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
O’Connell’s Poolroom is an eccentric bar that is neither Irish nor a poolroom, and the kind of place that “family men come to for a different kind of family.” This is Archie and Samad’s “home from home,” and they have been meeting here every day for 10 years to discuss anything and everything. Samad has confessed to Archie that he cheated on Alsana, and Archie tells him to meet him at O’Connell’s at four o’clock, but at 4:15, Archie hasn’t showed up. Samad talks to Abdul-Mickey, the chef, waiter, and proprietor, who tells Samad that his son, Abdul-Colin (Mickey gives all of his sons the name Abdul “to teach them the vanity of assuming higher status than any other man”), has recently gotten very strict about his Muslim religion.
O’Connell’s is a space in which diverse cultures, opinions, and histories clash: it is the staging ground for many of the disagreements between Archie and Samad, but it is also a place where they find common ground—to meet and connect, despite their obvious differences in background, religion, and ethnicity. It’s notable that the “family” the two have at O’Connell’s is actually much more intimate than the families they have with their wives, since they often hide things from Clara and Alsana but are generally open with each other.
Themes
Archie enters, greets Mickey and the other two regular patrons, Denzel and Clarence—“rude, foul-mouthed octogenarian Jamaicans”—and finally meets Samad, who tells Archie about seeing his sons while on the date with Poppy. Samad says that he now has a “choice to make, a choice of morality”—similar to the choice Archie made during the war, with Dr. Perret. Samad believes that there is a “rebellion” in his sons, who don’t respect tradition. Archie goes to get his food from Mickey and banters with him about Samad. Archie reflects that what he loves about O’Connell’s is that “everything was remembered, nothing was lost”: “history was never revised or reinterpreted, adapted or whitewashed.”
O’Connell’s is also a space that stands outside of history, preserving tradition: nothing ever changes in O’Connell’s, where the men participate in the same rituals for years upon years. Archie, who is averse to change, finds O’Connell’s comforting for this very reason, since it allows him to live a steady, stable life. Of course, refusing to consider reinterpreting history also means refusing to move into the future—for example, women never come inside O’Connell’s, and Archie and Samad never make much progress in their musings.
Themes
The narrator expounds on tradition as an “even more sinister analgesic” than religion because tradition doesn’t usually look sinister: Samad believes that roots are always a good thing, but the narrator notes that “the first sign of loose teeth is something rotten, something degenerate, deep within the gums.” Samad begins to think about sending his sons back to Bangladesh, but he doesn’t have the money to send both of them there. Back in O’Connell’s, Samad tells Archie his plan: to send one son to Bangladesh, separating the twins. Yet he cannot decide which one to send. Millat is in need of more “moral direction,” while Magid is Samad’s favorite. Samad continues struggling to decide for a couple of weeks until he reads a characteristically mysterious letter from Horst Ibelgaufts to Archie, in which Horst describes chopping down an old oak tree in his garden. Archie takes this to mean that to mean that Samad has to send Millat away. Eventually, though, he settles on Magid, after consulting with Poppy and even letting Archie flip a coin.
While Samad believes that tradition is something to be maintained, followed, and passed on, the narrator notes that tradition can be inhibiting and destructive, like a gum infection that eventually spreads to the teeth. Indeed, Samad’s desire to keep tradition alive in his family—in order to atone for his own sacrilegious actions, such as the affair with Poppy Burt-Jones—leads him to separate his sons, an action that will have enormous repercussions later on.
Themes
Samad has not told Alsana about his plans, and he is nervous when he comes home and discovers her weeping at the kitchen table. Indira Gandhi, the prime minister of India, has been assassinated, and Alsana is crying for her friends in Bangladesh, who will be forced to endure riots and violence in response to the assassination. She says that she is relieved that her children will not have to experience such violence, and Samad, feeling guilty about his plan to send Magid to Bangladesh, disagrees; he says that their sons would have a better life back home than in England. Alsana and Samad get into a physical scuffle, which Millat and Magid watch with amusment. Afterward, Samad calls Poppy and breaks up with her.
Alsana and Samad display strikingly different views about their homeland, Bangladesh: while Alsana sees Bangladesh as dangerous, Samad longs for its traditions, viewing the West as corrupt (though he also allows the West to corrupt him).
Themes
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At work, Shiva tells Samad that he was wrong to sleep with a white woman. The restaurant, nestled in the heart of London’s theater scene, is crowded on this Saturday night; Ardashir orders the waiters to bring rice and naan bread for the white theater-goers, who are unused to spicy Indian food. Samad is requested to wait on a table, and when he walks over, he sees Poppy Burt-Jones and her sister. Poppy mocks him briefly.
Samad is forced to serve Poppy Burt-Jones as a customer in the curry restaurant, literalizing his position beneath her in a xenophobic British society (as an immigrant and a man of color). The fact that Poppy specifically requests his services also indicates that this subjugation is intentional: even though Poppy claims to be culturally sensitive, she quickly uses her whiteness as a weapon to get back at Samad.
Themes
At 1:00 a.m., Archie pulls up outside of the restaurant, where he meets Samad. He admits that when he tried to wake up Magid to bring him to the airport, he also woke up the other children, who were having a sleepover. Samad tells Magid that he is going to Heathrow Airport; years from now, “this will be history that Samad tries not to remember,” “false teeth floating silently to the bottom of a glass.”
Samad is clearly conflicted about separating his sons—years later, he does not wish to remember what he did—but nonetheless carries out the plan, since he wishes to remove Magid from corrupt Western society. This moment makes it clear that history, though important, isn’t static; it exists in different forms that people can interpret as they wish. Here, false teeth are first used as a symbol to represent submerged secrets or a suppressed part of the past; later in the novel, the symbol becomes literal, since Clara is revealed to have had false teeth all along, a secret she keeps from Irie.
Themes
