Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in White Teeth, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Family Ties
Race, Racism, and Multiculturalism
Female Independence
The Influence of History
Summary
Analysis
It is Thursday, December 31, 1992, New Year’s Eve. The consequences of what Joshua is about to do on this day have escaped him, given his obsession with Joely; he is seated in a bright red minibus with the other FATE members, driving toward Trafalgar Square. Kenny is reading a press release about the FutureMouse event, which describes the event apolitical. Minnie, a brand-new FATE convert who flirts openly with Crispin, shows the group a tabloid paper with a satirical cartoon of Marcus Chalfen. Crispin says that Marcus looks “more fucking Chalfenist than ever”; Joshua regrets telling Crispin about the term “Chalfenist,” and he begins to feel as if he has betrayed his father.
Though he is still distracted by his crush on Joely, Joshua begins to realize that he has betrayed his family by joining FATE and by allowing his father to become a target of FATE’s protests; he is beginning to come back around to his ties to “Chalfenism,” though the word now takes on a meaning that has more to do with emotion than logic.
Themes
Joely asks Joshua if he is scared about the night and his “conflict of loyalties,” complimenting him for remaining so calm. Joshua isn’t sure whether he should act so passively, or whether he should be more “proactive” about shaping the future. He remembers thinking about “end-of-the-world” scenarios as a 12-year-old, and realizing that instead of doing anything rash or exciting, he would return to his room and continue building with Leogs. Joshua is terrified of consequences, and what he is about to do to his father is so enormous that the consequences seem inconceivable to him; he feels strangely detached. Joshua believes that “the world happens to you [...] you don’t happen to the world,” while Marcus believes the opposite.
Though Joshua has learned to disagree with some of his father’s “Chalfenist” attitudes—namely, that individuals can control the world, and that action, rather than passivity, is best—he nonetheless realizes that “Chalfenism” is a part of his identity that he cannot give up. This tension (rather than any real loyalty to FATE and its mission) is at the core of what Joely calls his “conflict of loyalties”).
Themes
Gathered at the Willesden Green Station, KEVIN—including Millat, Hifan, Tyrone, Mo, Shiva, Abdul-Colin, and Abdul-Jimmy—realize that there are no southbound Jubilee Line trains from Baker Street, which disrupts the route KEVIN are planning to take to the FutureMouse event. Millat is stoned: he has been smoking all day, and Shiva, concerned, asks him what he has been doing to himself. Millat says that he is preparing himself for action. Brother Ibrahim was arrested recently on charges of tax evasion and civil disobedience, and KEVIN soon realized that the police might be tracking their activity: they decided against “Plan A” and improvised a Plan B, which involves the seven KEVIN members standing up during the FutureMouse press conference and reciting Sura 52 from the Qur’an.
Unlike Joshua, who accepts his own passivity, Millat decides that he must be active, and that KEVIN’s “Plan B” is not acceptable: he wants to act with the kind of temerity and boldness that Mangal Pande, his “esteemed” ancestor, was never able to.
Themes
Millat is disappointed by Plan B, since the KEVIN members are obsessed with finding the right translation for the Qur’an passage: Millat thinks that they are focused on words, not action, but Plan B has stuck nonetheless. Shiva tries to convince him to follow through with the plan. Twenty minutes later, the group gets off in Trafalgar Square. Looking around at the statues of men in the square, Abdul-Colin says that the English build their statues “with their backs to their culture and their eyes on the time”—the statues face Big Ben—because the English “look to their future to forget their past.”
Abdul-Colin’s remarks reflect on the history of the British empire and England’s questionable colonial past. The notion of the “future” drove the English to colonize non-Western countries, since they hoped to “develop” them—bringing them out of “backwards” traditions and into the future, and aligning them with Western values. However, as Abdul-Colin hints, this fixation on the future also keeps the English from learning the lessons of their own history and understanding how that history still shapes them.
Themes
Get the entire White Teeth LitChart as a printable PDF.
Millat hangs back as the group walks away from the square and toward Chandos Street, where the conference is. He walks over to a bench and finds the word IQBAL scrawled between one leg of the bench and the other: Samad wrote this a few months after arriving in England, after cutting his thumb open in the kitchen of the curry restaurant. He used his own dribbling blood to write IQBAL on the bench, then went over the word with a penknife. Samad explained to Millat that he was ashamed of writing his name there, since it meant that he “wanted to write [his] name on the world,” like the Englishmen who “named streets in Kerala after their wives.” Millat, though, thinks that it means that Samad is “nothing” compared to the statues of men in the square. But Millat believes that he—unlike Mangal Pande—is capable of turning this history around, and that he will write his name all over the world bigger than Marcus Chalfen’s. Millat believes that decisions that are made come back, that “we live in circles.”
