfather, Mangal Pande, an unknown hero. Samad stands dangerously in between the two extreme sides in the spectrum of “closure and openness,” for not being able to decide whether to embrace the West or to go back to the East. He is caught in between as if he had “One leg in the present, one in the past,” so observes Alsana, Samad’s wife (WT 68). In chapter twelve,

“Canines,” when Alsana talks about the Chalfens, she says “I’ll call them Chaffinches,” common English garden birds with “sharp little canines.” Alsana is frustrated with the prospect that the Chalfens are stealing her kids away. Or even worse, “[T]hey don’t just steal, they rip apart,” mourns Alsana (WT 285). In fact, the ripping teeth of western cultures are not just tearing Alsana’s kids away from her, but they are tearing apart all immigrants, both bodies and souls. Immigrants are torn and split into pieces so that they cannot recognize their original faces anymore. Alsana’s nightmare that her only “legacy” will be a bunch of

“unrecognizable great-grandchildren,” with “their Bengaliness thoroughly diluted, genotype hidden by phenotype” explains it all (WT 272). Samad Iqbal is torn apart as well by the West and lives in states of fragments and incompleteness. Samad’s identity is definitely like a labyrinth traversed both by the complicated history of his family and by the tangled history of modern England and Bangladesh. Most of the time, Samad is found to be extremely anxious when trying to situate himself and to accustom to the unfamiliarity around him. He denies the changes happening around him and his denial perhaps is the reason why he and Archie both like staying in the O’Connell. “Nothing changes here” in O’Connell (WT 203). Interestingly, sometimes though very rarely, Samad is, or performs, with confidence, knowledge and progressiveness. To understand Samad’s split identity and to clarify what he suffers from and Sun 25

why he suffers, in the following, I need to begin with illustrating how Zadie Smith utilizes the symbol of “teeth” and images of animals to portray the psychic split of immigrants and why people, or at least immigrants and diasporas, suffer from being split.

Images and symbols of animals are easy to be found. As one of the chapter titles suggests, “The canines” in White Teeth has been mentioned and regarded as one of the metaphors to represent the split life of immigrants torn apart by different cultures and countries. “The ripping teeth,” moreover, can also demonstrate an image of animals for the fact that “canines” can be coincidentally linked with dogs according to the definitions given by Oxford English Dictionary. As for the other innovative coinages that we find in the novel such as the FutureMouse, the mouse used in Marcuss genetics experiment, and FATE, acronym for Fighting Animal Torture and Exploitation, an organization that Joshua Chalfen join, they all connote a specific and intimate connection between humans and animals. What does Zadie Smith see in the relationship between men and animals? Kay Anderson examines the “‘bestial’ within human character” (emphasis in original) in her essay. Anderson argues that in human nature is present an animal-like wildness. She defines the animality in humans as human’s “‘impure’ impulses” or “bodily impulses.” To distinguish ourselves from animals, humans intend to “repress” or “elide” the impulses or the “drive” of nature within our bodies

(4). Humans’ animality causes fears. “The ‘beast within’ may well represent the denied bit of ourselves, the bit of ‘human nature’ we fear we cannot control,” notes Anderson (6).

Anderson therefore develops a theory of the “split.” She sees “Human as ‘split’—into physical animal and cultural human” (8). The “split,” however, not only exists in a person but also draws a line between humans and animals. Tracing backing to ancient Greeks and borrowing ideas from Aristotle, Anderson characterizes human-animal relationship as a

“human scale,” in which humans stand on one side and animals or “bestial people,” the other.

“…‘[B]arbarians’ (nature’s slaves) stood at the bestial end of the human scale where people lacked mastery over their passion,” so explains Anderson (9). Because of this “baseline Sun 26

distinction” between humans and “brute-like people” (9), Anderson moves one step further and applies it to explain the cause of human superiority. Therefore, she notes “If to be

‘human’ was to hold the capacity for ascent out of instinct or savagery, then the superiority of some humans over others could be made to stand analogously to the superiority of primitive people over apes” (11). Anderson, as the result, briefly concludes

Discourses about animality have regularly found their way into institutional life and

collective efforts at exclusion, the interrogation of which clarifies at least two things as

they relate to European racist formations: first, the role that universalizing assumptions

about humanity and animality played in justifying peculiarly racist regimes; and second,

we stand to gain more precise understanding of the cultural character of discursive

regimes known often too blandly and monolithically as ‘racist’. (12)

In the seventh chapter in White Teeth, for instance, Mr. J. P. Hamilton illustrates the significance of “the third molars” by metaphorically calling them the “father’s teeth” and

“wisdom teeth” which can only grow when one’s mouth is “large enough to accommodate them.” “[W]isdom teeth are passed down by the father,” says Hamilton to the kids. In a word, molars can metaphorically be an analogy of the fathers’ or ancestors’ wisdom and cultures that breed their descendants. Hamilton’s fear of dental problems shows his ambivalent attitude toward the older generations; therefore, he says “[t]hey [the molars] stay locked up there with bone—an impaction, I believe, is the term—and terrible, terrible infection ensues”

(WT 145). For Cuder-Domingues, Hamilton’s “teething problem” suggests that the problem of “ethnocentrism” still exists in modern immigrant society. He notes, “That this episode has bestowed the novel’s title cannot fail to be significant, [for it connotes] Smith’s own way to point at how entrenched these values [ethnocentrism] continue to be in present-day England”

(186). Duder-Domingues’ assumption is confirmed when Hamilton claims “...the only way I could identify the nigger was by the whiteness of his teeth, if you see what I mean” (WT 144).

Anderson’s notion of humans’ inner bestiality could provide another possible explanation to Sun 27

account for Hamilton’s “ethnocentrism.” Hamilton’s implicit racism actually shows his

“anxieties” of losing control over immigrants. When confronting with minorities, the dominant groups experience “the loss of control that is threatened to the purity and integrity of self-identity body,” notes Anderson (5). Hamilton’s hatred toward niggers shows his fear of being in an “out-of-controlled” situation and meanwhile his obsession with the third molar suggests his desire to regain control of his own body. Identifying black people as

“barbarians,” Hamilton situates himself at the opposite end of niggers, the bestial people.

However, niggers’ white teeth blur the differentiation between the whites and the blacks.

Ostensibly shocked by this fact, Hamilton, as a result, unconsciously expresses his anxiety over the loss of superiority as a white man.

Then what is it about Samad’s animality? Does it also exist? Samad is perfectly aware of his “impure impulses” and tries all his best to “elide” or “repress” such impulses but all is in vain eventually. Sex and alcohols are two of the largest temptations that Samad can hardly resist, though he never admits to himself that he is constantly struggling with those impure and animal instincts. Ironically, Samad even shows his contempt of Archie’s so-called “dying wish.” “The last thing you would wish to do before you shuffled off this mortal coil is ‘slap your salami.’ Achieve orgasm,” questions Samad in a tone of belittlement (WT 86). However,

Samad’s actions again prove he is never a man of his word. When he meets Poppy Burt-Jones the first time, Samad is sexually attracted to her. His affection for Poppy is direct, sexual and without any disguise. Samad immediately recognizes his desire for sex because for a long time sex has been distracting his mind from his body. Sarcastically, as a way of compromise, he finds himself an excuse. Therefore, “To the pure all things are pure,” recites Samad whenever he feels sexually aroused by comforting his “abominable heat in his trouser” with his “functional left hand” (WT 115-16). “To the pure all things are pure” is like the last outpost that Samad builds to protect himself from sexual excesses. However, Poppy

Burt-Jones makes all Samad’s “self-restraint” (emphasis in original) turn out to be a Sun 28

paradoxical farce. There is a ridiculous moment when Samad and Miss Burt-Jones talking about Magid’s use of silence as a protesting strategy, Samad intentionally misinterprets it as an act of piety in Muslim, “Amar durbol lagche,” (emphasis in original) which, according to

Samad’s false explanation, means “closed-mouth worship of the Creator.” “I fell weak. It means, Miss Burt-Jones, that every strand of me feels weakened by the desire to kiss you,”

(emphasis in original) says Samad silently in his mind. The real meaning and Samad’s misinterpretation of “Amar durbol lagche” (emphasis in original) displays Samad’s struggles

(WT 133). His dilemma comes from his inability of controlling the “denied bit” of “animal nature” within himself, to use Anderson’s words. According to Anderson, the human and animal distinction can be traced back all the way to antiquity. It has always been believed by ancient Greeks that “humans could control their biological endowments through thoughts,” whereas “animals were locked in the tyranny of instinct, unable to realize their potential”

(Anderson 7). Samad’s animal instinct, which has been hypocritically disguised with his spell,

“To the pure all things are pure,” makes him sexually attracted to Poppy.

Besides sex, drugs and alcohols also awaken Samad’s “bestial instinct.” “Drinking alcohol, it is said, releases ‘the animal’ in people, especially men” (Anderson 3). Samad’s inability to resist drinking proves this argument valid. He, again submitting himself to the desire of drinking, makes a deal with God. The deal stipulates that “he might drink” if he

“gave up masturbation.” Instead of pursuing one absolute and strict doctrine, Samad looks for a compromise. “Can’t say fairer than that” (emphasis in original) is his way to acquit himself of his responsibility to obey Allah. “I’m basically a good man. I don’t slap the salami. Give me a break. I have the odd drink,” says Samad (WT 117). The contract with God is so easy to break and the new one, therefore, is easy to set up after Samad recognizes his sexual need for

Poppy Burt-Jones. Samad naively thinks his compromises can lessen “the sin”; however, the fact is, his “spiritual, physical, sexual” hunger becomes bigger and bigger until the day when

“the animal” within him transforms into a monster (WT 118). Samad thinks that the kids Sun 29

discover his adultery and all his sinful deeds finally take revenge on him when he stands on the street with Miss Burt-Jones, seeing “his two sons, their white teeth biting into two waxy apples, waving, smiling” to him (WT 152). After all, his downfall is not an act of revenge exacted by God though Samad believes it is; instead, it is the definite result of a man’s bestiality and his fear of that.

Human beings’ animality, the beast within, shows the weakness and the darkest side of human nature and also proves the hypothesis that Zadie Smith purposely uses plenty of animal images and symbols to illustrate people’s ambivalence. More importantly, via Samad

Iqbal’s animality and his struggles in fighting against it, the novel exposes Samad’s in-betweenness. Focusing on immigrants in London and the problems which they encounter,

Smith addresses the sorrow and the fears of both the first and the second generations of immigrants. Suffering from their “original trauma,”1 the first generation and their children both have no way to escape from “going back and forth...from one land to another, from one faith to another” (WT 136). Similarly, to Samad, it is impossible and unbearable to live two lives, one at the present and the other far away in the past and back in the East. Unfortunately, he has no option but to accept the coexistence or the “co-presence” of his split identities.

There, as Smith concludes in the same passages, is always “a dash across continents” tagged before every immigrant’s name (WT 136). When Alsana explains her relationship with Samad

Iqbal to her Niece-of-Shame, she says, “We married old men... they still always have daddy-long-legs for fathers. One leg in the present, one in the past...Their roots will always be tangled” (WT 68). For immigrants like Samad Iqbal, their roots are dangled not only between time, the present and the past, but also between nations, cultures and religions and even between his conscience and morality. He, therefore, suffers from the unceasing tumbles

1 Accordingly Ulrike Tancke, “Original trauma” is an “unavoidably painful constants the immigrants experience.” Based on Roland Robertson, it is “the fundamental sense of loss, rootlessness and unbelonging that often come with live” in life of migrant people (qtd. in Tancke 1). Original trauma is that diaspora identities repeatedly experience, “struggle to connect to their origins and to construct their identities”(Tancke 1). Sun 30

inside and outside of his mind. When confronting Mad Mary on the street, Samad spontaneously responds to her antics by saying, “We are split people. For myself, half of me wishes to sit quietly with me legs crossed, letting the things that are beyond my control wash over me. But the other half wants to fight the holy war” (WT 150). It is at this moment that we see clearly that Samad senses his incompleteness and he continually struggles against his corruption which, he believes, is caused by England, where is “so far from God” (WT 121).

Apparently, Samad fails to situate himself in this cosmopolitan city, London, in which he now finds himself trapped.

Interestingly, Samad was once a man with confidence when he first arrived in England.

