White Teeth

Samad is Alsana’s husband, Millat and Magid’s father, and a Bangladeshi immigrant. He served with and befriended Archie during World War II and seeks him out when he moves to England many years later. Samad is the great-grandson of Mangal Pande—an Indian soldier whose actions sparked the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857—and he takes great pride in this legacy despite Pande’s questionable reputation.

At first glance, Samad and Archie’s friendship seems unlikely. Where Archie is easygoing and (for the most part) at peace with his unexceptional personality and looks, Samad is good-looking, proud, and quick-tempered. He considers himself something of an intellectual and is therefore embarrassed that he is forced to work as a waiter after immigrating. Above all, Samad is much more concerned with his family and personal legacy and often becomes frustrated with Archie for not taking more interest in the same.

This sense of urgency is deeply tied to Samad’s experiences as an immigrant; identity can be so precarious for immigrants, who find themselves at risk of disappearing into a new country and culture. This anxiety causes Samad to cling more and more tightly to his heritage and sense of his own importance as the novel progresses. For instance, whereas Samad claims to be “no religious man” during WWII, he rediscovers the “fear of God” shortly after moving to England (100, 115).

Despite all of this, there is one important way in which Archie and Samad are similar: both men are fairly weak and powerless figures, though only Archie acknowledges his limitations. Samad’s affair with Poppy Jones is a good example. After spending a large amount of time and energy resolving to remain faithful to his wife, Samad becomes involved with Poppy almost without meaning to. When she asks, after their first kiss, whether he’d like to see her again, he blurts out that he would, his “mouth [becoming] the lone gunman on the grassy knoll […] killing off his brain and swearing itself into power all at the same time” (138).

Furthermore, rather than deal directly with his own guilt, he blames Western culture’s corruptive nature and attempts to force his wife and sons to adopt a more traditional lifestyle. This backfires when Magid returns from Bangladesh fully secular and Westernized, and it is only at the end of the novel that Samad, watching Hortense sing, finally seems to see himself as he is:

Samad watches it all and finds himself, to his surprise, unwilling to silence her. Partly because he is tired. Partly because he is old. But mostly because he would to the same, though in a different name. He knows what it is to seek. He knows the dryness. He has felt the thirst you get in a strange land—horrible, persistent—the thirst that lasts your whole life (439). 

Irie is the daughter of Archie and Clara Jones. She is biracial and, according to Samad, inherited the worst of both her parents’ features: “Archie’s nose with Clara’s awful buckteeth” (124). Irie is more concerned with her weight and her hair, which she wants to be “dead straight” and red (234). At one point, she accidentally burns off most of her hair when attempting to conform to Western beauty standards.

Irie’s determination to overcome her genes reflects her impatience with her family’s (and especially her father’s) obsession with the past; Irie is intelligent and curious, and therefore impatient with Archie’s love of routine and tradition, feeling he “[drags] ancient history around like a ball and chain” (271). For these reasons, she’s immediately drawn to the Chalfen family, seeing them as the pinnacle of middle-class respectability and intellectualism: “[S]he wanted to merge with the Chalfens, to be of one flesh; separated from the chaotic, random flesh of her own family and transgenically fused with another” (284). 

Significantly, Irie does not want to cut all ties to her family’s past; in fact, part of her frustration with her parents stems from the fact that they have kept certain details of that past from her. After moving in with her grandmother, Irie becomes increasingly interested in the story of Ambrosia Bowden and Charlie Durham, imagining Jamaica to be a place “[w]here things sprang from the soil riotously and without supervision, and a young white captain could meet a young black girl with no complications, both of them fresh and untrained and without past or dictated future” (332). This is a highly romanticized reading of her family history, and part of what draws Irie is the fact that it seems so removed from the history she is more familiar with.

At the same time, however, reclaiming this part of her heritage marks an important step in Irie’s development. No character in Smith’s novel can entirely escape the past, but some learn to incorporate their pasts into their identities while still looking to the future. Irie is arguably the most successful at this, with the family she eventually establishes bringing together the legacies of each of the novel’s major families (the Joneses, Bowdens, Iqbals, and Chalfens) to create something new.

