Of Teeth and Tilling:

Dental and Horticultural Imagery in Zadie Smith’s ​White Teeth

An essay by Brad Allen

For Professor Nellie McKay’s Spring 2001 Afro-American Studies 677 course

In the summer of 2000, I traveled to New York City for a weekend getaway. Ambling through the
City, I noticed that every bookstore window I passed prominently displayed Zadie Smith’s ​White
Teeth​. Languishing for the remainder of the summer in the libraries of Champaign-Urbana, I
constantly saw ​White Teeth plastered all over the web pages of internet bookstores as I surfed
the ‘net—40% off no less! It became a ​New York Times bestseller, and Zadie Smith was all the
rage amongst literary jetsetters. ​Entertainment Weekly honored Smith in their annual It List as
“It Lit Debutante.” The buzz surrounding the book intrigued me; it was ​the literary summer read
par excellence. But I wondered if ​White Teeth could really stand up to the hype surrounding it?
Simply overwhelmed by the publishing industry’s hype machine, the glowing reviews, and
Salman Rushdie’s praise (“an astonishingly assured debut”), I decided to bite. I bought the book.

And ​White Teeth served its purpose well; it was a delightful summer read. Zadie Smith’s
hyperactive prose, witty allusions, clever references, and Pynchonesque turns-of-phrase won
me over. But reading it merely as a summer treat, it did not take long for me to forget
everything about the book except that I had liked it. In the following months, I began to think
more and more about the significance of ​White Teeth​. I longed to reread it, peruse it with a
more critical and incisive eye, and try to better understand this dense and rewarding novel still
devoid of any published literary analysis.

Popular press book reviews only go so far in their discussion of novels. These types of reviews
are generally to give a reader an idea whether they should buy the book or not; they don’t really
get into detailed literary analysis. Indeed, it is not the point of popular press reviews to provide
this kind of scholarly treatment of a text. The majority of the initial reviews read very similarly,
going something like this: with her debut novel, 24-year-old Zadie Smith has unleashed a
stunning literary achievement. Smith has produced a sweeping, multiethnic epic ​that surpasses
the current Bridget Jones, girl-about-London literary vogue and dodges the Autobiographical
First Novel Syndrome. It is dazzlingly written and hysterically funny (a point Smith contests).
Most reviews outline the basic plot and note that the book is an impressive achievement, but
often these 500-to-1000-word reviews stop there. It is at this point that I begin to ask questions.
Why is the book called ​White Teeth​? How does Smith write about race in a multiethnic London
neighborhood? How is the book structured? What are the central metaphors and how do they
function?

To this point the above questions have been left unanswered. Practically no literary analysis has
been published on ​White Teeth,​ and this kind of work is crucial for a text to exist as legitimate
“literature.” In a negative review of the novel in ​The Spectator,​ Zenga Longmore predicts that “in
a few years’ time, students all over [England] will be poring over Zadie’s opus in an attempt to
‘re-examine the marginalisation of the multi-ethnic urbanisation of the late 20​th century.’”​1
Although Longmore intends a sarcastic remark, ironically, she is correct for this is the step in the

1
Zenga Longmore, “Fairy-sweary-land,” ​The Spectator​ v284 n8947 (Jan 29, 2000), 47.
development of criticism of ​White Teeth​: an examination of the book as a literary text. While it
is somewhat frustrating that little scholarly work has been done on ​White Teeth​, at the same
time it is an exciting and interesting challenge to look critically at a novel that is relatively
untouched by the academy.

The closest writing resembling literary analysis of this novel thus far is James Wood’s lengthy
review in ​The New Republic,​ but he seems to see little value in any fiction dabbling even
remotely in the realm of the postmodern. Such a massive blind spot in his argument causes me
to hesitate to take it seriously. Wood disavows the current explosion of postmodern
literature—embodied for him specifically by authors such as Pynchon, DeLillo, Foster Wallace,
Rushdie, and now Smith—what Wood calls the genre of the “big, ambitious novel.”​2 His
criticisms of Smith appear to be essentially aesthetic. For instance, one of his major problems
with Smith is that she has the tendency to delve into too “low” of a style of writing at times.
What constitutes a “low” style of writing?