There has once been brightness and hopes in his life when he has just married his young new wife, Alsana. Feeling tragically depressed by his failed first marriage, Archie Jones asks

Samad for advice and Samad, with a delightful and positive tone, says, “Don’t live this old life—it’s a sick life, Archibald.” In contrast to the depressed Archie, Samad has felt that his marriage with his “young” and “vital” wife brings “fresh air” into his old and sluggish middle-age, opening up all kinds of possibilities for him (WT 10). “[T]here are second chances in life,” says Samad showing his great confidence (WT 11). Unfortunately, though he believes otherwise, Samad is never a man with strong will. His weakness appears whenever he confronts threats to his identity and the sense of belongingness. Samad’s indecision and ambivalence shows his anxiety and fears of “dissolution and disappearance” (WT 218). On the one hand, despite the strictness of Muslim doctrines, Samad Iqbal chooses to compromise his faith by conflating Muslim with Christianity. He innocently tries to make “a deal” with his

God like a real Christian, praying, “Give me a break...Can’t say fairer than that...” (emphasis in original WT 117). However, despite his flexibility, Samad is obsessed with the story of mutiny told by the British colonialists about his great-grandfather, Mangal Pande. Whereas the official imperial history presents Pande as a traitor, Samad sees him as a hero who fought and died for the freedom of India. From a certain aspect, the unrecognized hero represents Sun 31

Samad’s attempt at being connected or re-connected with his homeland, Bangladesh. Samad suffers from his ambivalence toward the new country and its tradition. Though he endeavors to accommodate to the customs of modern Britian, Samad cannot suppress his sense of unbelongingness and his wish of returning to the East (WT 121). Meanwhile, Samad cannot help but compromise with the reality that he can go nowhere but England because there’s no one in the East who “would have such an Englishman” (WT 95). As Taryn Beukema suggests in “Men Negotiating Indentity in Zadie Smith’s White Teeth,” “Samad does not give up his quest to reconcile his Bengali identity with his English identity. He is continually trying to renegotiate his place in British society while trying to force his twin sons...into strict Muslim identities” (3). The difficulty Samad experiences in his quest for identity somehow strengthens his belief in his fidelity to the “one experience” that he can claim as his; that is,

Samad should strive for one pure religion and identity as a Muslim and a Bangladeshi.

Beukema therefore points out that Samad’s in-betweenness apparently comes from his

“constant need to belong” (emphasis in original 3). Because of the need to belong, Samad feels lost in England. Meanwhile, because of his sense of unbelongingness, his demand for purity and certainty in identity and in blood becomes the only possible answer to rescue his life from chaos and corruption.

It eventually proves that Samad’s betweenness is unresolvable. His failure in negotiating with new identity and his fear of assimilating himself into British culture finally ends up in his awakening to the fundamentalist insistence in the purity of genealogy and history.

Samad’s obsession with the purity of blood and religion at the same time reveals the importance of history and roots to immigrants. However, critics like Cecilia Acquarone

Dominic Head, and Sell, and may provide totally opposite perspectives on questions like “do history and roots really matter?” when they read White Teeth as a postmodern novel. In their essays, they emphasize that one person’s identity can be multiple and full of fluidity and uncertainty. Head, for example, as Beukema quotes in his essay, attempts to prove that “roots Sun 32

do not matter” when observing from the perspective of the female roles, Irie Jones especially, in the novel. Head, in Beukema’s opinion, ignores the male roles to whom their roots do really matter (12-13). In his study, “Chance and Gesture in Zadie Smith's White Teeth and The

Autograph Man: A Model for Multicultural Identity,” Sell breaks the line between cause and effect. He notes, “[A]ny relationship obtaining between past and present may be simply coincidental, rather than necessarily causal” (29). Sell argues that Smith intentionally reverses the order of past and present by “melt[ing] [the sequence] into a more liquid and arbitrary relationship of analogy or serendipitous contingency” (29). According to Sell, White Teeth can be read as a novel which brings out the positive view of multiculturalism and hybridity.

This argument can be convincing because the unexpected reversal in the end seems to suggest that Smith promises a brighter future for this multicultural new world. “[T]he past can be taken or left, identity can be changed at will or left to metamorphose by chance,” notes Sell

(32). Coincidentally, Acquarone makes a similar argument and claims that “identities...are free choices” and her essay therefore presents “a fluid, ever-changing reality when divergent and equally valid options are available” in the postmodern world (219). Briefly, the studies mentioned above can all prove that if a person’s identity is full of fluidity then it can be changed by “whim or chance” (Acquarone 219). Roots do not matter in this multicultural cosmopolitan world. Unfortunately, Samad’s miserable identical crisis and the twins’ tragedy of being split apart from each other prove these arguments to be debatable.

The fact is roots do matter especially when people sense the crisis of losing them.

Beukema argues the importance of history in the essay noting, “[I]n White Teeth; the men cling to their histories in order to survive, and when that history was lost,...the men’s conceptions of their identities become confused as they are unable to find a connection to hold them in their present positions” (13). That history becomes an issue of survival is not the only case in Samad’s experience. It is also represented by the second generation of immigrants, Magid and Millat. Suffering through their adolescence crisis, not knowing how Sun 33

to behave themselves, the younger generations also feel that they are the lost ones when being unable to identify their roots. In different ways, the young boys rebel against their fathers’ expectation of being what they are supposed to be. Samad’s obsession with pure genealogy and his endeavor to discover the truth about the family roots and his great grandfather both prove the positive interpretation of uncertain roots and changeable identities even more misleading. Whenever encountering identical crisis, Samad again and again proves himself a fundamentalist. Taking drugs, drinking alcohol or even having adultery with the teacher of his sons become ways for Samad to numb his fear. Only in so doing may Samad find himself temporal peace before the occurrence of the next crisis and the new threats to his faith and identity. Therefore, to seek for eternity and certainty in his life, Samad needs to go back. He needs to embrace the “fundamentals” of life.

In his lifetime, Samad takes pride in being a descendant of Mangal Pande, a hero and freedom fighter; nonetheless, the distorted history of Mangal Pande accelerates Samd’s desire to prove Pande’s historical value and existence both among his family and friends and more importantly in Britain. Then, it is not strange at all when we, the readers, find how many times Samad tries to persuade Mickey, the owner of O’Connell, to hang the portrait of

Mangal Pande on the wall of his restaurant (WT 205) and how hard he works on searching for any trivial clues about the so-called first rebellion in India in encyclopedias (WT 215). For

Samad, it is like he can eventually clarify “what he is and who he is,” the ultimate answer he keeps searching all the life time. Samad Iqbal can exist only when Mangal Pande exists.

Symbolizing his pride as a member of the Iqbals, Mangal Pande therefore is the cure to

Samad’s fear of “dissolution” (emphasis in original WT 272). Mangal Pande, the Iqbal family, and Samad Iqbal are bound to be the trinity representing pure blood, one religion and one united family. That is why Samad is outraged when his son, Magid, refuses to see himself as a son of Iqbals. Samad is stunned and says, “I GIVE YOU A GLORIOUS NAME LIKE

MAGID MAHFOOZ MURSHED MUBTASIM IQBAL!...YOU WANT TO BE CALLED Sun 34

MARK SMITH!” (emphasis in original WT 126). The family name, Iqbal, symbolizes

Samad’s pride as a son of the Iqbal family and a successor of heroic royal blood from Mangal

Pande. Other than being well-educated in college, Samad’s witty eloquence and quick response suggest that he, if not being crippled, should have had a better career. Samad is a man with the great ambition to achieve a great success. Carving his family name “IQBAL” with blood and a penknife on the bench, Samad says, “It meant I wanted to write my name on the world” (emphasis in original WT 418). Like all the great people in history, Samad wants his name to be written, be remembered, and he wants to leave something behind after his death. “[Y]ou are becoming like them,” says Samad continually (emphasis in original WT

419). The needs of others’ recognition, the “truth” in the history books, his name under the bench, all these can perfectly explains the magnificence of the great deeds to Samad because

“actions will remain” (WT 86) and be honored by offspring. Ironically though years later, when Millat once again sits on the bench looking at his father’s signature, all that he has in his mind is “contempt.” “It just means you are nothing,” whispers Millat to himself

(emphasis in original WT 419). During the War, tempted by the possibility of winning a big fame, Samad persuades Archie into taking the life of Dr. Sick, saying “[W]e need blood on our hands... There is a great evil that we have failed to fight and now it is too late. Except we have him [Dr. Sick], this opportunity” (WT 99). The reason sounds irrational and makes murder an indifferent behavior as if one’s life becomes nothing but a sacrifice to further another’s self-interest. When Samad asks Archie the question about “what kind of a world do you want your children to grow up in,” (emphasis in original) he has to admit to himself that the only thing that matters in life is the potential legacy that he can hand to his children (WT

99). As a father and a son of the Iqbals, he wants his greatness and honorable deeds to be highly respected.

Holding his hope of achieving something great and different by joining a “real war,”

Samad is disappointed because nothing really happens. “I mean I am educated. I am trained. I Sun 35

should be soaring with the Royal Airborne Force, shelling from on high!...My great-grandfather Mangal Pande was the great hero of the Indian Mutiny,” says Samad when he feels the insignificance of the role he plays in the army over and over again (WT 74-75).

He is good and it is his misfortune being in a wrong position. When the War comes to an end,

Samad’s anxiety explodes as he feels like “A great fury was rising in him, bile blocking his throat.” It is the first time that Samad perceives the crisis of being nothingness. “He was expected to come home covered in glory, and then to return to Delhi triumphant,” but now

Samad “have missed” the chance which would never happen again (WT 88). Samad’s sense of nothingness goes wild and he totally loses control of himself after taking morphine which definitely should be a taboo in his religious doctrine. “It’s for my sins…and yet I am more sinned against than sinning,” cries Samad who is obviously suffering from a pang of conscience and morality (WT 87). Taking drugs, however, releases Samad’s inborn nature, or in Anderson’s word, the “animality” (3) that is otherwise repressed within his body. With the help (or damage) of morphine, Samad shows his innate nature as a fundamentalist of Islam.

He forces Archie to agree to his statement, saying “You don’t stand for anything, Jones. Not for a faith, not for a politics. Not even for your country” (WT 101). When “his mind carried elsewhere by the morphine,” (WT 86) Samad makes himself sound indifferent to his friendship with Archie by using strong and cruel expressions like “a coward” and “a cipher” to call Archie. Samad becomes more like a religious man when his mind is distorted by the drug than when he is normal. “I’m a Muslim and a Man and a Son and a Believer. I will survive the last days,” Samad chants this like a wizard chanting his incantation (WT 101).

The feeling that he exists is what Samad needs and what he is afraid to lose.

The history of the Iqbal family, from Marcus Chalfen’s viewpoint, is “[o]ne part truth to three parts fiction” (WT 280) and its ambiguous claim to truth also results from the encounter of two opposite nations and cultures. In order to conquer his fear of disappearance Samad treasures all he has now and then. V. S. Naipaul has famously said in his India: A Million Sun 36

Mutinies, “[I]f you felt your community was small, you could never walk away from it; the grimmer things became, the more you insisted on being what you were” (qtd. in Nair 7). In

Samad’s case, Supriya Nair argues, “Samad’s increasing need to rely on fundamentals is met with Alsana’s oppositional ambivalence, her ‘maybe/maybe not’.” That is to say, Samad’s fundamentalism is a contrast with Alsana’s refusal to be delimited by any fundamentalist discourse (7). In other words, the kind “fundamentals” that Samad searches for can go more deeply and be more complicated than religious fundamentalism. “Truth and firmness…,” says

Samad when coincidentally confronting Mad Mary who asked him the question “WHAT’S

DE SOLUTION” on the street (emphasis in original WT 149-50). “[The] solution” is not only what Mad Mary is seeking for but also what obsesses Samad for some time. What Samad says to Mad Mary may seem to be spontaneously popping out of his mouth as a reflex, but they reflect his fundamentalist convictions that are hidden inside his body. To put it differently, Samad has always known the solution to his life; however, the answers are the ones that he does not dare to articulate or is not capable of approaching. The truth, for Samad,

“runs in [his] family” (WT 150) and comes from “a bit of history in [his] blood” (WT 84).

However, it is still a mysterious cipher that Samad can never access because of his misunderstood great-grandfather and the dubious family history.

Samad’s anxiety comes from the fear of extinction, of losing his memory and his dignity as one of the Iqbals. Feeling like “A stranger in a stranger land” (WT 222), Samad is threatened by “assimilation.” Making friends with a white English man, having an affair with a white English woman, and raising a child who wants to be named as “Mark Smith”(WT

126), not Magid Iqbal, Samad thus believes that it is his downfall for not having the ability to maintain “their Bengaliness” (WT 272) in himself and his children. The only way he can regain his identity is to hold onto it more tightly. It is like a drowning man who holds the last reed in his hands. “Iqbal,” his family name, is Samad’s last reed. For Samad, “Iqbal” is not just a family name; instead, it signals his “roots,” where he comes from and which he Sun 37

cherished the most. “[R]oots were roots and roots were good,” and “these were untainted principles,” believes Samad (WT 161). His roots should be “untainted,” so does his blood.

