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     Volume 4 Issue 11 | September 3, 2004 |


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Book Review

After Post-colonialism

John Mullan

It will be interesting to see if the fastest growing branch of literary studies in Britain over the past decade - post-colonialism - decides that Zadie Smith belongs to its terra nova or not. Out in the universities, where academics may happily use vocabularies intelligible only to initiates, "post-colonialism" is the heading for a large number of courses and accompanying primers of dense literary theory. It is under this heading that literature and ethnicity are invariably discussed, often with a special critical terminology: "hybridity", "subaltern", "the Other".

Well, White Teeth is certainly about ethnic identity (or confusion) and the latterday consequences of colonialism. It is colonialism that has brought almost all the characters to London, and they are sometimes conscious of their post-colonial identities. Samad Iqbal, the waiter with higher aspirations, is proud of his descent from Mangal Pande, executed by the British in the first phases of the Indian Mutiny of 1857. Hortense Bowden, Jamaican stalwart of the Lambeth Jehovah's Witnesses, was fathered by an English officer, posted to the West Indies, on his landlady's daughter.

Yet the ethnic and cultural identities of the characters are so various that Smith seems to be taking and enjoying new liberties rather than plotting the consequences of empire. Much of the book is devoted to a Bangladeshi family and Smith (daughter of a Jamaican mother and an English father) has no hesitation about taking us into the inner world of its would-be patriarch, musing on his failed attempts to pass on his culture. The son he keeps in England turns into a "fully paid-up green bow-tie- wearing" Muslim fundamentalist. The son he sends back to Bangladesh to imbibe the wisdom of the old country "comes out a pukka Englishman, white suited, silly wig lawyer".

Smith has allowed herself a certain imaginative freedom. "All the mixing up" of cultures and races allows her to mix customs and vocabularies at will. Parents lie awake at night foreseeing their "unrecognisable great-grandchildren... genotype hidden by phenotype". But the odd mixes go on. They come alive in Smith's dialogue, where we hear the English language comically accommodating every new pressure and habit.

In one way, this is characteristic of "post-colonialism" as a type of literature: fiction and poetry in English written by citizens of former colonies, or by British citizens who are immigrants or the children of immigrants from those colonies. The label has replaced "Commonwealth literature", with its implication of grateful subjects creatively repaying their debts to British civilisation.

White Teeth is full of jokes about odd couplings of cultures. Thus its cameos of what we might call "post-colonial cuisine". Once, Archie told Samad what he fought for in the war: "Democracy and Sunday dinners, and... promenades and piers, and bangers and mash - and the things that are ours". But eating becomes something much stranger in modern England, the land, as Samad reflects, of "terrible food".

Then there is the surreal anecdote about Australian cooking in Willesden. "After a complaint of a terrible smell above Sister Mary's Palm Readers on the high road", health officers found "sixteen squatting Aussies who had dug a huge hole in the floor and roasted a pig in there, apparently trying to recreate the effect of a South Seas underground kiln". You might indeed read it in your local paper.

So many differences, yet Irie, denizen of a multi-ethnic suburb, where children are called Isaac Leung and Quang O'Rourke, is free to moan: "Everyone's the same here". She wants to take a year off before university so that she can go to "the subcontinent and Africa (Malaria! Poverty! Tapeworm!)". She wants "some experiences". Suburbia is just suburbia, after all. Is this post-post-colonialism?

John Mullan is senior lecturer in English at University College, London. This article was first published in The Guardian.

 

 

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