#Title

WORTH A RE-READ

On Zadie Smith’s Bangladeshi characters
I am not a Bangladeshi immigrant living in a Bangladeshi neighbourhood somewhere in Kilburn, London like Samad Iqbal and his family from White Teeth (Hamish Hamilton, 2000). But I still identified with them on many grounds—cultural nuances, identity, religion. Geographic boundaries held little value. I know saying this seems unfair on the literary quality of Smith’s debut novel, but I bought this book solely because it had Bangladeshi characters at the pulpit of the story.
It is important to note: I am not implying that works like Tahmima Anam’s Bengal trilogy, Arif Anwar’s The Storm or Numair Atif Choudhury’s Babu Bangladesh! did not accomplish the task of placing Bangladesh on the literary map. I am only expressing my admiration for a writer who, despite not being a Bangladeshi, flawlessly, sensitively wrote Bangladeshi characters without perpetuating stereotypes.
White Teeth follows the lives of Archie Jones and Samad Iqbal as they navigate a world after surviving the Second World War as British soldiers. It swings back and forth through time and poses questions about the legacy of colonialism, about the marginalisation of people of colour, and the things that glue a society together. I can’t speak for everyone with my limited knowledge but personally I felt as though the pages of White Teeth provided me with a holography containing all things accurately Bangladeshi—from the slangs, the greetings, the food items, and the religious connotations to the sense of loss which stems from having a distinct Bangladeshi identity often muddled with, and overshadowed by, Indians in the Western Imagination.
One could argue that the presence of natural disasters in the novel alludes to another common stereotype: that Bangladesh is a country perpetually stuck in death throes. However, in the late 20th century in which the book is set, these issues were in fact deeply embedded in the collective psyches of residential and non-residential Bangladeshis alike. Political turmoil gripped the nation at the time, coupled with a devastating flood in 1988 and a cyclone in 1991. These events connect the Iqbal family with their homeland. Without them, they wouldn’t feel truly Bangladeshi.
Even then these characters are very much punctuated with individual characteristics. Samad oscillates between spiritual faith and the “real” world, plunging deeper and deeper into a pit of identity crisis. His wife Alsana is calm and has made peace with their loss of identity unlike Samad. Their son Magid is a precocious child with an affinity for intellectual growth. His twin Millat is his absolute antithesis—reckless, violent, dissolute. These characters are fascinating because each is a world of their own, a world not engineered by a Western gaze obsessed with “exotic” qualities.
In 2016, Lionel Shriver declared at a Brisbane writer’s festival that a writer “should not try on other people’s hats”. Last month, I saw a similar tweet that sadly received a lot of support. “White people shouldn’t write Brown Characters,” it read. These notions—that someone shouldn’t write about someone else—completely obliterate the purpose of fiction, which is, to imagine. They stifle creative freedom and squeeze the life out of diversity in imagination.
The Iqbals in White Teeth —Bangladeshi characters written by a British-Jamaican author—highlight how a writer can venture, expand, imagine without succumbing to cultural appropriation, by virtue of unbiased research and non-stereotypical representation. It is both an example of culturally sensitive writing and a reminder that writing good fiction is possible, even if your characters and you have vastly different identities. An intergenerational saga, White Teeth delicately weaves the stories of people who have been shaped by colonialism one way or another. It is laced with drama, wit, suspense, thrill, and insight, a novel that can keep one occupied even after the last page has been turned.
Shah Tazrian Ashrafi is a contributor. Email: tazrian1234@gmail.com
PHOTO DESIGN: Sarah Anjum Bari
Shah Tazrian Ashrafi