Laila Amine in her essay simply reads Samad Iqbal as “a staunch representative of the strict genealogy of his ‘blood’” (78). Obviously, to Samad his blood symbolizes the heroics of his great-grandfather, his tradition, culture, roots as a Bangladeshi and his faith in Allah.

However, the experience of “marginalization” in London arouses Samad’s “anxiety of invisibility” (Amine 78, 80). Samad’s anxiety is shared by all his contemporary immigrants.

Smith portrays the fear in words such as the following: “[I]t makes an immigrant laugh to bear the fears of the nationalist, scared of infection, penetration, miscegenation, when this is small fry, peanuts, compared to what the immigrant fears—dissolution, disappearance”

(emphasis in original). If we understand the Iqbals as a species in the term of biology, being invisible or being diluted can mean the extinction. Smith also presents “dissolution” as a process during which “genotype [is] hidden by phenotype” (WT 218). Name, with the passage of time, may gradually lose its function of signifying ones’ identity, ones’ genealogy.

That is, if naming has nothing to do with “blood,” people cannot recognize each other by his or her name. A white girl can be named “Sita,” and “Sharon” can be the name of a Pakistan girl. This “mixing up” is definitely not what Samad would like to see and accept contentedly

(WT 217). Therefore, to prevent the Iqbal family from “disappearance,” or extinction, Samad chooses to send his elderly son, Magid, back to the East, hoping that he can learn how to be a real Muslim, a Bengali and a son of the Iqbals. After all, the Iqbal family’s genealogy needs to be handed down through the Iqbal “blood,” the children. To summarize, Samad’s fear of extinction proves the fact that this fear registers not only the instincts of humans to survive but also those of animals. This again explains why Beukema maintains that “the men cling to their histories in order to survive” (13). Once the Iqbals are corrupted by Western culture and are gradually forgetting their own tradition, culture and history, they do not exist anymore.

They are not physically dead though, they are dead mentally because of the loss of identities. Sun 38

Samad Iqbal reaches another miserable climax when discovering his son, Magid, becomes a totally white British from inside out. Magid is supposedly sent back to find his root, which sarcastically “he never knew existed for him because he was born in England”

(Beukema 10). Magid, who is educated as a Muslim kid going to the mosque and studying

Quran every day, turns out to be “a little aristocrat, like a little Englishman” (WT 180). There must be something going wrong but Samad cannot figure that out. However, the answer is not that hard to access. Samad simply underestimates the influence of globalization or more specifically, westernization in the eastern world. Distance is no longer a problem. Because of the rapid transmission by global media and broadcasting, the news, science, knowledge, values and everything from the West can be transmitted to the East within a second. The quick development of science definitely is not what Samad can predict and think of back in the time when he decided to send Magid back to the homeland. The normalization of quick and cheap knowledge also causes Millat’s participation in the radical fundamental Muslim group. Thanks to the nation-wide broadcast, Millat recognizes that he is not the only one filled with anger and depression. “He knew he had no face in this country, no voice in the country, until the week before last when suddenly people like Millat were on every channel and every radio and every newspaper and they were angry, and Millat recognized the anger”

(WT 194). His recognition of anger does not come from his recognition of and identification with his cultural, racial or religious identity as a Muslim and an eastern Asian; instead it comes from Millat’s identification with the heroic characters from films and western pop cultures. Here, the focus is not about how westernization damages or benefits eastern countries and people there. The point is it does happen and no one can stop the trend. Neither can Samad.

Samad’s fundamentalism is practiced in terms of his obsession with pure blood.

However, when his fundamentalism encounters and is challenged by the westernized eastern world, it crumbles. Many believe that globalization and multiculturalism could release Sun 39

immigrants from the anxiety of racial discrimination and help all those who are away from home once again position themselves properly in the new land. Unfortunately, all Samad

Iqbal can feel is the anxious fear of assimilation, disappearance and extinction. For Samad, multiculturalism is not like the promise land for immigrants; instead, it violates his core beliefs and it also privileges the rights of bourgeois. Samad always regards himself as a victim of British culture thinking that he is ruined, “corrupted by England” (WT 120).

Interestingly, the younger son, Millat Iqbal, experiences multiculturalism in a different way and, as such, he reacts in different way as well. However, it is not due to his fear of assimilation that prompts Millat to violently act out his anger and anxiety when being bullied.

He is not like his father. Millat does not care about his genealogy as an heir of the Iqbal family and the heroic ancestor, Mangal Pande. All he cares is to be accepted by society, the people around him. Therefore, his participation in the fundamentalist group, KEVIN, somehow becomes a way to satisfy his need to belong. He, having been excluded from the white-dominant society for years, can finally recognize himself as a group member of

KEVIN. Smith here again sarcastically mocks the claim that multicultural London is a land of harmony and happiness for all. Multicultural London is never a place that treats people of different skin colors equally and fairly. Sadly in the cosmopolitan city people still feel subtle fears when walking by minority people and confronting people of different colors. At least, it is what Samad feels when heading north to Harlesden. “Willesden, Dollis Hill, Harlesden, and watch with dread…as white fades to yellow fades to brown,” writes Smith (WT 137-38).

As Gilroy once notes, “[W]hile technology, by conquering distance, compressing time, …, at the same time it exposed these expressions to the risks of misappropriation and manipulation”

(qtd. in Jakubiak 210). To Millat, multicultural London never treats him fairly as well. The city does not even recognize him as part of it. To clarify Millat’s processes of becoming a fundamentalist, the following passages will first analyse his anxiety and fear of being ignored, denied and misunderstood by the white-dominant society. Sun 40

The misreading of oriental culture by the whites happens in Millat’s daily life. During a music class Miss Burt-Jones asks Millat to introduce the music he listens to “at home”

(emphasis in original WT 130). Here Miss Burt-Jones refers to “Indian music,” which she assumes Millat must be familiar with and be good at playing (emphasis in original WT 129).

Millat’s reaction surprises and embarrasses Miss Burt-Jones when he answers that Michael

Jackson’s pop songs are his favorite. She is just like every other white Briton who has a certain illusion about the mysterious exotic atmosphere of Indian people and obviously

Burt-Jones finds this oriental exoticism extremely attractive. Samad Iqbal recognizes this orientalist fantasy when Burt-Jones shows her interests in “Indian culture.” With his explanation of “I’m not actually from India,” Samad tries to correct Burt-Jones’ misrecognition of India and Bangladesh (emphasis in original WT 111). Millat, if he at first does not understand the pervasive influence of this orientalist fantasy, is gradually getting familiar with it when he discovers that many white girls find him attractive and regard him as

“their dark prince, occasional lover or impossible crush, the subject of sweaty fantasy and ardent dreams” (WT 252). Millat’s erotic and exotic charisma is not the only one reason that makes him attractive in the eyes of white girls. The other reason is his irresistible perverted personality. “What was to be done about Millat? He simply must stop smoking weed. We have to try and stop him walking out of class,” think those girls who want to “improve him”

(emphasis in original WT 225). The important thing that both Burt-Jones and those girls could not understand is their curiosity or affection toward Millat unfortunately is just another way to show their ignorant prejudice as white English people. For them, Millat is not a person but a “project” which should be improved, “justified,” and upgraded (WT 225). Millat’s imperfection as a perversion emphasizes his difference from his schoolmates and from white

British culture. Burt-Jones and the girls both act out the whites’ condescension toward oriental cultures; therefore, their irrational expectation and false imagination of what kind of person Millat should be turn out to be a violation of Milliat’s being, and an act of implicit Sun 41

racial discrimination that reduces the complexity of Millat as a human being into a racial stereotype that fits their racist plot. Millat is always the other, the outsider of British culture no matter how hard he tries to assimilate into the West. The confrontation with J. P. Hamilton is one of the most radical examples of white people’s racial xenophobia. However, the more subtle repudiations come from those who love Millat (or at least they think they do love

Millat) and their repudiation could be much more hurtful than Hamilton’s strong and direct humiliation and contempt. Poppy Burt-Jones and the girls who adore Millat are two representative groups and Joyce Chalfen is another type of the subtle violation of Millat’s human rights in the name of education.

Joyce Chalfen’s disavowal and misreading of racial difference is exercised in the guise of maternal affection. Regarding herself as a mother figure for Millat, Joyce tends to educate

Millat, a kid from a nonfunctional minority family, and to improve him to be a better person.

She forces both herself and Millat’s mother to admit that Millat suffers from a kind of trauma, the mental wound that pushes him to become “filled with self-revulsion and hatred of his own kind.” Millat once again is a “subject” that Joyce wants to observe and to study. “[H]e had possibly a slave mentality, or maybe a color-complex centered around his mother (he was far darker than she), or a with for his own annihilation by means of dilution in a white gene pool, or an inability…and it emerged that 60 percent of Asian men did this…and 90 percent of

Muslims felt that…,” notes Joyce (emphasis in original WT 311). Joyce’s recognition of

Millat as “a research,” a problem to be solved satisfies her pride of being a mother and being a powerful white middle class woman who can save a racial other from being ruined by his nonfunctional family. The problem is Joyce does not have the ability to recognize her prejudice as a bourgeois; therefore she intentionally violates Millat in the name of love. Love may hurt, especially the love from the dominant groups. Here the story between Ambrosia

Bowden, Irie Jones’s great grandmother, and Captain Charlie Durham, a white English man, testifies to the wicked conspiracy concocted by western colonizers against the colonized. The Sun 42

colonizer’s so-called “love” for the colonized others does not from the colonizer’s generosity but from his pride and arrogance. “[H]er education elevated her,” tells the captain (WT 296).

With an English education, a maidservant like Ambrosia could be turned into “a lady” and of course, with Joyce Chalfen’s love, Millat Iqbal can be cured and saved. Ironically, Ambrosia

Bowden, for the English captain, was never a lady but a sex doll that he can exploit and manipulate, and Millat, a research subject and an element in Joyce’s experiment of civilizing the lesser races. Mirze in her essay notes that Joyce believes Millat’s perverted behavior is the result of “Islam’s insistence on purity and its intolerance of other religions” (198). However,

Joyce, as Irie once tells, errs in “misreading” Millat (emphasis in original WT 360). Joyce cannot notice that her prescription to Millat ironically shows her unconscious pride as an

English woman so that she just acts like any other “English nationalists who are also adamant about purity that continue to marginalize Muslim minorities, denying them access to the national domain” (Mirze 198). This kind of fundamentalist discourse, endorsed and practiced by the white majority, excludes Millat and denies his existence and citizenship in cosmopolitan London. As Tariq Modood argues, “hurtful jokes, harassment, discrimination, and violence” do not disappear at all even after the collapse of imperialism and colonialism

(qtd. in Mirze196). Millat’s anger represents his way to fight against his anxiety of being excluded and marginalized. “Millat responds to this denial with anger” (196).

Given that Millat feels that he “was a Paki no matter where he came from; that he smelled of curry; had no sexual identity,” he thus “had no face in this country, no voice in the country” (WT 194). Irene Perez Fernandez points out the younger generations’ ambiguous position within the society makes them feel disoriented and even unneeded. All of the kids

“are displaced and trying to find their own spaces,” argues Fernandez (154). Moreover, the immigrants’ second generations “are forced to re-define their identity status within an imaginary community” because in reality their needs to belong cannot be satisfied. Irie, therefore, traces back to her origins as a Jamaican and Millat, as a Bangladeshi (Fernandez Sun 43

155). Millat, however, needn’t go back to Bangladesh and instead he finds his position in the fundamental religious group, KEVIN. “For him, the assumption of a new identity is part of a game, an attempt to become more visible against the English nationalists who are determined to keep the ‘purity’ of their nation” (Mirze 196). It is the “populist formulae that ostracise”

Millat and forces him to embrace “religious identity” as a Muslim (Tancke 3; Mirze 197) because the Muslim group recognizes and embraces Millat. Millat finds home away from home. With the help of KEVIN, he gains “a legitimate voice in a society” and finally gets the strength “to stand against the injustices of the white majority” (Mirze 197). He “stood schizophrenic, one foot in Bengal and one in Willesden. In his mind he was as much there as he was here” (WT 183). Here Smith not only refers to his relationship with his twin brother,

Magid, who is living far away in Bangladesh but also implies Millat’s imaginary roots as a

Muslim. However, his need to belong turns out to be based on a false illusion that has its origin in the gangster films in Hollywood.