Millat is the younger of Alsana and Samad’s children by two minutes. The fact that he is the second son is significant, as it lays the groundwork for his later resentment of Magid. Millat had been more high-spirited and less studious than Magid from a young age, but Smith implies that some of his adolescent rebelliousness—smoking, sleeping around, etc.—stems from a desire to spite his father. Although Samad eventually considers both his sons to be failures, there is a long stretch of time during which he idolizes the absent Magid and takes every opportunity to remind Millat of that fact:

Two sons. One invisible and perfect, frozen at the pleasant age of nine, static in a picture frame […] As for the son [Samad] could see, the one who was under his feet and in his hair, well, it is best not to get Samad started up on that subject, the subject of The Trouble with Millat, but here goes: he is the second son, late like a bus, late like cheap postage, the slowcoach, the catch-up kid, losing that first race down the birth canal, and now simply a follower by genetic predisposition (180–81).

Millat’s life is further complicated by the fact that he is a second-generation immigrant. He is drawn to Western culture from a young age, playing video games, listening to American music, and watching mafia movies. That same society, however, constantly reminds him that, in the eyes of many, he does not belong in England. This is part of what eventually drives Millat to join KEVIN. Doing so, however, does not solve the basic problem, which is that his subconscious is split by his dual identity. Having been influenced by and drawn to Western culture his entire life, he cannot simply renounce that side of himself as KEVIN demands. Millat ultimately become so frustrated with this situation that he tries to completely reject Western society by shooting Dr. Perret. In keeping with the novel’s general optimism, he is thwarted and presumably grows out of some of his identity struggles after his stint doing community service.  

Magid is the older of Samad and Alsana’s twin boys. By the time Magid is nine years old, he is both a gifted student and unusually serious in demeanor; as one of his teachers puts it, “Magid is so impressive intellectually for a nine-year-old—everybody says so […] He’s like a little adult. Even his clothes…I don’t think I’ve ever known a nine-year-old to dress so—so severely” (112).

The differences between Magid and his brother only increase when Samad sends Magid to live with his relatives in Bangladesh. Contrary to what his father hopes, Magid becomes more Westernized during his time overseas. Instead of surrendering to life’s upheavals and accepting them as acts of God, Magid becomes determined to study law and “make the Asian countries sensible places, where order prevailed” (239).

Magid finds a kindred spirit in Marcus Chalfen, who also hopes to make the world more rational. The two become pen pals, and when Magid returns to England, he uses his superior social skills to package Marcus’s work for public consumption:

Here was a boy who could weave the most beautiful moral defenses with a professionalism that belied his years, who helped Marcus formulate arguments he would not have had the patience to do alone. It was Magid who encouraged him out of the laboratory, taking him by the hand squinting into the sunlit world (352).

Not everyone finds Magid’s apparent perfection as wonderful as Marcus does. Samad is furious that his son has abandoned his faith, while Irie finds his unwavering pleasantness annoying: “[L]ike all manifestations of the Second Coming, all saints, saviors, and gurus, Magid Iqbal was also, in Neena’s eloquent words, a first-class, 100 percent, bona fide, total and utter pain in the arse” (353). Although Smith hints that Magid is not actually as saintly as his demeanor implies—ordering a bacon sandwich, for instance, seems like a calculated jab at his father—the fact that he is missing for so much of the novel makes him a somewhat mysterious character.

Clara is Archie Jones’s wife and the mother of Irie. She is a first-generation immigrant from Jamaica who was brought to England by her mother, Hortense Bowden, as a teenager. Hortense is a Jehovah’s Witness, and Clara grew up in a deeply religious and restrictive environment. Combined with her race and her buckteeth, this made her deeply unpopular at school. Clara eventually rebelled against her upbringing by dating the equally unpopular Ryan Topps, only for Ryan to convert to the Jehovah’s Witness faith. Shortly after this, at age 19, Clara married Archie, who was immediately drawn to her tall, slender good looks.