Wood steeps most of his arguments in taste-oriented aesthetic preferences. Despite all his
criticisms, however, interestingly enough, he concedes that Smith has more potential than her
forbears or peers—Pynchon, DeLillo and the others—to write a more full-fledged novel. Clearly,
he does not like the book because it does not conform to his idea of what a good book should
be, but he thinks she has talent and that soon Smith will write fiction ​he likes. Such a comment
displays how irritatingly narrow-minded and condescending much of his argument is.

There is much in ​White Teeth that is worthy of critical analysis and discussion. Zadie Smith
deserves her place alongside authors like Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Toni Morrison, Gayl
Jones, and Salman Rushdie. She is not as Anita Mathias claims, “a multicultural Garrison
Keillor.”​3 This essay concentrates on Zadie Smith’s use of dental and horticultural imagery and
symbolism to allegorize the curious relationship between Britain and the residue of colonialism.

White Teeth is the story of three families: the Joneses, the Iqbals, and the Chalfens. Smith draws
out her introductions of the central characters of the novel over the first two hundred pages.
The Chalfens do not properly enter the story until the second half of the book. Smith divides the
novel into four five-chapter sections, each focusing on a specific character or characters: Archie;
Samad; Irie; Magid, Millat and Marcus respectively.

The novel opens in the early morning hours of January 1, 1975, with Archie Jones, your
run-of-the-mill middle-aged, middle-class Englishman, silently gassing himself in his car. With
the flip of a coin, he has decided to commit suicide, but things do not work out as planned:

While he slipped in and out of consciousness, the position of the planets, the
music of the spheres, the flap of a tiger moth’s diaphanous wings in Central
Africa, and a whole bunch of other stuff that Makes Shit Happen had decided it
was second-chance time for Archie. Somewhere, somehow, by somebody, it had
been decided that he would live.​4

2
James Wood, “White Teeth”, ​The New Republic​ v223 n4 (Jul 24, 2000), 41.
3
Anita Mathias, “White Teeth”, ​Commonweal​ v127 n14 (Aug 11, 2000), 28.
4
Zadie Smith, ​White Teeth​ (New York: Random House, 2000), 4.

2
Thrilled at his new lease on life and in search of a stiff drink, Archie finds himself at an End of the
World party where he sees Clara Bowden descending the staircase, a beautiful
nineteen-year-old Jamaican “with a complete lack of teeth in the top of her mouth.”​5 Six weeks
later they marry.

Not one to leave out particulars, Smith spends the next chapter discussing how Clara ended up
at the top of the staircase. Clara came to London from Jamaica with her mother. Both are
Jehovah’s Witnesses and according to the religious bigwigs in Brooklyn, January 1, 1975, will
mark the end of the world. Clara’s boyfriend, Ryan Topps, befriends her mother, and Clara
distances herself from both of them and her religion. Ryan and Clara wreck a motorcycle into a
tree, knocking out Clara’s top row of teeth in her fall. Unconcerned with the Jehovah’s
Witness-proclaimed End of the World, Clara goes to the New Year’s party where she meets
Archie Jones.

The story branches out, introducing Archie’s best friend and mentor, Samad Iqbal, and his
young, new, arranged-marriage wife Alsana. Without pause, both Alsana and Clara end up
pregnant. Clara gives birth to a daughter whom she names Irie—Jamaican patois for “OK, cool,
peaceful.” Alsana has twin boys she names Magid and Millat. “Ems are strong,” she says.​6

The second part of the book (“Samad—1984, 1857”) jumps ahead to the mid-1980s and centers
on the Iqbal family. Samad has an affair with the school music teacher, the cute, white Poppy
Burt-Jones. Furious with the corrupting ways of London, Samad decides to send Magid to
Bangladesh to study and learn the ways of their ancestors without bothering to mention his
plans to his wife.