Iire may be right in her justification of Millat that his “feeling of inadequacy” comes from being neglected by his father, Samad Iqbal. Millat “is the second son, late like a bus,…by the intricate design of Allah, the loser of two vital minutes that he would never make up…not in his father’s eyes” (emphasis in original WT 181). The slight time lap between the births of the twins becomes Millat’s wound that he can never make up with. The gap between Millat and Magid is like the paradox we find in the contest between Achilles and the tortoise. “The harder Achilles tries to catch the tortoise, the more eloquently the tortoise expresses its advantage” (WT 385). Millat is always “the lesser son” “in his father’s eyes,”

(WT 382). Combined with his anger of being denied by the white dominant community, the neglect from his father coincidentally strengthens the incompetence of the father figure, which is supposed to be a role model for the kid to learn from. Millat’s contempt for his father is obvious. He takes Samad, who has achieved nothing great in his life, as a symbol of failure. Because of Samad’s incompetence as a father figure, Millat turns his attention to Sun 44

heroic figures in the fictional world. “Here was where Millat really learned about father.

Godfathers, blood-brothers, pacino-deniros, men in black in black who looked good” (WT

181). Therefore, when Millat chooses to join the radical group, the KEVIN, it does not prove that he chooses to identify himself as a religious man, a Muslim because “he understood that to rely on faith, as his own father did, was contemptible” (WT 367). Instead, Millat’s religion is “not one based on faith,” neither is it “one that could be intellectually proved by the best minds” (WT 367). The most ironical thing is that Millat does not have “the best mind” nor the intelligence and comprehensive ability to elucidate the doctrines and wisdom in Quran. To

Millat, KEVIN represents not his faith in Allah but a tool to speak out his extreme anger of exclusion and depression of being misread by the majorities and being neglected by his own father. Only when he stays in KEVIN can Millat prove his existence and satisfy his sense of belongingness at the same time. He, like his father, wants to be remembered by history.

“There would be no misspelling his name in the history book. There’d be no forgetting the dates and times,” (amphasis in original) promises Millat to himself before his shockingly disturbing action at Marcus Chalfen’s FutureMose press conference. He is “here to finish it.

To revenge it. To turn that history around,” says Millat (WT 419).

However, like father, like son. Millat’s fundamentalism is built on his false idea of heroism. To Samad, his great grand-father, Mangal Pande, symbolises the heroic behavior of patriotism and insistence in royalty. To Millat, heroes are those who exist in Hollywood movies and those who dress in black holding deadly weapons in hands and speaking the coolest and the most perverse words like “As far as I can remember, I always wanted to be

Muslim” (WT 369). Therefore, Millat takes KEVIN’s plan on destroying Marcus Chalfen’s transgenic FutureMouse as his last chance to fulfill his dream of being a real hero. To Millat to participate in radical movement of KEVIN is never about how FutureMouse and the transgenic experiment violate the religious doctrines and Allah; instead, KEVIN represents his only hope of becoming a hero who is even greater and bigger than his ancestor, Mangal Sun 45

Pande. However Millat can never be a heroic character in the fictional world nor in real life.

As a drug taker and flippant Muslim who does not follow doctrines at all, Millat consequently confronts his failure in fundamentalism the same way as his father does. Though Smith brings out a serious topic about the conflict between science and conservative religions, she surprisingly ends up the issue without giving any definitive judgment. Instead, she chooses to narrate the final scene in a slightly sarcastic tone and thus translates a scene of violent confrontation into a funny melodrama in which no one cares about how the experiment will change humans’ future. Moreover, as a radical religious group but with a hilarious name,

KEVIN represents Smith’s ironic view of religious fundamentalism. The reason that the

KEVIN participants join the group also supports this hypothesis. Mohammed

Hussein-Ishmael or Mo, the butcher, and Shiva, the waiter in the Palace restaurant, are two of the most apparent representatives. The reason of “Mo’s conversion was more personal.

Violence.” Having been robbed for years, he “wanted a little payback…He wanted the degenerate nature of these people explained to him. He wanted to know the history of it and the politics of it and the root cause” (WT 390). Shiva, as an Indian waiter in a Muslim restaurant, probably experiences the same kind of frustration of unbelongingness as Millat has been through. He chooses to become a member of KEVIN “because being Head of internal Security for KEVIN beat the hell out of being second waiter at the Palace” (WT 416).

Moreover, he also takes it as a way to allure women who might think a conservative religious man sexually attractive.

From Mo’s and Shiva’s example, it is evident that KEVIN is not only a traditional

Muslim group but it also represents “a radical new movement” that becomes popular within young generations of black people and Asians (WT 390). As the minority groups in the white dominant society, the blacks and Asians who are like Millat feel the anxiety of being racially discriminated and neglected by the middle class, the majority groups and the whites. Most of the members in KEVIN probably are like Millat without any affirmative faith in Muslim and Sun 46

their conversion is proof less of their faith than a symbolic act of rebellion against the white dominant society. By depicting the psychodrama of KEVIN members, Smith is able to deliver an incisive anaysis of the multicultural London. To be more precise, the religious fundamentalism is the excuse that KEVIN and Millat use, as a weapon, to fight against the benighted, ignorant British society and the multiculturalism it endorses.

Nonetheless, Millat’s fundamentalism ends up being in vain because he accidently shot

Archie Jones and released the FutureMouse. The novel then ends with this note of ambiguity with the escape of the FutureMouse, the birth of Irie’s child, and the untold story between

Millat, Magid and Irie. This ambiguous ending suggests that Smith considers the controversy between multiculturalism and fundamentalism is still inexplicable and debatable. Previously,

Samad’s fundamental belief in pure blood challenges the rosy picture of a multicultural

London. Also his fear of assimilation into British culture evidently reveals the disadvantages of globalism and multiculturalism. The fact is, however, Samad’s fundamentalism eventually confronts its biggest hurdles and all his effort in maintaining the cultural heritages and purity of the Iqbals proves to be worthless because of Magid’s westernization and Millat’s misguided rebellion. Millat, as another embodiment of Smith’s fundamentalist discourse, has been a victim of implicit racial discrimination, treated as an exotic object of fascination and a deviant object of education. Millat and the KEVIN member experience more or less harassment, contempt and insult and many other negative judgments from the white majorities on a daily basis. They could not help but choose fundamentalism as their shield and weapon to fight against the hypocritical multicultural community in which they are both included and excluded. The unpredictably plot twists, however, once again suggest that the troublesome controversies between multiculturalism and fundamentalism are like the two ends of a spectrum, always fighting, always folding over each other, forever building on and feeding into each other’s strength as well as weakness.

The relationship of the twins, Magid and Millat, is an interesting metaphor of the two Sun 47

sides of the spectrum. The westernized Magid and the conservative Millat symbolise the unceasing struggles between science and rationalism on the one hand and religion and tradition on the other hand. As Smith mentions, they are “two of Zeno’s headfuck arrows,” which are forever “trapped in the temporal instant.” “[N]othing moves. Nothing changes.

They are running at a standstill, Zeno’s paradox” (WT 384). The paradox of Zeno reveals a partial fact of the relationship between Millat and Magid, and Smith recognizes this so well that she writes “Paradoxes aside, they are running.” Furthermore, in Zeno’s paradox, Smith explains, the “multiplicity, the Many” is “an illusion” (emphasis in original). Zeno tends to prove “a reality a seamless, flowing whole. A single, indivisible One” (WT 384). That is, when we split time into infinite minimal units, then all of us are imprisoned within the infinite universe of time and cannot make any step further because every finite unit can be cut into another finite unit. The journey of time can neither begin nor reach the end, thus Zeno concludes time is an illusion after all and everything is motionless and quiescent.

However, the paradox is just a paradox and “multiplicity is no illusion” (WT 385).

Samad, Millat and Magid all try to prove their belief is the One, the ultimate answer to the world denying and ignoring the value of diversity, multiplicity. Multicultural London seems to follow a different path. Though defined as a city that celebrates and practices multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism, the multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism it endorses, however, can be just another conspiracy and disguise of imperialism and racial discrimination.

Once the minorities and the immigrants realize the “happy multicultural land” is more rhetoric than reality, they fall back on either tradition or religion to situate, re/define their identities at home away from home. Fundamentalism is, at least in the cases of Samad and

Milliat, the inevitable result when an immigrant’s dream for a rose garden turns tour and bitter. Sun 48

Chapter Two:

The Rational/scientific Fundamentalist Discourses of Marcus, Magid and Joyce Chalfen

As what has been mentioned in the previous chapter, the downfall of Samad and Millat is the result of their unceasing desire for pure identity and religious fundamentalism. Samad and Millat are both the representatives of those who fetishize conservative religious fundamentalism, as they are haunted and possessed by the so-called traditions and cultural heritages. On the contrary, the other son of the Iqbals, Migid, he stands at the opposite side of the spectrum, as a modern intellectual who endorses the most liberal and progressive discourses of certainty and science. In the last section of White Teeth, Smith begins with the definitions of “fundamental” and “fundamentalism.” The word, fundamental, so writes Smith, means “going to the root of the matter” and refers to those things that are “essential and indispensable” in life (WT 341). To Samad, for instance, roots are everything which can define what he is and who he is. Millat’s needs of recognition and belongingness drive him to embrace Muslim, which he sees as his “root.” “Fundamentalism” is defined by The New

Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, so writes Smith, as “the strict maintenance of traditional orthodox religious beliefs or doctrines” (WT 341). Samad and Millat symbolise Smith’s recognition of the revival of fundamentalism as a threat or a crisis of multiculturalism at the turn of the century. In depicting Samad and Millat’s turn towards religious fundamentalism, so Jay writes, Smith “make[s] up a language for talking about identity, truth, morality, and difference that structures competing claims about national identity and cultural belonging at the end of a twentieth century that will give birth to the attacks of 9/11” (Multiculturalism

174).

However, Samad’s religious purism and the radical behavior of fundamentalist groups are not the only focus of the novel. Smith meanwhile notices the turbulence caused by the Sun 49

new and unpredictable genetic science practiced by Marcus and endorsed by Joyce and

Magid. If the fear of immigrants has aroused anxieties with Samad’s nostalgic return to the dark age of the past, the fear of the unknowns also initiates public resistance to the genetic science and the brave new world of the future ushered in by scientists like Marcus Chalfen and Magid Iqbal. Whereas people like Samad and Millat stand for the most conservative strength striving for the maintenance of religious doctrines, people like Marcus and Magid, despite their embrace of modernity discourses, embody a different kind of fundamentalism, one that believes in the supreme power of science. Given that Samad and Millat believe in the willpower of omnipotent God, in their eyes, people like Marcus and Magid, who are like “the

Promethean overreacher,” are trying to “play god, ignoring the role of accidental” (Gustar

338, 340). Magid and the Chalfen family as well become an incarnation of modernity and a symptom of people’s fantasy for modernity. When Marcu’s FutureMouse brings hopes to solve mysterious genetic codes of human beings and arouses curiosities about the future in the public, it meanwhile triggers fears, suspicions and even hostilities from diverse communities such as the radical religious groups and animals rights groups.

As an edgy scientist who works on epoch-making research speeding up the evolutions for human races, Marcus Chalfen embraces and practices an ideology which is actually as

“fundamental” as that practiced by the religious and conservative Samad and Millat. Jan

Lowe categorizes Marcus as a man with a “Messiah complex” and she believes it is his

“Messiah complex” that “makes him use science like Old Testament religion, to convert the world to the Utopia he wants to live in. For all his scientific rationalism, his dreams and plans have the urgency of Old Testament prose” (178). The Chalfenism that he practices not only represents his pursuing of perfection and success in his profession but also symbolises a religious cult that he worships and treasures the most. Chaflenism defines every single member of the Chalfen family. “They referred to themselves as nouns, verbs and occasionally adjectives” (WT 261). Marcus’ sons and his wife, Joyce Chaflen, all become the adherents of Sun 50

Chalfenism believing that the Chalfens are the one and only heir of “Intellectual faith” who can change the destiny of humans (emphasis in original WT 348). Marcus’ FutureMouse therefore promises a utopian dream for his Chalfenism and it can also signify their excessive desire for and obsession with pure genealogy, a desire which, however, is eventually turned into “human eugenics” (WT 346). The parallels between Marcus, Magid and Dr. Marc-Pierre

Perret can be easily observed. As a “Nazi eugenicist,” Dr. Perret (or as known as Dr. Sick) survives from the War but finds his adherent to finish his eugenics experiment. Ironically,

Marcus Chalfen, being a member of the third-generation Jews, should be the head of this scientific project whose original aim is to cleanse Nazi Germany of “the problem of Jews.” It is simply historical absurdity that Jews like Marcus, whose very survival hinges on the failure of the eugenics experiment of Nazi Germany, should be the one to continue the eugenics project to rid the earth of the problem of genetic difference. Such a dramatic twist can imply

Smith’s intention to loosen the unbroken bounds between genealogy and genes. Samad stubbornly believes that purity comes from the pure blood of his family and that to maintain the pure blood means to hold on to genealogical roots tightly. Marcus is not like Samad. He believes the omnipotent power of science and progress. If he can change FutureMouse’s genetic codes, he can change those of his own and many of others’ too. “Marcus creates

Beings,” says Joyce Chalfen (emphasis in original 260). Marcus, like Doctor Faustus in

Christopher Marlowe’s play, makes friends with the devil, Dr. Sick and then intends to displace the Creator by creating his own beings. He desires the Utopia and wants to create a new human race with predetermined and calculated genetic codes. All these prove that no matter being a “Promethean overreacher” tempting to playing the role as God, the almighty

Creator, or being an adherent of Old Testament waiting for his Messiah, Marcus Chalfen is no less different from Samad and Millat. He is a fundamentalist as well. By observing Marcus’ genealogical fundamentalism, White Teeth accordingly portrays a vision of contemporary society split between two fundamentalist discourses, religious fundamentalism as well as Sun 51

scientific fundamentalism.