Samad is embarrassed that he wrote his own name in London, since he believes this reflects colonizing impulses—the kind of impulses that motivated the British to take over India and Eastern countries. Even though Millat has turned away from British culture by joining KEVIN, he still wants to act with the kind of power and force that British colonizers acted with. Ironically, though, he ends up misfiring at the end of the book, just like Pande, proving his own philosophy (that “we live in circles”) to be correct.
Themes
Ryan Topps was asked to assemble the Lambeth Kingdom Hall’s Thought for the Day desk calendar for 1992, and for December 31, he included the following Bible citation: “He that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.” He believes that the citation is an apt warning for this day, and he drives Hortense in his motorcycle toward Trafalgar Square. Ryan has a skill for fixating closely on just one idea, and he finds that this makes him suited for the church of Jehovah’s Witnesses, since he relishes facing evil and asking it to prove itself. He hopes to do the same to Marcus Chalfen, since he believes “the right to be the good guy” in the face of evil.
Though Ryan Topps seems to have changed dramatically since his days as a teenage rebel, he also seems to be repeating many of the same behaviors he demonstrated as a young man obsessed with drugs, sex, and his scooter: he has merely shifted the object of his obsession, becoming fixated on religion and morality instead (and showing that Millat’s declaration, that “we live in circles,” holds true for other characters as well).
Themes
While getting a ticket on the bus from Willesden Lane to Trafalgar Square, Archie realizes that the tickets seem different now. He asks Samad why the tickets might have changed, and Samad looks tense: everyone is on edge, since Neena has demanded that the Iqbal and Jones families attend the “mouse thing” in order to support Magid and Irie. Archie would have preferred to be alone on New Year’s, just to avoid all of the drama. Horst Ibelgaufts sent him a “prophetic” letter the day before about his cat, Gabriel, who sits on top of the shed and watches Horst’s other cats battling each other in the garden; Archie wonders if he should have acted like Gabriel. In the end, Alsana convinces all of them to go.
Tensions between the Iqbals and Joneses are coming to a head; the families’ conflicts, histories, and secrets are bound to intersect at the FutureMouse event, and Archie—who normally avoids conflict—is dragged into the chaos, in which he will play a major role.
Themes
Samad replies irritably to Archie’s question about the changes in bus tickets, and Neena tells him to stop being a “bully.” Clara and Alsana chime in, and Irie tells all of them to “shut up”: some families, she says, are quiet all of the time, and “they’re not constantly making the same old mistakes.” Happy families are not concerned with the past; they are content instead to live out their lives in the present. Irie is now eight weeks pregnant and knows it; she doesn’t know the identity of the father, however. Her child seems to be a ”perfectly plotted thing with no real coordinates”—since it is not “somebody’s child,” it is “nobody’s child.”
Though Irie has previously been fascinated by her own idealized version of her family history in Jamaica, she now wants to create a new sort of family: one unconnected to the past. Thus, she ultimately decides that she doesn’t want to know the identity of her child’s father, so that her new family might have a history of its own. It’s also notable that even if she wanted to, Irie likely can’t find out who the child’s father is, since Magid and Millat are identical twins with the same DNA; this fact makes Irie’s wish for disconnection from the past into a kind of literal reality.
Themes
Irie tells Archie that the bus tickets now include more information in order to deter people from paying less than they should for their journey—so that inspectors can check that people are paying enough. Archie wonders if fewer people cheated in the past, and he thinks that people need to hear that England “was once a green and pleasant land.”
As Irie is moving away from the past, her father is still looking toward it: he believes that the past offers comfort and nostalgia, though ironically, the past will prove disruptive during the upcoming FutureMouse event.
Themes
The Iqbals, Joneses, Chalfens, FATE, KEVIN, and the Jehovah’s Witnesses are all headed for the same room in the Perret Institute. It is a “neutral” space, covered in posters that read MILLENIAL SCIENCE COMMISSION in a variety of fonts and colors: the room has been designed to be a “space for Britain, Britishness, space of Britain, British industrial space cultural space space.” The narrator says that people can finally give the answers required when a space is being designed, since they know what is meant by: “national identity? symbols? paintings? maps? music? air-conditioning? smiling black children […] ?” Those who have lived this century, forced from one space to another, know what they want: “nothing nothing space please just space nothing please nothing space.”
The Perret Institute is not truly a neutral space (like the university in which Millat and Magid met) but rather one loaded with symbols meant to reflect the diversity of British society. However, the narrator suggests that immigrants (“forced from one space to another”) are seeking a neutral space free from these empty, meaningless symbols and the weight and complications of history.
Themes
