
Any ending is temporary
That becomes clear on the first page of White Teeth, when a despondent Archibald Jones tries gassing himself.
The act should have ended Zadie Smith’s novel before the debut had properly begun. But…
‘No one gasses himself on my property,’ Mo snapped as he marched downstairs. ‘We are not licensed.’
Archie survives to reach an ‘End of the world’ party that’s petering out in a North London suburb.
Defying apocalyptic prophecies, the world is alive and well on 1 January 1967. In fact, it seems to spin faster than ever, because…
Clara Bowden walks down the stairs
Clara was nineteen. Archie was forty-seven.
Six weeks later they were married.
A chance meeting leads Archie and Clara to the altar, and Zadie Smith to a problem: How did the marriage come about?
History enters as the central character of White Teeth:
… it’s about time people told the truth about beautiful women. They do not shimmer down staircases. They do not descend, as was once supposed, from on high, attached to nothing other than wings. Clara was from somewhere. She had roots.
And so the beginning retreats
Clara marries Archie, because of a love affair gone sour.
That affair began because Clara was door-knocking for the Jehovah Witnesses.
She was proselytising because her mother, Hortense, was a devoted member of the church.
Hortense was devout, because the church gave her a feeling of security she had lacked, ever since she was born during an earthquake.
And why? We can keep asking.
Why had her mother, Ambrosia, given birth as tremors brought down a church around her screams? Because she’d been left in Jamaica. She’d been left in Jamaica, because it was convenient for the English captain who’d got her pregnant. She stayed, because the earthquake convinced her that Revelation had come.
Keep pulling threads and you’ll get tangled.
Clara knows and respects that history
It informs her present. Britain’s colonial past gives her a particular place in multi-cultural London. Jamaica influences the way she dresses, cooks and speaks. And a more recent, more personal history affects everything from her spirituality to her dental health (hence the title, White Teeth).
There’s a reason Zadie Smith uses a line from The Tempest as an epigram:
What’s past is prologue
While I learnt about Clara and the generations above her, a couple were added below. Irie Jones — daughter of Archie and Clara — appears in later novels by Zadie Smith, turning White Teeth into a kind of prologue.
So it’s ending isn’t any sort of conclusive ending, just as the beginning isn’t actually the beginning. The book is a slice of family history, which stretches backwards, which goes on.
Aidan Clifford writes for Pinstripe Poets – artists who love their day jobs. This post is part of a series called ‘Write like the Greats’. See the rest here.