Maigd, who is supposed to be a pure Muslim grown up in the East, unpredictably becomes the disgraced son of the Iqbal family for being completely westernized. He is actually the adherent of Chalfenism, a representative of “the modernist dream” (Gustar 339).

Describing Magid as “a chosen son” of Marcus Chalfen, Gustar defines Magid as “the

Frankenstein, the god-trickster turned modernist” who is oblivious to the “invisible terror of science without ethics” (339, 340). Traces of Magid’s thoughts are not as clearly available to the reader as those of Marcus, given that, unlike Marcus, he never indulges in any interior monologue in White Teeth. Still, by reading his conflicts with his father and twin brother, the reader can see that Magid, with his entering into a partnership with Marcus and his distancing himself from both Samad and Millat, defines and embodies another offshoot of

“fundamentalist ideology” (Bentley 498). Whereas the fear of assimilation and

“disenfranchisement” (Gustar 340) triggers Samad’s and Millat’s fundamentalism, Magid’s longing for complete certainty and calculated life strengthens his reliance upon the Chalfenist fundamentalism, which promises the infinite possibility of modernity, science and power of human intelligence. Sadly, the failure of Marcus’ experiment once again proves the impossibility and limitation of this Chalfenist fundamentalism. Noteworthily, as the only female character in the Chalfen family, Marcus’s wife, Joyce Chalfen, represents a particular prototype of Chalfenist fundamentalism. Though being a well-educated horticulturist and modern woman, Joyce seems to be satisfied with her role as an omnipotent mother who can cultivate and improve both the Chalfen kids and the twins from the Iqbals. As an enthusiastic follower of the cult of her husband’s Chalfenism, Joyce of course practices Chalfenist fundamentalism in her ways of improving on both plants and juvenile delinquents such as Irie and Millat. However, what she fails to notice is that sometimes her so-called “Tough love”; that is, forcing others (both plants and people) to satisfy her own needs and imagination, can unconsciously do more harm than good when she pays no heed to their complex upbringing Sun 52

(WT 263). Meanwhile, her attitude toward both the mother and the sons of the Iqbals and the

Jones also reveals the first world women’s manipulations of and racial discrimination against ethnic minority, when they are eager to instruct and edify immigrants from the third world.

The Chalfenist fundamentalism therefore is not the opposite of the radical religious fundamentalism that Samad and Millat practice; rather, they are mirror images of each other.

Both of these two fundamentalist discourses play important roles in White Teeth, as they express Smith’s awareness of the revival and transformation of fundamentalism in the era of multiculturalism and globalization.

In this chapter, the Chalfenist fundamentalism and its adherents, mainly the Chaflens and Magid Iqbal, are the main focuses. To clarify the Chalfenist fundamentalist discourses in

White Teeth, the following passages will begin with Marcus Chalfen, apparently the founder of Chalfenism and his transgenic FutureMouse experiment, with an explicit aim to find and examine what triggers Chalfenism. Moreover, a careful scrutiny of the connections between the mouse and the Chalfenism helps us to figure out how the Chalfenist fundamentalism has been practiced and why it values so much to Marcus. As the two most important followers of

Chalfenism, Magid Iqbal and Joyce Chalfen will be analyzed next. Being the first son of the

Iqbals, who is supposed to inherently bear the pure blood of his honorable and heroic ancestors, Magid, however, fails to meet his father’s expectation and grows up to be an westernized postcolonial mimic. His transformation from a Muslim kid to a white British man does not only symbolise the triumph of westernization but also implies the dangers of being an overreacher in his deployment of modern science and human intelligence. Last but not least, Joyce Chalfen shows her arrogant ignorance towards minorities and their different cultures, which can be observed in her conversation with Alsana, the twins’ mother and her niece, Neena. Moreover, her fantasy of educating Millat is motivated less by her affection and admiration for the mysterious exotic cultures of the East than by her pride of being a member of the dominant culture and her self-imposed obligation to civilizing barbarians by teaching Sun 53

them the mores of modern civilization and the enlightened habits of rationalism.

Marcus Chalfen’s rational/scientific fundamentalism is constructed upon his abomination of uncertainty and unpredictable randomness. Marcus shows his contempt of the irrational and unreliable tale of the Iqbal family when he declares, upon hearing the tale of

Mangal Pande, that the tale is “One part truth to three parts fiction” (WT 280). Rather than resorting to imagination to reconstruct his family history, Marcus keeps a detailed record of the genealogy of the Chalfen family. Everything is under control and is scrupulously recorded in the Chalfen family. “We all go back as far as each other. It’s just that the Chalfens have always written things down,” explains Marcus when showing the family trees to Irie (WT

280). As a scientist, Marcus’ enthusiasm with calculating, controlling and reducing unpredictable mysteries is not only evident in his careful recording of his family history but also in his devotion to his transgenic experiment and in the condescending ways he treats his family. The FutureMouse perfectly captures Marcus’ confidence in the promising power of science and human intelligence. By “re-engineer[ing] the actual genome” of the mouse,

“specific cancers are expressed in specific tissues at predetermined times in the mouse’s development, then you’re no longer dealing with the random,” explains Marcus (emphasis original WT 280). The goal of Marcus’ transgenic project is supposed to benefit human races.

By deciphering the gene codes, his transgenic experiment can control and even eliminate fatal diseases like cancers and other hereditary diseases that have plagued humans before they happen. This possibility of becoming a savior of human races satisfies Marucs’ self-esteem.

As the prospective creator of the “new breed” (WT 283), Marcus’ confidence and pride can evidently be discerned whenever he talks about his project.

However, even though the transgenic program of the FutureMouse signify his pride of being both a scientist and an upper middle class intellectual, it also arouses Marcus’ anxiety as well, especially his anxiety about the ethical issues raised by his transgenic experiment.

When sitting at the airport lobby waiting for Magid Iqbal to arrive, he met a girl who was Sun 54

reading his book. The girl shows her nasty feeling and suspicion of the genome programs saying “things are getting scary…reading this shit you just realize how close science is to science fiction” and “[y]ou’ve got to be seriously naïve if you don’t think the West intend to use this shit in the East…” (WT 345). Definitely, Marcus would not agree with the girl and cannot understand why she connects modern science with fiction, cultural manipulation, or even the massacre of eastern people. To Marcus, politics or moral issues can never be one of his concerns; instead, all he focuses on is to find answers to “determining the future of a cancer, or a reproductive cycle, or the capacity to age” (WT 346). While the FutureMouse is getting attention from the public, different voices from his opponents who “professed strange objections to his life’s work” are heard. All those “idiots, conspiracists, religious lunatics, presumptuous novelists, animal-rights activists, students of politics, and all the other breeds of fundamentalists,” to Marcus, misread the points of his genome programs as they are terrified by the misguided impressions they get from ridiculous science fictions and by horrible “neofascist tabloid fantasies” about “mindless human clones, genetic policing of sexual and racial characteristics, mutated diseases” (WT 345). Marcus shows his prejudice against people holding contrary arguments by calling them “idiots, conspiracists” and

“lunatics.” From his attitude toward the girl whom he talks to at the airport and his negative judgment of his opponents, we can easily detect Marcus’ confidence and arrogance. Yet, this does not mean that Marcus is anxiety free, even though his anxiety is of a different kind from

Samad’s.

“You work partly in the dark, uncertain of future ramifications, unsure what blackness your name might yet carry, what bodies will be laid at your door,” confesses Marcus about his fears; that is to say, if the project eventually fails, both he and his “Chalfenism” would die “a death here in the wilderness” (WT 348). His anxious feeling comes from the uncertain and unpredictable future of his genome program and he meanwhile is terrified by the public’s interference and intervention into his scientific project. After a news report about his project Sun 55

and the transgenic mice used in his experiment, all the negative responses and condemnation that Marcus receives from conservatives and social movement groups such as “Conservative

Ladies Association, the Anti-Vivisection lobby, the Nation of Islam” punch him shockingly.

“[T]he public were three steps ahead of him like Oscar’s robot, they had already played out their endgames…,” thinks Marcus, and then they astonishingly “already conclude what the result would be—something he did not presume to imagine!—full of their clones, zombies, designer children, gay genes” (WT 347). Realizing that his program has been prematurely denied by the community, Marcus feels frustrated and thus he makes all his efforts to defend himself by saying “No one working in a new field, doing truly visionary work, can be certain of getting through his century or the next without blood on his palms” (WT 347). However, these words also express Marcus’ cruelty and indifference towards other species when he claims that, as a scientist, he regards “the animal as a site, a biological site for experimentation into heredity, into disease, into morality” (WT 346).

The FutureMouse embodies all there is in Chalfenism, both its investment in a “perfect” future as well as the means that it deploys to arrive at a future-to-come. Regarding “the animal as a site” for his experiment, Marcus practically neglects “the mousiness of the mouse” (WT 346). His attitude towards the mice used in his experiment registers and expresses the core concept of Chalfenism which sets its goals upon reducing randomness, eliminating the differences between each individual, and aims to predetermine or “program” the futures of both the mice and human species. Marcus controls his children in the same way as he controls the gene codes of the FutureMouse. When sitting at the dinner table, the

Chalfens are “[l]ike clones of each other, their dinner table was an exercise in mirrored perfection, Chalfenism and all its principles reflecting itself infinitely” (WT 262).

Interestingly, when the girl at the airport envisions a monstrous world filled with “Millions of blonds with blue eyes” and “Mail-order babies” with the successes of Marcus’ genomic program, Marcus silently mocks the girl’s naivety and impracticality (WT 346). Nonetheless, Sun 56

Smith ironically gives a portrait of the Chalfen family that parallels with the girl’s fantasy of a world of clones. Marcus practices his Chalfenism on his family by symbolically transforming his wife and children into clones of the perfect prototype of the Chalfens, the very embodiment of his “gorgeous logic,” “compassion” and “intellect” (WT 262). His intolerance of variations and multiplicity leads to the isolation of his own family and the preference of his family for homogeneity to individuality. “The Chalfen had no friends. They interacted mainly with the Chalfen extended family,” who possess “the good genes”

(emphasis in original WT 261). Like doing an experiment, Marcus estimates and controls himself and his family by educating and disciplining them with proper and reasonable behaviors. “Every Chalfen proclaimed themselves mentally healthy and emotionally stable.

The children had their oedipal complexes early and in the right order,” notes Smith (WT 261).

Therefore, when his son, Joshua, rebels against this orderly existence and joins an animal-rights group, it shocks Marcus because all his children symbolise the clowning achievement of Marcus’ Chalfenism and thus Joshua’s unpredictable transformation represents the failure of Chalfenism. “[I]n his present estrangement from Joshua he felt more powerless than ever. It hurt him that even his own son was not as Chalfenist as he’d hoped,” admits Marcus (WT 348).

Lowe recognizes Marcus’ fears and notes “as a third-generation Jewish immigrant” and also “as a scientist who has achieved a secure position at Oxford University, and in knitting him back into the society of other immigrants,” Marcus “desires to stay as far ahead in his profession as he can” (176). Marcus’s accomplishment in science and in creating Chalfenism thus reconfirms and reinforces his sense of superiority as a rational, competent, and advanced

Chalfen. Marcus “breeds a new strain of a genetically advanced mouse, in the same spirit as he and his wife are raising an intellectually superior breed of Chalfen children,” concludes

Lowe (176). Then eventually where exactly does Marcus’ anxiety come from? To Lowe, it comes from Marcus’ subtle fears of being an “insecure” Jewish immigrant “who must ever Sun 57

prove [the Jew’s] indispensability to society or face rejection” (176). As immigrants, Samad and Millat embrace cultural traditions and religions to comfort them and to rid them of their insecurity. To them, religious fundamentalism is a way to protect themselves from assimilation and to escape from western cultural hegemony. Instead, Marcus’ choice is different. As a modernist and rationalist, he believes in the power of “Intellectual faith”

(emphasis in original WT 348). Regarding the Chalfen family as the advanced human species bearing good genes, Marcus’ pride, however, at the same time becomes his Achilles’s heel.