Clara’s decision to marry Archie is based on practicality rather than love, and she remains one of the novel’s most level-headed characters. She is not as outspoken as Alsana and sometimes remains quiet or plays to other’s expectations in order to keep the peace. For instance, when Joyce questions “which side” of the family Irie gets her intelligence from, Clara turns to the portraits hanging in the Chalfens’ home, “look[ing] up and down the line of dead white men in starched collars, some monocled, some uniformed, some sitting in the bosom of their family” (293–94) and then says that Irie gets it from Clara’s English grandfather. In reality, Clara is very intelligent and eager to learn. By the time she was pregnant with Irie, she had already begun to borrow and read Neena’s collection of feminist literature and, later in the novel, she enrolls in night school, taking courses on everything from “British Imperialism 1765 to the Present” to “Medieval Welsh Literature” (284).

Despite being relatively non-confrontational, Clara stands up for herself and her loved ones when pressed—for example, she warns her mother not to fill Irie’s head “with a whole load of nonsense” when Irie goes to live with Hortense (326).

Alsana is Samad Iqbal’s wife, the mother of Millat and Magid, and a work-from-home seamstress. She is much younger than her husband—in fact, the marriage was arranged between the Begums and Iqbals before she was even born—and is first introduced as a “diminutive” and “moon-faced” 20-year-old (11).

Despite her age and appearance, Alsana is a stronger personality than Samad; she is highly opinionated and confident in her beliefs, and frequently bests Samad physically when they get into fights. To the extent that she acts like a “little submissive Indian woman,” in her niece Neena’s words (64), she does so for calculated and practical reasons. At one point, for instance, she tells Clara that she ought to let Archie have his way on naming the baby, saying, “Anything for a little […] shush” (64). In general, Alsana views her husband—and husbands in general—as a necessary evil but prefers to have as little to do with him as possible.

Alsana approaches the rest of her life with the same pragmatism. Unlike Samad, who deludes himself into thinking he is more devout than he actually is, Alsana is clear-eyed about her reasons for practicing religion: “[S]he liked to show people her respectability, and besides she was really very traditional, very religious, lacking nothing except the faith” (53). More than anything else, her life is based on the idea that the “real difference between people” is that some have “learn[ed] to hold […] life lightly” and others have not (175, 176).

Coming from Bangladesh, where catastrophic flooding is common, Alsana is familiar with the sense that life is uncertain. In her search for a more stable existence, Alsana is much quicker than Samad to embrace life in England. She is therefore furious when Samad sends Magid back to Bangladesh and spends the next eight years refusing to respond directly to Samad’s questions as punishment in order to “force him to live like she did—never knowing, never being sure” (178).

Husband to Joyce and father to Joshua, Marcus is a scientist whose work focuses on genetic engineering. He is the grandson of Polish-German Jews who immigrated to England (the surname Chalfen is an Anglicized form of Chalfenovsky), but the entire family has been secular for generations. In fact, the family prides itself so much on its particular brand of rationality and objectivity that the Chalfens coined a word for it—“Chalfenism.”

Like the rest of his relatives, Marcus believes that “social and scientific progress [are] brothers-in-arms” and that both the body and society can be “perfected” through the application of scientific principles (260). His own goal is to pave the way for cures for cancer and other deadly diseases through his experiments on mice. These efforts culminate in FutureMouse, a genetically engineered mouse Marcus intends to put on display for the public’s education.

Because Marcus sees his goals as worthy, he tends to feel that the ends justify the means and expresses frustration with anyone who opposes his plans: “People focused on the mouse in a manner that never failed to surprise him. They seemed unable to think of the animal as a site, a biological site for experimentation into heredity, into disease, into mortality” (346). Although it is an exaggeration to claim, as the animal rights’ group FATE does, that Marcus is a psychopath, it is certainly true that he views concerns about his work’s ethics as beneath him:

No one working in a new field, doing truly visionary work, can be certain of getting through his century or the next without blood on his palms. But stop the work? Gag Einstein? Tie Heisenberg’s hands? What can you hope to achieve? (347).

What’s more, Marcus has a tendency to treat people—particularly women and people of color—the same way he treats his mice. He apparently married Joyce partly for her strong genes and ability to produce children, and he fetishizes Irie and Neena’s exoticism: “‘I can’t help thinking,’ said Marcus […], ‘that a Chalfen man and an Iqbal woman would be a hell of a mix. Like Fred and Ginger. You’d give us sex and we’d give you sensibility or something’” (290).