The third part of the book (“Irie—1990, 1907”) jumps ahead to the 1990s, focusing more heavily
on the children. When Irie Jones, Millat Iqbal, and Josh Chalfen are caught smoking marijuana at
school, the principal punishes them by sending Irie and Millat to the Chalfens house after school
each day for Josh to help them with their homework. Thus, the Chalfen family enters the story: a
white middle-class, liberal family living in the neighborhood who took the “ideological gamble
their peers guiltily avoided” and sent their kids to the integrated public school. The Chalfen
family consists of Jewish geneticist Marcus; horticulturist and pop author Joyce; and their four
children, Josh, Benjamin, Jack, and Oscar. The Chalfens have no friends and no outside
influences. Smith writes, “the children had their Oedipal complexes early and in the right order,
they were all fiercely heterosexual, they adored their mother and admired their father.”​7 The
introduction of Irie and Millat into their lives begins to disrupt their utopian world.

Upon adding the Chalfens to the mix, the plot hastens in its fourth section (“Magid, Millat, and
Marcus—1992, 1999”). Millat joins the militant Muslim fringe group, Keepers of the Eternal and
Victorious Islamic Nation (KEVIN), and Magid returns to London “more English than the English.”
Irie, furious with her family, gets reacquainted with her grandmother, Hortense Bowden.
Annoyed with the attention his parents give to Millat and Irie, Josh joins a group called Fighting
Animal Torture and Exploitation (FATE) that opposes his father’s use of lab mice. The end of the

5
​Ibid​., 20.
6
​Ibid​., 64.
7
​Ibid​., 261.

3
novel focuses the attention of all of the characters on Marcus’s FutureMouse™ project, an
oncogene-laden mouse.

The genesis of ​White Teeth is in the relationship between Archie Jones and Samad Iqbal from
which develops a web of relationships that includes the novel’s central characters. These two
fathers are polar opposites, yet best friends. On one hand, Archie Jones is the embodiment of
practicality. His job is to design the best ways to fold things, “not much of an achievement,
maybe, but you’ll find that things need folds, they need to overlap, otherwise life would be like a
broadsheet: flapping in the wind and down the street.”​8 Samad deals almost entirely in
abstractions. He is full of brilliant theories but is practically incapable of action. Smith explains
the Archie-Samad dichotomy:

As far as fixing the radio went, Samad knew ​how,​ he knew the ​theory​, but Archie
had the hands, and a certain knack when it came to wires and nails and glue.
And it was a funny kind of struggle between knowledge and practical ability that
went on between them as they pieced together the tiny metal strips that might
save them both.​9

Through their shared war experiences, their friendship “crosses class and color, a friendship that
takes as its basis physical proximity and survives because the Englishman assumes the physical
proximity will not continue.”​10 It is interesting that after the war they lose contact for several
years when they live in different countries, only to be united when they reestablish physical
proximity in the same London neighborhood. Smith, who comes from the neighborhood she
writes about in ​White Teeth,​ makes a strong argument for the importance of integrated
neighborhoods in the development of cross-racial relationships and friendships. While Archie
retains some of his inherent racism, he forges a true friendship with Bangladeshi Samad and he
marries a Jamaican.

For Smith, “roots” is the metaphor that runs deep—even (or perhaps especially) in this
multiethnic neighborhood. The roots of colonialism run deep and affect the relationships
between the characters that play a central role in ​White Teeth.​ Smith names three different
chapters “root canals.” These “root canals” take the form of flashbacks in the text and explain
the history of how things came to be. We learn about the initiation of Archie and Samad’s
wartime friendship in “The Root Canals of Albert Archibald Jones and Samad Miah Iqbal,” about
Samad’s mutinous Bengali great-grandfather in “The Root Canals of Mangal Pande,” and of
Clara’s mother in “The Root Canals of Hortense Bowden.”