He is thus shocked to find himself rejected by the society which condemns him as the

“reincarnated cockroach” (WT 347) and betrayed by his son, Joshua. It is Joshua’s betrayal, moreover, which kills Marcus’ Chalfenist pride.

The projected success of transgenic project, the FutureMouse, and the success of the

Chalfen children in their inheritance of Chalfenism not only represent Marcu’s personal achievement but also a fatal issue that concerns the integrity of the Chalfen family. The failure of his transgenic project and destruction of Chalfenism can tear the Chalfen family apart. Beukema once in her essay discusses the importance of history and roots to characters in White Teeth and she notes that “the men cling to their histories in order to survive, and when that history was lost or… never really existed, the men’s conceptions of their identities become confused as they are unable to find a connection to hold them in their present positions” (13). Samad and Millat are two perfect examples of those who treasure history and roots so much that they even invent and cling to an imagined tradition as an anchor of their identity. However, Marcus Chalfen is the only character who “seems completely ignorant of the process of historical becoming and certain of his identity,” argues Lowe (8). In fact, history bears little significance to Marcus. Marcus Chalfen “takes the mouse’s life and erases all possibility of selfhood and agency in his creation of a unique identity and history for it”

(emphasis in original Beukema 8). In other words, instead of tracing back to the roots and protecting his family traditions from disappearance, Marcus is a man of future, and all he Sun 58

concerns is to uplift the Chalfen family with his efforts in the genome program. He wants to create history in the same way as he “creates Beings” (emphasis in original WT 260).

Moreover, Marcus’s ways of dealing with his family history are different from those of those religious fundamentalists such as Samad and Millat. He does not believe family myths and fairy tales; instead, he counts on calculating and recording details and facts. The Chalfen family tree shows the family’s tradition of being specific, cautious and precise. When Marcus shows to Irie how the history in the Chalfen family has been recorded, Irie describes the family tree as “an elaborate illustrated oak that stretched back into the 1600s and forward into the present day” and she seems to be shocked by the fact that “the Chalfen actually knew who they were in 1675.” Then Marcus explains, “[I]t helps if you want to be remembered” (WT

280). “[T]o be remembered” defines perfectly what Marcus pursues in his lifetime and also it completely corresponds to Lowe’s argument about Marcus’ anxiety of being denied by the society and his desire for social recognition and fames. Beukema after all does not misread the values of history in White Teeth. Religious fundamentalists like Samad and Millat go far way back to the roots searching for cultures, traditions and languages they can identify with and possess naturally. Marcus Chalfen makes use of scientific fundamentalist discourses and thus he believes that history can be controlled and be determined like the gene codes of mice.

For all of them, history does value a lot, though it has to be regarded from two different perspectives.

Beukema’s argument of regarding history as a survival issue and Lowe’s hypothesis of

Marcus’ fears of being rejected both prove that Marcus’ anxiety comes from his fear of uncertainty, fears of losing power to others and most importantly, his fear of the possible collapse of Chalfenism, which symbolises not only the essence of being a good Chaflen and also his pride and superiority. Marcus’ superiority is revealed also in his insistence on pure gene. His insistence upon good gene comes from “the notion of biological purity,” which,

Gustar believes, is derived from the “hubris” of European colonialism and imperialism. “The Sun 59

possible consequences of Chalfen’s science, for its potential to eradicate biodiversity” are

“the replay of modernist belief in man and technology, modernist hubris—a hubris that underpinned the entire colonial enterprise,” notes Gustar (338). Janathan Gottschall goes one step further and argues that the belief in genetic superiority is a universal phenomenon suggestive of the need to control the “human animal” lurking under human skins (279).

Konard Lorenz categorizes the ferocious confrontations among male animals as a “ritual combat” (qtd. in Gottschall 282). Male animals contest their “dominance hierarchy” for their

“reproductive success” (282). That is to say, male animals fight to win higher social status within the groups they belong to. In Marcus’ case, in order to achieve or to maintain his academic position among scientists, he needs to attract public attentions, to bring out some controversial arguments to satisfy the public’ curiosity. Apparently, the FutureMouse becomes the solution and the weapon for Marcus to garner attention in his “ritual combat.” The ultimate purpose for wars between male animals is to “pass on their genes” and to win their ritual combats (282). “[R]itual combats are serious business; they help determine pecking order, which is correlated with mating order, which determines who puts the most swimmers in the gene pool,” explains Gottschall (284). For instance, Archie Jones, with his pale skin characteristic of Caucasians, still shows his desire to win, to pass on his gene, to have a child with blue eyes, a symbol of the West. He “couldn’t imagine any piece of him slugging it out in the gene pool with piece of Clara and winning” (emphasis in original WT 57). This possibility pleases Archie and also proves Gottschall’s hypothesis of ritual combats within dominant male groups. Eventually, male figures in White Teeth are just like any other male animals in the nature world as well. As a result, to Marcus, to participate in this competitive game of the “ritual combat” is also to pass on good genes and to maintain his dominant social status within both the Chalfens and the society.

There are subtle differences between Marcus’ faith in good genes and Samad’s belief in pure blood. The pure blood in the Iqbal family, however, can be easily diluted by one Sun 60

interracial marriage, with the unfortunate consequence of leaving the Iqbal family “a legacy of unrecognizable great-grandchildren (Aaaaaaa!)” (emphasis in original WT 272). However,

Chalfenism is more intellectual and scientific. Though Marcus seems to feel quite disappointed about Joshua’s not being so “Chalfenist,” he surprisingly discovers that Magid

Iqbal can “think like” him and behave like a real Chalfen (WT 304). As a scientist, Marcus learns from his years’ study of the transgenetics to know that it is possible to transform an animal or a person’s genome arrangement. To Marcus, Joshua’s adolescent rebellion symbolizes “the random actions of a mutagen.” Fortunately, if a scientist can “re-engineer the actual genome,” he or she can eliminate randomness (emphasis in original WT 282). Magid can be the last hope for both Marcus’ transgenic mice and Chalfenism because he represents a perfect prototype of the Chalfens, people who only believe in the prowess of the intellect and in science. Accordingly, to “pass on” the Chalfenism, his good genes and his belief in the power of wisdom becomes a fatal issue. The ritual combat for Marcus is somehow similar to

Samad’s “holy war.” Samad fights for the pure blood and his religion in order to survive; similarly, Marcus fights for good genes and his Chalfenism in order to be “remembered,” to be written in the history (WT 280). In other words, to pass on his “good genes” is, as a male animal, Marcus Chalfen’s innate ability to survive. To Samad, the disappearance of the Iqbal family’s pure blood means the death of his identity; similarly, to Marcus, good genes consolidate Chalfenism, which completely defines him as a human being. As a result, to destroy or to contaminate the good genes of Chalfen can mean the death of Marcus Chalfen.

Marcus’s pride of and insistence on rational fundamentalism finally become a form of violence not only to his rivals but also to innocent animals and the Chalfen children.

Sometimes, males’ ritual combats can become real wars in the human world. “War is only one form of violence in a graded series of aggressive encounters,” argues Napolen Chagnon and “some of the other forms of fighting…may even be considered as the antithesis of war, for they provide an alternative to killing” (qtd. in Gottschall 283), which means males’ ritual Sun 61

combats can be “direct or indirect fighting” and most of time they needn’t cost any death

(284). Samad’s ritual combat for winning spaces and recognition in history is a quiet one. He goes to the library searching for the truth about his ancestor and most of the time he weeps over his sorrow and anxious depressions, while sitting silently with his best friend, Archie.

The most brutal thing Samad does is to send Magid, his elder son, back to Bangladesh. Millat, however, chooses a more radical and coarse form of fighting against the inequality and discrimination in society. Though not being mentioned in White Teeth, many critics have noticed that the radical movement of KEVIN can be the precocious terrorism in the early twenty-first century. White Teeth is “a cautionary tale, improbably prophetic in its intensity, for an age in which competing religious (fundamentalist) as well as secular (civilizationist) extremes have since converged in nightmarish collision course of 9/11” (Huggan 761).

Marcus and Chalfenist fundamentalism apparently symbolise different “form of violence,” which surfaces when he encounters public’ rejections and is threatened with randomness and uncertainty. When the scientific fundamentalism is combined with Marcus’ insistence on pure gene, it can be dangerous.

“The gene, and by association the Human Genome Project,” according to Elaine Graham, becomes more than “the formation of essential proteins” but is also taken as “the icon of destiny” and merchandise from “the patenting and marketing of genetic information” (qtd. in

Huggan 761). That is to say, when scientists intervene into the formation of gene’s sequences and then take further steps to control, to determine the development of certain genes, cells and tissues on bodies of animals and humans, Graham believes, they are at the same time malfunctioning the balanced operations of “environment, sociability, natural selection and biology” (Huggan 761). Moreover, due to the abnormality of genomic systems, the Human

Genome Project then will redefine “what it means to be human” when it renders impossible for us to distinguish the boundaries between “human” and “almost-human,” whose genomic sequence has been transformed (761). Therefore, when Marcus yields to the omnipotent Sun 62

power of modern science, programs the mutagen of mice, and then intervenes the future of mice, he indirectly ruins the “inevitable consequences of nature’s laws” (Huggan 762).

Huggan is not the only critic who envisions the future development of the transgenic project and its potential dangers. Gustar even defines Marcus as “the most frightening” father figures in White Teeth because of his abnormal obsession with purism and his intolerance of randomness (338). The image of Marcus Chalfen becomes scarier when it is paralleled with that of Dr. Marc-Pierre Perret (Dr. Sick), the French scientist who once “worked in a scientific capacity for the Nazis since before the war.” Dr. Sick is a real “Promethean overreacher,” a crazy scientist and Frankenstein, who works on “the sterilization program” and “the euthanasia policy” (WT 90). Giorgio Agamben argues “the lawfulness of euthanasia” as a fundamental controversy in biopolitics, “the decision on the value (or nonvalue) of life.”

The “sovereign power” is the one that can decide whether life “deserves to be lived” or “does not deserve to be lived” (137). Thus the ambiguity in euthanasia policy is that if the person who executes euthanasia surgery need not to face the condemnation of “the commission of a homicide,” does this also imply the decriminalization of killing people’s life, depriving of one’s sovereignty of his/her own body, or forcing the other to give in the sovereignty of body?

(139). Worse still, the decriminalization of homicide can be an excuse for genocide, massacre and cultural and racial purism of Nazis. Samad’s judgment on Dr. Sick is correct when he says “He [Dr. Sick] wants to control, to dictate the future. He wants a race of men, a race of indestructible men, that will survive that last days of this earth” (WT 100). Dr. Sick does not only desire for the sovereign power to control the values/nonvalue of life but also pursues for the ultimate knowledge, the almighty intelligence in the universe. “It is such a terrible thing, to know only in part. A terrible thing not to have perfection, human perfection, when it is so readily available,” admits Dr. Sick (WT 446). His perfectionism and desires of overreaching the beyond and breaking the thresholds between divinity and secularity can eventually lead to the horror of Nazified cultural/racial purism. Sun 63

Regarding Dr. Sick as his mentor and companion, Marcus Chalfen, however, does not recognize the dangers of the transgenic project, the FutureMouse. Because of the popularity of science fictions, people’s imaginations are “a thousand years ahead of anything either robotics or artificial intelligence could yet achieve,” mocks Marcus ironically after listening to the girl’s judgment of his books and receiving the hostility from the public (WT 345).

Nonetheless, all the sense of suspicion and apprehension expressed by the girl at the airport and by readers of the news are not odd at all if we examine Marcus’ words in the press released before the conference. In the report it says,

The FutureMouse experiment offers the public a unique opportunity to see a life and

death in ‘close up.’ The opportunity to witness for themselves a technology that might

yet slow the progress of disease, control the process of aging and eliminate genetic

defect. The FutureMouse holds out the tantalizing promise of a new phase in human

history, where we are not victims of random but instead directors and arbitrators of our

own fate. (357)

To see the mouse simply as “the site for an experiment into the aging of cells, the progression of cancer” (WT 356), Marcus ignores the fact that the mouse is an animal and denies the mouse’s essence of life, “[t]he mousiness of the mouse” (WT 346). That is, being the sovereignty of the mouse, Marcus can control someone else’ “life and death,” decide the pace of its development “along a predictable timetable” (WT 356-57). With the success of the transgenic project, Marcus can be the arbitrator of his own fate. However, he cannot understand that at the same time he deprives others’ authority of their own bodies and fates.