Joshua is the oldest of Marcus and Joyce’s four sons and a classmate of Irie and Millat. When first introduced, Josh seems to embrace his parents’ “Chalfenist” principles and is smart but deeply unpopular at school. Secretly, he wants to be part of the more glamorous world he imagines Millat inhabits and harbors a romantic interest in Irie. He therefore seizes the opportunity to claim that the marijuana the three of them are caught with was his own, hoping to share in their popularity.

The incident leads the headmaster to send Irie and Millat to the Chalfens’ home for study sessions, which proves to be a pivotal moment in Josh’s life. He quickly grows annoyed by the attention his mother lavishes on Millat, and after his father takes Magid on as his protégé, Joshua begins to drift away from his family. He spends more and more time with a radical animal rights group named FATE, which he joined less as a result of genuine conviction and more because he’s infatuated with one of the cofounders and because the group vocally opposes Marcus’s experiments.

Joshua deals with identity issues like those of Millat and Irie, struggling to distinguish himself from his family legacy. It is implied that he ultimately works through this period of adolescent rebellion, since he and Irie eventually end up in a relationship.

Joyce Chalfen is Marcus’s wife and the mother of four sons: Joshua, Benjamin, Jack, and Oscar. She met her husband while she was studying biology at college. Joyce is notably more sentimental than the rest of her family and makes a living as a horticulturalist who writes books that are “more about relationships than flowers” (258). Nevertheless, she has devoted her life to upholding Chalfenism—the ultra-rational and forward-thinking philosophy her husband swears by—even though she does not fully understand his work. In fact, she romanticizes it, seeing him as a godlike individual who “create[s] beings” (260).

Joyce’s tendencies toward emotionality sometimes make her the butt of jokes in her family. When she gushes that Irie and Millat have intelligent-looking eyes, Marcus turns to Joshua and says that she is “asking [Marcus] whether IQ expresses itself in the secondary physical characteristics of eye color, eye shape, et cetera. Is there a sensible answer to this inquiry?” (268). Joyce remains unfazed by this treatment, largely seeing her role in the family as a maternal, nurturing one. Marcus repeatedly draws attention to her “substantial” (i.e., childbearing) hips, thinking of her as “his earth goddess” (259) and Joyce views herself in similar terms. In fact, her life revolves so much around caring for others that she is unhappy when her children become more self-reliant and casts about for someone or something else that needs her. Gardening fills this void until she meets Millat, at which point she becomes obsessed with reforming him.

Like Marcus, Joyce embraces liberalism but has a patronizing attitude towards people of color and the working class. She is prone to blurting out inappropriate comments in an attempt to be sympathetic and open-minded. 

Hortense Bowden is Clara’s mother. She is an immigrant from Jamaica who come to London when Clara was 16. Unlike her husband Darcus, who barely speaks to his family and spends his days watching TV, Hortense is energetic and opinionated. She is a devoted Jehovah’s Witness—a faith she inherited from her mother Ambrosia—and expects her daughter not only to adhere to strict rules surrounding dress, dating, etc., but also to aid her in converting others. This is, in part, because the Jehovah’s Witnesses believe the end of the world will occur in 1975: “No time for boys. This child’s work was just beginning. Hortense—born while Jamaica crumbled—did not accept apocalypse before one’s twentieth birthday as an excuse for tardiness” (29).

Hortense is therefore bitterly disappointed when Clara leaves the church. Though she continues to hold a grudge against her daughter for decades, she does allow her granddaughter Irie to stay with her, even inviting her to join her in Jamaica for New Year’s 2000 (the latest predicted apocalypse). Furthermore, while Hortense holds some eccentric ideas (she believes, for instance, that she can remember being inside her mother’s womb), she also has a practical side and sees her faith more clearly than her fellow Jehovah’s Witness, Ryan Topps. As she tells Irie, Hortense wants to be one of the 120,000 “anointed” to reign with Christ largely because she is tired of constantly being patronized and dismissed on account of her race, gender, and class:

‘I gat so tired wid de church always tellin’ me I’m a woman or I’m nat heducated enough. […] But if I were one of de hundred an’ fourty-four, no one gwan try to heducate me. Dat would be my job! I’d make my own laws an’ I wouldn’t be wanting anybody else’s opinions’ (338).

