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
Two weeks later, Samad is packing the one shirt he’s never worn to mosque into a plastic bag, so that he can change later and meet Poppy illicitly (without desecrating clothes he wears while worshipping). Magid and Millat are packing food into rucksacks to meet Irie and visit an old man they have been assigned to offer charity to for the Harvest Festival. The narrator notes that both journeys are “rerun[s].” Immigrants have always been “prone to repetition,” and in London, the Iqbals are reenacting “the dash they made from one land to another,” since Magid, Millat, and Samad are all dashing away from their Muslim heritage and beliefs.
The narrator directly connects Samad, Millat, and Magid’s trajectories: despite their surface-level dissimilarities, all three Iqbal men are influenced by Western culture, and by the history of immigration—which they will all continue to reproduce in different ways as the story goes on.
Themes
On the bus, Millat, Magid, and Irie loudly discuss the food they are bringing to the old man. An old age pensioner comments to another man that they—the children—should go back to their own country. Meanwhile, Samad is on his way to meet Poppy in Harlesden, which he agreed to after kissing her in her office two weeks before. He changes in a McDonald’s bathroom and visits his cousin’s wife Zinat’s shop, to provide himself with an alibi; Zinat is a notorious gossip, and Samad tells her that he is going to Park Royal to discuss a life insurance plan, knowing that she will report back to Alsana. Samad brings Poppy a coconut, which he says is “brown and old on the outside, white and fresh on the inside.”
Samad’s comment about the coconut suggests that he is trying to make himself seem acceptable to Poppy, a white woman, though he is not her race or age—he equates whiteness with being “fresh,” as opposed to his exterior, which is “brown and old.”He seems to have absorbed the kind of racist rhetoric that also plagues Millat, Magid, and Irie here, who are told to “go back to their own country” even though all three were born in England.
Themes
The old man the children are visiting, Mr. J. P. Hamilton, is surprised to find them on his doorstep. He is a distinguished, well-dressed man with a signet ring and four argent medals, and he speaks in a voice that “even the children sensed was from a different class, a different era.” Mr. Hamilton closes the door on the children, but Millat rings the doorbell again; the old man lets them into his home reluctantly and inspects the groceries they have left, which he deems “too hard” for him to eat (he has only false teeth). Mr. Hamilton instructs the children to take better care of their teeth than he did, though he notes that when he was in the Congo, “the only way [he] could identify a nigger was by the whiteness of his teeth.” The children are horrified by his racist remarks, but Mr. Hamilton presses on, talking about “third molars”—wisdom teeth, inherited through the father’s line. The children leave in the middle of his rambling.
Mr. J. P. Hamilton’s use of racist slur here makes reference to the novel’s title, suggesting that “white teeth” are a feature that mark out black and brown people as distinct and vulnerable. Indeed, Irie, Magid, and Millat are targeted for their ethnicities throughout the novel: they are bullied and called racist names, and they experience severe insecurities because of their different status in British society. The mention of wisdom teeth being passed down by fathers also hints at the way vulnerability and difference often persist through generations.
Themes
In Willesden, the children frequently encounter “the Mad”: crazy street people, the kind of people Londoners have learned not to look at for fear of direct interaction. Samad and Poppy Burt-Jones encounter “Mad Mary,” a “black voodoo woman with a red face”; Samad tells Poppy not to look at her, since she is dangerous and “doesn’t like white people.” Mad Mary screams at them, and Samad is struck by the thought that she is looking at him “with recognition”: she has identified him as a “fellow traveler,” a fellow madman. Samad touches Mad Mary lightly on her shoulder, trying to pacify her, and she moves away from them. Poppy compliments him for how calm he is, and Samad says that it runs in his family, thinking of Mangal Pande.
Samad recognizes a kind of familiar spirit in Mad Mary: they are both “travelers,” tormented by their outsider status in society (both are people of color). Thus, Mad Mary seems to trust Samad, sensing similarities between them. While Samad is not outwardly “mad” in the way that Mary is, he is similarly disoriented and lost, conflicted by his status as an immigrant attempting to understand his place in an adopted society. What's more, Poppy’s reaction indicates that it’s crucial for Samad to avoid showing this conflict in the way that Mad Mary does; appearing to stay calm is the only way he can be accepted in white society.
Themes
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Samad and Poppy walk through the city, talking, and Poppy confesses that she likes him. Samad reacts harshly, telling her that there is “nothing good” about their situation. Poppy tells him that he can leave if he wants to, but he says that he wants to spend the night with her; she shows him a toothbrush that she bought for him so that he can stay overnight with her. Just then, Samad spots his two sons nearby, “their white teeth biting into two waxy apples.”
Even as Samad attempts to create distance between himself and his family by engaging in an extramarital affair, his sons find him, showing that family ties are not so easily broken. Magid and Millat’s “white teeth” (contrasted with their dark skin) subtly remind Samad (and the reader) of just how conspicuous all three Iqbal men are at this moment—just as Mr. J. P. Hamilton said that he could identify Congolese men by their teeth.
Themes