Also, Marcus’ Chalfenism very much resemble Dr. Sick’s perfectionism because they both believe the ultimate power of human intelligence and both look forward to going to “the edges of his God’s imagination” (WT 259). Besides, Marcus’ idealization of good genes in the

Chalfen family can be seen as the practice of racial/cultural purism of Nazism.

Accordingly, the girl’s fantasy of a monstrous world of “millions of blonds with blue Sun 64

eyes” and “mail-order babies” cannot be simply a science fiction. Irie also cannot deny that the FutureMouse is a scary little shit when she sees the photo of a mouse with tumors “on its neck that appeared practically the same size as its ear” (WT 282). Even Joyce Chalfen has once envisioned the new breed that her husband creates will be “mice with rabbit genes, mice with webbed feet” (WT 259). By thus drawing up an analogy between Dr. Sick and Marcus

Chalfen, Smith reveals the potential dangers of transgenic projects and brings up the discussion of what crises the Chalfenism, the rational/scientific fundamentalism can encounter with the public’ acknowledgment of how horrible the FutureMouse and Chalfen’s fundamentalist discourse can be without protests and restrictions from opponent groups.

Archie Jones’ sudden intrusion in the FutureMouse press conference terribly ruins

Marcus Chalfen’s transgenic program. Archie and his flipped coin in White Teeth play the roles as the “opposition to all these fundamentalisms” (Bentley 498). Fred Botting argues that

Archie’s “coin-flipping” opens up “a space of everyday liberalism, ordinary possibility and gradual social change against forces, divine or scientific, that would eliminate randomness with awful certitude” (qtd. in Bentley 498). Archie is an indecisive person who always counts on “whim and chance” to make critical decisions in his life. “Archie’s characteristics are tolerance, apathy, rejection of any fundamental systems,” concludes Bentley (498). As a person who holds strong beliefs in fundamentalism, Samad cannot understand him, neither can Dr. Sick. Knowing that his life was about to be decided by Archie’s coin-flipping, Dr.

Sick was extremely astonished and apparently did not know how to deal with this weird boy because during all his lifetime, he was pursuing accuracy and certainty. Samad Iqbal, being the best friend of Archie, finally discovers the truth that Dr. Sick is still alive and he was betrayed by his best friends. When Samad tries to persuade Archie of the necessity of killing

Dr. Sick, he says, “A man is a man is a man. His family threatened, his beliefs attacked, his way of life destroyed, his whole world coming to an end—he will kill…There will be people he will kill” (WT 217). Samad’s choice of violence when confronting threats and crises is Sun 65

easy to predict because of his being a religious fundamentalist and his responsibility of protecting the family heritages. However, “And there will be people he will save,” answers

Archie (WT 217). He is always an exception in White Teeth. Acquarone therefore argues that

Archie and his coin symbolize “the duality of the unexpected, the paradoxical, the uncertain, in one word, the hybrid,” all of which Marcus hates and strives anxiously to eliminate (218).

Archie Jones thus serves as a surprising, though unintended, critic of Chalfenism. Then the FutureMouse’s escape implies the inevitable crises or predictable failures of rational/scientific fundamentalism. The genetically altered FuturMouse represents more than a groundbreaking innovation not only in the genome program but also in Marcus’ practice of

Chalfenism, the ultimate, infinite power of modern science and human intellects. Archie’s interruption in the press conference ends up with the FutureMouse’s escape and leaves an unknown future for both the mouse and Marcus’ project. Bentley then concludes that “in claiming its stake for freedom,” the twist of the FutureMouse’s destiny “defies those who wish to contain it, just as Archie’s coin evades the imperatives of fundamentalism” (500).

With her narrations of Archie and the FutureMouse, Smith points out the unavoidability of randomness and chance and ironically implies that the predetermined, calculated programing of both mice and human beings can be a fantasy or scientists’ overreaching desire. “Choosing chance” and freedom is the mouse’ instinct to survive so that it fights against “darkness,” the planned destiny of being an experimental animal (Lassner 195); therefore, “In this gleefully ironic version of the return to the nature, the instinctive need to survive trumps the redemptive promise of the genome,” notes Huggan (762). Marcus’ rational/scientific fundamentalism, as a counter discourse of globalization and multiculturalism, shows another possibility when people confront challenges from the unknown scientific fields and experience horrors of the random conditions in life.

As the eldest child of Samad Iqbal, Magid has a destiny that is doomed even before his birth. “You come with me on haji. If I am to touch that black stone before I die. I will do it Sun 66

with my eldest son by my side,” says Samad, thus suggesting the inevitable responsibility borne by the eldest son in the Iqbal family (WT 127). Being a fate determinist, Samad believes that the superiority of his eldest son, Magid, is decided long before his birth and his second son, Millat, is “by the intricate design of Allah, the loser of two vital minutes that he would never make up” (WT 181). Interestingly, the differentiations between the young twins seem to prove Samad’s argument. Magid is smart, a quick learner who shows his interests in scientific study and new discovery in daily life; however, Millat is the trouble maker, the dumb one and the less important son for Samad. Unfortunately, Magid does not take his

Muslim and Bangladeshi identity as his innate nature; instead he “really wanted to be in some other family” (emphasis in original WT 126). Magid is not like his father and twin brother. He does not experience the identity crises they have been through because he “has long given up the idea of negotiating between the identity his father wishes him to embody and the identity he finds on his own” (Beukema 10). Magid recognizes himself as a real British man who follows Christian tradition and “join[s] in with the Harvest Festival like Mark Smith would.

Like everybody else would” (WT 126). Mirze thus argues that instead of “constructing a hyphenated ethnic identity,” “[Magid] ‘swallows [England] as a whole’ and is determined to build an alternative future to transcend this father’s limitations as an immigrant” (195).

Magid’s being sent back to Bangladesh does not satisfy Samad’s naïve and ridiculous hope that Muslim traditions and doctrines can convert his son into a real Muslim. In fact, as a

Englishman, Magid is actually expelled by his beloved father and forced to adapt to the customs of strange lands so far away from home. It is hard for people in England to imagine how bad the circumstance in Bangladesh is. People who are safe cannot imagine that there is a country which “half the time…lies under water; generations wiped out as regularly as clockwork; individual life expectancy an optimistic fifty-two” and its people “lived under the invisible finger of random disaster, of flood and cyclone, hurricane and mudslide” (WT 176).

Bangladesh people learn there is no choice except by “holding on to a life no heavier than a Sun 67

paisa coin, wading thoughtlessly through floods.” And so should Magid. Though he has expressed neither his anxiety of being an exile constantly threatened with death nor his desire for living in a “relatively safe” place, “the Chittagong Hills, the highest point” in the country,

Magid does experience the cruelty of fate, “God’s idea of a really good wheeze, his tab at black comedy” (WT 176). In his letter written to his family way back in London, he writes about his future vocation plan saying “it had long been my intention to make the Asian countries sensible places, where order prevailed, disaster was prepared for…New laws, new stipulations, are required to deal with our unlucky fate, the natural disaster” (WT 239-40). In his letters, Magid reveals his fears and sense of insecurity when confronting the unpredictable fate and recognizing how fragile life can be in front of the power of nature. Nonetheless, he, instead of compromising with the unknowns, searches for possible ways to escape from the traps of fate. Samad could not recognize Magid’s transformation when reading Magid’s words like, “Allah punishes and sometimes men have to do it and it is a wise man who knows if it is Allah’s turn or his own. I hope one day I will be a wise man” (WT 179). To be a wise man who can make decisions on his own implies Magid’s wishes of independence and his desires not to be controlled by Allah or other mysterious power anymore.

When Magid is young, he cannot find ways to deal with his anxious fears of uncertainty.

He is able to rid him of his anxiety when he meets “India’s very finest writer,” “the great man,” who teaches him the importance of wisdom and education and also the unavoidable bonds between human’s fate and future. “Too often we Indians, we Bengalis, we Pakistanis, throw up our hands and cry ‘Fate!’ in the face of history. But many of us are uneducated, many of us do not understand the world,” says the man (WT 240). The man inspires Magid with his admiration of western cultures and rationalism saying “We must be more like the

English. The English fight fate to the death. They do not listen to history unless it is telling them what they wish to hear” (WT 240). Samad, who believes the inevitable consequence of fate, would not agree with Magid. He bursts out his outrages shouting, “If Allah says there Sun 68

will be storm, there will be storm…the very reason I send the child there” is “to understand the essentially we are weak, that are not in control” (WT 240). He cannot understand that his two sons, Magid and Millat, who are supposed to be “the two aspects of their father’s personality, the transcultural field, the land of no-where where the crucible of identity comes to be realized” (Acquarone 218). Fernandez in her essay discusses the displacement of immigrants. “All of them, regardless of the (in)stability of their households, are displaced and trying to find their own spaces within their families and within society,” notes she (154). The displacement of Magid comes from his father’s mistaken insistence on cultural purity and genealogy. Exiled by his own father, Magid ironically finds his roots in the Chalfen family and comes to identify with Marcus Chalfen and the western science he practices.

Years later, Magid meets Marcus Chalfen, the conductor of transgenic FutureMouse.

Communicating via their letters, Magid and Marcus find each other soul mates and saviors.

“They can save each other,” thinks Marcus, (emphasis in original WT 348). “[I]f I were a

Hindu I would suspect we met in some former life,” writes Magid in his letter to Marcus (WT

304). Magid cannot stop admiring Marcus’ revolutionary genome project as he identifies the

“remarkable mice” as the most “fundamental” answer to his doubt about the world for years.

From Marcus’ project, he hopes to derive the strengths to fight against the malevolent God and unknown destiny. Marcus’ FutureMouse promises Magid a wonderful vision which can

“improve the lot of [his] poor country—which is victim to every passing whim of Gad, every hurricane and flood…” Therefore with the help of Marcus, Magid finds his savior as well, that is, “to eliminate the random” (WT 304) and gradually converts himself into a Chalfenist, the rational/scientific fundamentalist. Magid proves he is also an extremist in the following narrations,

He witnessed the custom design of genes… One mouse only… No potluck. No

random factors… No question about who was pulling the strings. No doubtful

omnipotence. No shaky fate. No question of a journey,… No other roads, no missed Sun 69

opportunities, no parallel possibilities. No second-guessing, no what-ifs, no

might-have-beens. Just certainty. Just centainty in its purest form. And…what more

is God than that? (WT 405)

Magid’s extremist discourses are as dangerous as Marcus’ Chalfenism because they both are intolerant of randomness, uncertainty and are longing for the ultimate “purest form” bearing their overloading greediness of being God, dominating and manipulating others, animal and human races. Magid is, therefore, “the Frankenstein, the god-trickster turned modernist,” who searches for the impossible “perfection of the human,” so Gustar argues (339).

Being a rational fundamentalist, Magid devotes his life to defending and promoting

Marcus’ transgenic program and Chalfenism. He shows an indifferent and cruel attitude toward his own father and twin brother. Magid disappoints Samad with converting himself to

“a nonbeliever” and his brother Millat refuses to talk to him (WT 354). As the patent attorney for Marcus’ FutureMouse, Magid arranges beautiful words with his “elegant English” to turn

“the bald statements of a scientist uninterested in moral debates into the polished arguments of a philosopher.” Magid can “weave the most beautiful moral defenses with a professionalism that belied his years,” describes Irie (WT 352). Gustar even recognizes Magid as “the invisible terror of science without ethics” (340). Moreover, Magid shows his passion only when facing Marcus and his FutureMouse; to his father, his is a shame, a son that “he would have hidden” forever. His father should have “locked him under stairs or sent him to

Greenland,” for he is a bastard who eats “a bacon sandwich” in front of his Muslim father

(WT 350, 372). For the time being, Magid has totally been excluded by his birth family and has merged himself into “some other family,” like he has dreamed for yeas (emphasis in original WT 126).