This sense of underlying history is important in ​White Teeth​—the novel’s epigram is “What is
past is prologue.” In one of her many expositions, the narrator considers the importance of the
past:

[I]t’s all very well, this instruction of Alsana’s to look at the thing close up; to
look at it dead straight between the eyes; an unflinching and honest stare, a
meticulous inspection that would go beyond the heart of the matter to its

8
​Ibid​., 12.
9
​Ibid​., 79.
10
​Ibid​., 82.

4
 marrow, beyond the marrow to the root—but the question is how far back do
you want? How far will ​do​?11
​

One way in which the question of roots manifests itself is in Smith’s interesting use of dental
imagery in the book. Teeth protrude above the gumline from roots we cannot see; similar to the
way people are physical manifestations of their underlying, invisible roots, and their histories. In
her motorcycle accident with Ryan Topps, Clara loses her teeth, a precursor to losing her roots
and connections to her family. Indeed, for the rest of the book she is no longer in touch with her
devoutly religious mother. It is precisely her loss of roots that allows Clara to meet and marry
Archie. Throughout the rest of the story, Clara wears a set of brilliantly white false teeth.
There is also a curious scene dealing with teeth centering on Irie, Magid, and Millat. When they
go to an old man’s house to bring him food for the school-enforced Harvest Festival, he asks
them how often they brush their teeth and comments that people forget the significance of
their teeth. On a superficial level, he is merely an old man offering an unsurprising lecture to the
children on the value of dental hygiene, having lost his own teeth due to neglect. But why would
Smith include this exchange without a larger goal in mind? While extolling the value of one’s
teeth, the old man also notes “clean white teeth are not always wise.”​12 He tells the story of his
bygone soldering days, fighting in the Congo and how the whiteness of the Africans’ teeth led to
their demise—British soldiers were able to see their shining white teeth in the dark and shoot
them dead.

Teeth and roots are not always precise metaphors in ​White Teeth​, but the connections between
teeth and roots are significant. When Samad’s affair with Poppy Burt-Jones is at its pinnacle, she
offers him a toothbrush as a present. At the surface level, obviously this gesture is an invitation
to sleep over, but it continues to perpetuate the dental imagery that surfaces throughout the
novel. Near the end of the novel, Irie decides that she will become a dentist. Smith seems to be
suggesting here that Irie will attempt to continue to grapple with the tensions of roots and
history.

Smith extends her use of dental imagery further with her narrative “root canals.” The “root
canals” throughout ​White Teeth provide a historical backdrop that influences the lives of the
characters. As Smith says, we sometimes forget that all people are ​from somewhere.​ These roots
tie the characters to their heritage, their history. Whether we embrace or run away from our
roots, where we come from definitely has an effect on our lives. Samad and Clara illustrate
these two choices. Samad clings to the heroism of his great-grandfather Mangal Pande in the
face of historical precedent. Smith provides a humorous table that divides up the two camps of
modern opinion on Mangal Pande:
An unrecognized hero A palaver over nuffin’
Samad Iqbal Mickey
A.S. Misra Magid and Millat
Alsana
Archie
Irie
Clarence and Denzel

11
​Ibid​., 71.
12
​Ibid​., 144.

5
 British scholarship from 1857
to the present day​13

Conversely, Clara lets go of her roots, stretching beyond the constraints of her Jamaican and
Jehovah’s Witness upbringing and marrying a white Englishman. She does not lose her sense of
who she is or where she is from—she continues to smoke marijuana and uses Jamaican
idioms—but she open-mindedly adapts to the world around her. She has wonderful white teeth,
but there are no roots holding them into her head; she takes her teeth out every night before
going to sleep.

