“The Root Canals of Zadie Smith: London’s

Intergenerational Adaptation

By Kris Knauer

Zadie Smith

Novelist Zadie Smith was born in North London in 1975 to an English father and a Jamaican mother. She studied English at Cambridge, graduating in 1997.

Bibliography2009 Changing My Mind: Occasional

Essays

2007 The Book of Other People, editor

2006 Fail Better: The Morality of the

Novel

2005 On Beauty

2003 The Burned Children of America,

introduction2003 Best of Young British Novelists 2003, includes short story 'Martha, Martha'

2002 The Autograph Man

2001 The May Anthologies, editor

2001 Piece of Flesh, editor

2000 White Teeth

2000 Speaking with the Angel,

contributor

How the youth of London is changing the city

Zadie Smith’s works: “younger generations of her characters in her novels go well beyond the conventional ways of envisaging identity in relation to their nationality, religion, race, or ethnicity” (171)

Writers in general: “scores of young London writers are largely responsible for a certain shift in viewing cultural belonging, which is reflective of the physical reality of London’s unsegregated schools, residential areas, housing estates, and entertainment venues, as well as streets and often homes” (171)

Paul Gilroy and “intergenerational adaptation”

This term “captures the cultural adaptation of generations of Londoners living, working, and growing up together in the same neighborhoods in this diverse city” (172)

Knauer likens this to W.E.B. DuBois’s concept of “double conciousness” and asserts that this helps create an understanding of “the condition of being English/British and black” (172) in Smith’s works

“Every age, every colour and several faiths; people dressed very finely – hats and handbags, pearls and rings – and people who were clearly of a different world again, in jeans and baseball caps, saris and duffle coats.” – from On Beauty

geography and integration

“Despite differences between various localities in London with respect to wealth and ethnicity of the inhabitants, the way the city is laid out is preventing ghettoisation as blocks of council flats had been built even throughout the richest boroughs.” (172)

“London’s landmark quality is perhaps that its diverse communities are porous and not sealed off from each other: they interact and influence each other, and their individual members not infrequently find themselves crossing borders and lines” (174)

“. . . Both geographical and cultural space in the capital was shared, and ‘the unshackled looseness of the space created by this process made it possible to reclaim black identities, independent of blackness’” (172)

Changing the space

“It is not only the immigrant who adjusts to the new surroundings, but it is also the society into which they came that undergoes profound transformations as well” (175)

“Fashion, food, music, and entertainment industry are traditionally flagged up as the most emblematic illustrations of the impact of the twentieth-century immigrant populations on the lifestyles of British host communities.” (175)

“creolisation” of London’s streets, culture, and speech Tikka Indian dish Trip Hop such as Massive Attack, Portishead Sari blouses matched with boots

Mixing of languages

Hanif Kureishi writes “Britain is such a mélange of accents now . . . When my sons return from school they can sound Jamaican” (175)

Scenes from White Teeth shows a similar occurrences, such as the children are imitating a Jamaican accent on the street

“Like languages, cultures keep evolving, inscribing themselves on the physicality of the city with every new generation” (175)

Paul Gilroy’s “official multiculturalism”

“Smith gives us an example of how the ‘official multiculturalism’ Paul Gilroy mentions being introduced and how difficult it was for the older generations to liberate themselves from their essentialist views.” (177-78)

Knauer illustrates this point with the scene from White Teeth in which Poppy, Samad, and Millat discuss music

“Samad’s and Poppy’s knowledge is based on essentialist assumptions, as if of moderate ethnic (and in Samad’s case, religious) absolutism, according to which Freddie Mercury is part of white English culture (for Poppy), while Millat should identify with Indian/Bangladeshi music more than with Michael Jackson or Bruce Springsteen.” (179)

Generational differences

“The younger generations of the city have frequently much more in common with each other regardless of their background than with the elders of the communities from which they came” (176)

“The older generations of their parents and strangers on the street know more about constructs such as ‘otherness’ and ‘difference.’” (180)

“More than ethnic or religious difference, Irie, Millat, and Magid experience the difference of age.” (181)

“For the kids they were all the same (to a certain point and to a certain degree of course) – everyone in Willesden Green was the same. . .” (182)

“sameness” and “difference”

As she argues with her mother about wanting to see how other cultures live in different parts of the world, “What Irie can see beyond the spectacular manifestations of difference is ‘sameness’ shared by the inhabitants of Willesdeen Green, their ‘uniformity’ in their being ‘different’. . .She is so familiar with the ‘difference’ of the people of Willesden Green that it does not seem ‘different’ to her at all.” (183-84)

“Irie has adapted to the surroundings of her birth in a way that is too far-fetched for her mum to comprehend.” (184)

Conclusion

“We are bound to realize how porous London communities are and how ‘liquid’ . . . Contemporary London has become. And this fluidity of social formations in the British capital, along with its inhabitants’ intergenerational adaptation is often the subject and backdrop of Zadie Smith’s inspired work.” (185)

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