Ironically, Magid’s transformation, to Marcus, is a “miracle,” his “answer to prayer” and also the firmest evidence of any “argument against genetic determinism” (emphasis in original WT 352, 305). “Magid has become, for Marcus, a second son, a chosen son, Sun 70

displacing his own biological offspring,” notes Gustar (341). Marcus is surprised at the discrepancies between Millat and Magid and finds it convincing in his theory of transgenic project, as he intends to prove the inevitability of genetic determinism. “Cloning, when it happens is dimply delayed twinning, and never in my life have I come across a couple of twins who prove more decidedly the argument against genetic determinism than Millat and yourself,” writes Marcus in the letter to Magid (WT 304-05). However, genetic determinists would not agree with Marcus’ hypothesis. Samad, as a genetic determinist for instance, regards the pure blood/genealogy as the only answer to family heritages and believes that no one can escape “their past” because “the past were so palpable in the present, so constitutive of it, that it would be the present, as it would also be the future” (Sell 30). Sadly, it is exactly his past that Magid tries so hard to escape as it is a past of unpleasant memories of the years he spent in London as a Muslim kid in London and the lonesomeness he has endured in

Bangladesh. When he returns to London, he becomes a total “stranger” in his twin brother’s eyes. “The brothers meet in a blank room after a gap of eight years and find that their genes, those prophets of the future, have reached different conclusion” (WT 382). Therefore,

Maigd’s converting to Chalfenism breaks the bonds between “the gene and the sum total of human life,” “the inevitable consequences of nature’s laws” and also represents Smith’s

“satire on genetic determinism,” which is usually taken “as an historical explanation for human characteristics and behavior” (Huggan 762).

Irie’s unborn child once again proves that the genetic determinism is just a fantasy in the era of multiculturalism and globalization. The child’s “biological determination is merged with indeterminacy, and so his very nature rebels against being bound by one’s origins in history…,” argues Lassner (195). Irie, Milliat and Magid become entangled in a love triangle not only because Irie wants to take revenge on Magid for his existence which strengthens

Milllat’s “feelings of inadequacy,” but also because Irie wants to do rebel against the genetic determinism, given her disgusts at roots, origins and history (WT 382). Irie once shows her Sun 71

lacks of compassion toward Samad’s insistence on original roots and genealogical purism saying “I will put twenty quid down now that Samad is the only person in here who knows the inside bloody leg measurement of his great-grandfather. And you know why they don’t know? Because it doesn’t fucking matter” (emphasis in original WT 426). Her unborn child then promises “a vision” of “a time, a time not far from now, when roots won’t matter anymore because they can’t because they mustn’t because they’re too long and they’re too tortuous and they’re just buried too damn deep” (WT 437).

Archie, the father of Irie, symbolises an unpredictable intervention into Marcus’ hopes of eliminating randomness and approaching the ultimate truth inside animal and human’s gene codes. Then Irie definitely reveals the limitation of human’s intelligence and modern science because her child “can never be mapped exactly nor spoken of with any certainty.”

With her unknown child, Irie is glad to observe that “there are things the human eyes cannot detect, not with any magnifying glass, binoculars, or microscope,” all of which exposes the limitations of scientific/rational fundamentalism (WT 437).

The first chapter has discussed Joyce that Chalfen’s overabundant maternal love toward

Millat can symbolize racial discrimination and middle classes’ prejudice and ignorance. Not surprisingly, Joyce does not recognize that her fantasy and favors of exotic Eastern cultures can at the same time reveals her stereotype of racial groups from the East and other minority groups, homosexuality, for instance. Though Joyce definitely would not admit that she is a homophobic though, she does show her ignorance and rude attitude during her conversation with Neena, the nice of Alsana and her girlfriend, Maxine when they show up “arm in arm”

(WT 289) at the Chalfen’s dinner table. When Joyce asks the out-of-closet Neena, “Do you use each other’s breasts as pillows?”, she does not even mind embarrassing her guests continually and she even goes on with this topic by posing other more embarrassing questions such as “It’s just, in a lot of Indian poetry, they talk about using breasts for pillows,…I just—just—just—wondered, if white sleeps on brown, or, as one might expect, brown sleeps Sun 72

on white?” (WT 290). Defining the significance of “middle classes” to the Chalfens, Smith notes, “In the Chalfen lexicon the middle classes were the inheritors of the enlightenment, the creators of the welfare state, the intellectual elite, and the source of all culture” (WT 359).

Joyce’s middle class ignorance of homosexuals and her sense of superiority of being part of the white-dominant culture are apparently hidden beneath the guise of her intellectual wisdom. Ironically, Joyce Chalfen and her husband both regard this disgusting joke as a way of showing how clever and how intelligent the Chalfens can be. “I’ve been wanting to ask that all night. Well done, Mother Chalfen!” says Marcus (emphasis in original WT 291).

Joyce Chalfen is confident and satisfied with her role of being a well-educated middle class successful mother bearing four perfect little versions of her perfect husband, Marcus Chalfen.

Joyce needs to be needed. Sometimes she misses “the golden age when she was the linchpin of the Chalfen family. When people couldn’t eat without her.” However, “They were all perfect” so that Joyce cannot find any flaws. The fact that “[T]here seemed nothing to improve, nothing to cultivate” frustrates Joyce (WT 261). As an engineer of genome program,

Marcus believes that he can improve and benefit his generations and the next generations if he can detect the mysterious genetic sequence of the FutureMouse. Joyce Chalfen, as the most faithful follower of Chalfenism, satisfies her own desires of controlling and dominating the others with her maternal drive, her “Tough love” toward both plants in the garden, the

Chalfen kids and the Iqbal twins, Magid and Millat. Her decisive and cruel attitude toward

“thrips” can symbolise her characteristics of being a fierce manipulator. Joyce just cannot let things “go too far,” so “[s]he was doing this for delphinium. She was doing this because without her the delphinium had no chance.” Her so-called “Tough love” is just her excuse to control people and to intervene other’s lives (WT 263). Therefore, she psychoanalyzes

Millat’s participation in the fundamental movement and diagnoses his rebellions as a symptom of his needing love and she “longed to touch the site with the tip of her Chalfen greenfinger, close the gap, knit the skin,” to comfort and to save the poor Millat from a Sun 73

disastrous life (WT 270). Joyce always believes that “love is the reason” to involve herself into someone else’s life and her sense of superiority also makes her think that people can do nothing without her, neither can her plants in the garden (WT 378). She hopes to be a savior just like Marcus. However, her longing for being needed ironically represents her lack of confidence and her anxious greed for recognition.

In short, in the second chapter, with the observation of rational/scientific fundamentalist discourses of Marcus, Joyce Chalfen and Magid, it proves Smith’s recognition of the dangers of overreaching the edge of modern science and human’s intelligence. Though the rapid development of modern science and technology can bring a more convenient environment and better life quality for human beings, rational/scientific fundamentalism can meanwhile create discrimination between races, classes, and even genders and worse, it can deprive us of our compassion to minorities, our tolerance of multiplicity, and admiration for the multiple heterogeneity of each individual as we become obsessed with the pursuit for the fantasy of perfectionism, purism and definite truth. Sun 74

Conclusion

Smith ends the long story of “the great immigrant experiment” with more untold stories and leaving open-ended questions about all the characters’ future (WT 271). Still, by illustrating a snapshot of Irie Jones seven years after that magic day of Marcus’ FutureMouse conference, Smith provides readers a chance to glance the story behind the scene. Irie goes back to the Caribbean with her “lover,” Joshua Chalfen and her grandmother, Hortense.

“Irie’s fatherless little girl writes affectionate postcards to Bad Uncle Millat and Good Uncle

Magid and feels free as Pinocchio, a puppet clipped of paternal string” (WT 448).

Interestingly, we still have no chance to make sure whether Irie’s going back to her original homeland can represent her awakening affections toward the history, the roots and the traditions of her family or it is simply a travel of curiosity taken with her family and lover to satisfy her exoticism fantasy of the third world. The vague descriptions of Irie’s future may reveal Smith’s ambiguous and open-minded attitude toward the importance of genealogical roots and multiculturalism. One thing we can be sure is that Irie’s “fatherless little girl” does practice Irie’s dream of escaping the fixed plot of identity politics which dictates that one’s identity is decided by one’s skin color, culture and language. Irie Jones and her unrecognizable daughter provide a possible way-out for immigrants and diasporas when the girl suggests the impossibility of pure roots, history and Irie, an independent female figure being able to enjoy and “muster a modicum of freedom and direction” in her life (Lowe169).

Besides, the intrusion of Irie and her child symbolically destroy Magid’s dream of achieving ultimate certainty and deleting all randomness. Being a rationalist, Magid still cannot resist his sexual impulse toward Irie. Having an intercourse with Irie proves that the irresistible human’s instinct and unpredictable incidents can never be controlled or eliminated; moreover, the unrecognizable child represents the fantasy of transcending the natural power and Sun 75 human’s limited knowledge.

Irie Jones and her daughter, being the two most complex inter-racial characters, therefore become a site where fundamentalism, globalization and multiculturalism encounter each other, blending, interweaving together so that no one living in this era of diasporas can ever escape from being “involved.” “Involved” is “a consequence of living, a consequence of occupation and immigration, of empires and expansion, of living in each other’s pockets…one becomes involved and it is a long trek back to be uninvolved” (WT 363). With this argument, Smith explains the impossibility of ignoring the interrelationships of various controversies between radical fundamentalist discourses and liberal globalization and multiculturalism in cosmopolitan London.

Though Smith notices the fundamentalist discourses can be taken either as redemption discourse or as a counter discourse to work against the forces of multiculturalism and globalization, she actually does not make any affirmative judgments and conclusion about this controversial relationship between oppositions and instead she chooses to leave conflicts between immigrants and non-immigrants unsolved. Then why does Smith arrange this open-ended story? When the story comes to an end, the press conference of Marcus Chalfen’s

FutureMouse turns out to be a ridiculous melodrama. Samad is stunned by his best friend’s betrayal. Archie coincidentally saves Dr. Sick’s life twice only by chances. Millat fires a bullet through Archies’ thigh and shockingly rescues the FutureMouse. No one there in the press room is expecting this twist. Though every of them is eagerly to figure out the whole story, no one can fully tell it. The eyewitnesses cannot even tell Millat from Magid and recognize who is the one firing the bullet. We can only guess from some small clues in the very last page that Samad and Archie’s friendships can definitely last till the next coming decades, Irie’s daughter calls Magid and Millat uncle instead of father, and the Indian restaurant, O’Connell, “finally opened his door to women” (WT 448). There are still tons of labyrinths need to be solved. We do not know the future of Marcus’ transgenic project and the Sun 76 escaped FutureMouse, the after story of the unsolved conflicts between the twins and also the unknown father of Irie’s daughter. Smith confuses readers by telling an incomplete and undecided ending, which at the same time can represent her ambiguous but open minded attitude toward all those debatable controversial issues like genome program, fundamentalist movement which is believed is behind all acts of terrorism in the twenty-first century, and the fantasy of multiculturalism and globalization celebrated by some critics and criticized by others. In fact, with her recognitions of all these symptoms in the new century of diaspora in cosmopolitan London, Smith does not attempt to make any deceitful statement telling migrant people how to deal with their displacement and how to get along with non-migrant people. Instead, the ending passage in White Teeth implies it is impossible to comprehend the whole-known truth and to control the ultimate trajectory of human’s destiny.

“Maybe it would make an interesting survey (what kind would be your decision) to examine the present and divide the onlookers into two groups,” notes Smith: “those whose eyes fell upon a bleeding man,…and those who watched the getaway of a small brown rebel mouse” (WT 448). We can only choose one position at a time and miss the other ones. Samad and Millat choose to be religious fundamentalist giving up the chances to compromise with the white-dominant multicultural and cosmopolitan London; Marcus and Joyce Chalfen and

Magid choose to believe Chalfenist fundamentalist which they believe may usher in a bright future of the omnipotent power of science and human’s intelligence but at same time they lose their empathy toward different others. Similarly, people who believe in the myth of the happy multicultural London and the prospective utopia of a peaceful world without boundaries and decimations in the era of globalization cannot understand the rebellions from fundamentalists.

“This has been the century of the great immigrant experiment” (WT 271). With her symbolic “immigrant experiment” which is paralleled with Marcus’ transgenic project, Smith reveals the similarity between the uncertainty and unpredictable experimental result and Sun 77 humans’ fates. Though Marcu’s FutureMouse eventually runs away, it does not necessarily imply the failure of the genome program because it is impossible to stop Marcus and other scientists since transgenic science has become the newest and hottest issue in biotechnology.

Similarly, though confronting the challenge from various fundamental discourses, multiculturalism and globalization do not come to an end. From her illustration of Archie

Jones, the white Englishman with “tolerance, apathy,” and “inherent goodness” (Bentley 498) and Irie Jones, who stands in between conflicting zones of fundamentalism and multiculturalism, Zadie Smith writes White Teeth to alert her reader to pay due attention to the turbulence caused by debates among fundamentalist discourses. In so doing, Smith does not deny the possibility that cosmopolitan London could be a happy multicultural land that offers equality, peacefulness and compassion to inhabitants from different cultural and language backgrounds. However, she does demand us to practice patience, attention, and understanding. After all, it is just like what Smith notes, “The end is simply the beginning of an even longer story” (WT 448) and “What is past is prologue.”

Sun 78

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