In addition to this clever use of dental imagery, Smith also employs strong horticultural imagery.
Both the dental and horticultural imagery in ​White Teeth speak to the importance of roots
throughout the novel. Both teeth and plants have roots. The main instance of Smith’s use of
horticultural imagery is her introduction of the Chalfen family in Chapter Twelve. This chapter,
titled, “Canines: The Ripping Teeth,” opens with a quote from Joyce Chalfen’s first book, ​The
New Flower Power,​ which serves as so compelling an allegory that I quote from it at length:

Where once gardeners swore by the reliability of the self-pollinating plant…

now we are more adventurous, positively singing the praises of
cross-pollination… Yes, self-pollination is the simpler and more certain of the
two fertilization processes, especially for many species that colonize by
copiously repeating the same parental strain. But a species cloning such uniform
offspring runs the risk of having its entire population wiped out by a single
evolutionary event. … The fact is, cross-pollination produces more varied
offspring, which are better able to cope with a changed environment. It is said
that cross-pollinating plants also tend to produce more and better-quality
seeds.​14

This quote serves as an allegory for two central themes in ​White Teeth— ​ interracial marriage and
children and colonialism. Irie is a product of the “cross-pollination” of an Englishman and a
Jamaican. Growing up is difficult for her, looking different than those around her. Smith writes
convincingly about Irie’s predicament: “[She] didn’t know she was fine. There was England, a
gigantic mirror, and there was Irie, without reflection. A stranger in a strange land.”​15 She makes
many youthful mistakes and suffers from insecurities, but all of the difficulties of growing up
different better equip her to deal with a wider range of experience. She is “better able to cope
with a changed environment.” Upon her introduction to the Chalfens, she begins to long for a
more normal, more “British” family:

She was fascinated, enamored after five minutes. No one in the Jones
household made jokes about Darwin, or said ‘my foot and my mouth are on
intimate terms,’ or offered choices of tea, or let speech flow freely from adult to
child, child to adult, as if the channel of communication between these two
tribes was untrammeled, unblocked by history, ​free.​ 16
​

13
​Ibid.​ , 208.
14
​Ibid.​ , 258.
15
​Ibid.​ , 222.
16
​Ibid.​ , 265.

6
This quote alludes to the complexity of cultural heterogeneity. The Chalfens, unencumbered by
race, religion, and historical baggage, exist in an edenic world unaffected by conflict between
generations (recall the quote about the healthy Chalfen children above). Homogenous
(“self-pollinating”) groups have simpler, less historically ravaged relationships to one another.
But confronted with “an evolutionary event” they could be entirely wiped out. The title of the
chapter is crucial—“Canines: The Ripping Teeth.” The introduction of the “Other” into the
Chalfen family literally tears them apart and tears apart both the Jones and Iqbal families as
well.

When Millat, Magid, and Irie enter their world, the insular Chalfen family suffers a major
disruption. Smith’s narration is an allegory for British imperialism:

The century was drawing to a close and the Chalfens were bored. Like clones of
each other, their dinner table was an exercise in mirrored perfection,
Chalfenism and all its principles reflecting itself infinitely… [T]here was no one
left to admire Chalfenism itself. Its gorgeous logic, its compassion, its intellect.
They were like wild-eyed passengers of the ​Mayflower with no rock in sight.
Pilgrims and prophets with no strange land. They were bored, and none more
than Joyce.​17

Like Victorian British imperialists, the Chalfens turn to the exotic “Other” with a desire to spread
the sweetness and light of Chalfenism. The above quote in fact closely parallels a passage from
Matthew Arnold’s “Sweetness and Light” chapter in ​Culture and Anarchy (1882). Arnold writes,
“Culture has one great passion, the passion for sweetness and light. … It knows that the
sweetness and light of the few must be imperfect until the raw and unkindled masses of
humanity are touched with sweetness and light.”​18

The outward-reaching, messianic drive of Joyce and Marcus Chalfen works out about as well as
British colonialism. Tension develops between Marcus and Joyce as Joyce dotes on and (at least
subconsciously) lusts after Millat. With all of her children properly weaned, Joyce “needed to be
needed.” She views Irie and Millat as not unlike one of her precious plants:

Joyce paused and looked at Irie and Millat the way she had looked at her
“Garter Knight” delphinium. She was a quick and experienced detector of illness,
and there was damage here. There was a quiet pain in the first one (​Irieanthus
negressium marcusilia)​ , a lack of a father figure perhaps, and intellect untapped,
a low self-esteem; and in the second (​Millaturea brandolidia joyculatus​) there
was a deeper sadness, a terrible loss, a gaping wound. A hole that needed more
than education or money. That needed love. Joyce longed to touch the site with
the tip of her Chalfen greenfinger, close the gap, knit the skin.​19

17
​Ibid.​ , 262.
18
Matthew Arnold, ​Culture and Anarchy​ (Cambridge, England: University Presses, 1935), 69.
19
Smith, 269-70.

7
Reading this passage it is difficult not to be reminded that ​culture originates in the idea of
cultivation and Smith uses this horticultural imagery well to allegorize the Chalfens as
neocolonialists.

To push this allegory further (possibly to its breaking point), the colonial bent of Joyce and
Marcus Chalfen distances them from their own children and dealing with their nascent
“empire,” they neglect major problems at home. The most relevant instantiation of Chalfenist
neglect centers around the eldest son, Josh. When his parents abandon him to tend to the
needier causes of Millat and Irie, Josh rebels against the family, hooking up with a fringe animal
rights group that stands in direct opposition to his father’s genetics projects. He creates
surrogate parents out of Joely and Crispin, the married ringleaders of FATE. Having been cut
loose by his own parents, he returns to the unresolved oedipal triad, lusting after Joely and
wanting to kill Crispin. The loss of a strong family bond leads to a disruption in his previously
resolved Oedipal complex. By disrupting their homogenous Chalfenist homeland, Joyce and
Marcus cause a major rift between themselves and their son.

This allegory of colonialism stretches into other areas of the text as well. Magid and Millat are
products of “self-pollination” (two Bengali parents), each ​repeating a way of living that
reproduces the colonial relationship between South Asians and the English. Millat decides to
become a fiercely devout Muslim, associating with KEVIN, the reactionary but rather
theoretically unsound Muslim fringe group about London. Magid chooses the exact opposite,
becoming more English than the English “with his bow ties and his Adam Smith and his E. M.
bloody Forster and his atheism!”​20 Neither Millat nor Magid escape the colonial web
surrounding them, repeating the history of decisions made by former colonial subjects in the
residual aftermath of colonialism.

At times, reading postcolonial allegories into the dental and horticultural imagery of ​White Teeth
feels like a bit of a stretch. There is something else, however, that makes this type of analysis
appropriate: connections to two archetypal (or stereotypical?) symbols of “Britishness”—Culture
with a capital ‘C’ (embodied by their elaborate gardens) and bad teeth (recently mocked by
Mike Myers in ​Austin Powers)​ . Zadie Smith toys with both of these “essentialized” notions of
Britishness by developing dental and horticultural imagery with ​White Teeth.​ She uses this
imagery to create insightful allegories about the residue of colonialism. The insistent use of the
word “root(s)” that surfaces again and again in ​White Teeth couples the dental and horticultural
imagery together.

But this initial examination of allegory and imagery within ​White Teeth barely scrapes the
surface. Much more analytical work can and should be done on this novel. Why are Magid and
Millat twins? The role of genetics and the nature/nurture debate surfaces often throughout the
text. Marcus Chalfen is a geneticist. People talk about good genes. Archie considers his genes
battling it out with Clara’s genes when they discover she is pregnant. The importance of genetics
and its relationship to race is an important facet of the book.

Another area where valuable work could be done is looking closely at the structure and
organization of ​White Teeth​. The sections and chapters of the novel are tightly constructed and

20
​Ibid.​ , 351.

8
map out the trajectory of the book. Close examination of how Smith builds and paces the story
would prove useful for a better understanding of ​White Teeth​.

White Teeth is a new novel. It takes time for academic scholarship to develop and mature on a
novel. The reasons for the lag in scholarship are understandable: journals have substantial lag
time in publication, it takes a while to digest contemporaneous writing, professors are busy
people. Despite these reasons, it is time for literary critics to pay more attention to authors in
their own time. There is no convincing reason that we should not stay on the cutting edge of
new additions to the field of literature. New voices will continue to take a long time entering the
canon of what we consider literature. It is time for contemporary voices from a more
multiethnic literary community to be welcomed into serious literary study.