When Smith first introduces Ryan Topps, he is a “very thin and very tall, redheaded, flat-footed, and freckled” teenage boy obsessed with music and a “green Vespa GS scooter that he polished twice a day with a baby’s diaper and kept encased in a custom-built corrugated-iron shield” (23, 24). Although he is unattractive, awkward, and self-centered, Clara is drawn to him; they begin dating after she stumbles across his house while knocking on doors for the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Through Ryan, Clara meets and begins to emulate the group of “Hippies, Flakes, Freaks, and Funky Folk” who throw the 1975 “End of the World” Party (32). However, Ryan meets Hortense and converts to the Jehovah’s Witnesses. While arguing with Clara about this, Ryan crashes his scooter in an accident that knocks Clara’s teeth out.

Ryan resurfaces later in the novel, at which time he is living with Hortense and serving as a high-ranking member of the church. Although he helps the elderly Hortense out around the house, he remains as arrogant as he was as a teenager, taking every opportunity he can to correct her on matters of religion.

Neena is Alsana’s niece who works at a cobbler’s and later begins designing shoes herself. Although she is only two years younger than her aunt, she is much more Westernized; she bleaches her hair, swears, talks openly about sex, and eventually gets into a relationship with a woman named Maxine—a “sexy and slender girl […] with a beautiful porcelain face” (236). Neena’s outspoken demeanor often makes her the sole voice of reason within the family. She insists, for example, that the Joneses and the Iqbals set aside their various objections and quarrels to support Irie and Magid by attending the unveiling of FutureMouse.

Poppy Burt-Jones is a pretty red-haired music teacher at Manor School. She is young, enthusiastic, and somewhat naive, particularly on matters of race. She is drawn to Samad Iqbal, whom she has a brief affair with, partially because of his religion and ethnicity despite knowing very little about either; in fact, she initially assumes he is Indian and decides to teach a unit on Indian music for this reason. She is also impressed by what she takes to be Samad’s intellectualism and sophistication. When Samad breaks up with her, she is anger and bitter, which Samad’s coworker Shiva attributes to her Englishness: “[H]istory, history. It’s all brown man leaving English woman, it’s all Nehru saying See-Ya to Madam Britannia […] Ten quid says she wanted you as a servant boy, as a wallah peeling the grapes” (169).  

Dr. Perret, initially introduced as “Dr. Sick,” is a French scientist holed up in the same Bulgarian town where Archie and Samad’s tank breaks down during World War II. According to the Soviet soldiers who arrive looking for him, Perret is a Nazi collaborator whose work involves eugenics. His nickname refers to his chronic illness—diabetic retinopathy—which causes his eyes to bleed.

When Samad and Archie successfully capture Perret, Samad is adamant that Archie ought to execute him—partly because he views Perret’s experiments as an unholy attempt to play God and partly because he thinks Archie, as an Englishman, should stand up for his country. Archie appears to comply, but at the end of the novel, Smith reveals that he allowed the doctor to live. Perret later becomes Marcus Chalfen’s mentor and appears with him at the press conference on FutureMouse, at which point Archie saves his life again by stepping in between him and Millat’s gun.  

Mickey is the owner of O’Connell’s Poolroom. His father was an Iraqi immigrant, but since all the men in his family are named Abdul, they typically adopt Western names to differentiate amongst themselves. Mickey and his family kept the original Irish name of the cafe they run, which serves basic British pub food (but not pork). Mickey is friendly with customers and keen to offer opinions and advice. Like everyone else in his family, he suffers from disfiguring acne and consequently latches on to Magid’s suggestion that FutureMouse holds the key to curing this condition.

Ambrosia Bowden is Hortense’s mother. When Ambrosia was 14, she became pregnant by Charlie Durham, an English officer posted in Jamaica at the time who was renting rooms from Ambrosia’s mother. The two continued their love affair for several months, while Durham—who planned to eventually marry Ambrosia—gave her lessons in “letters, numbers, the Bible, English history, [and] trigonometry” (296).

Durham was called away late in Ambrosia’s pregnancy, only returning to Jamaica just after the 1907 earthquake. Frustrated with the governor’s insistence that Ambrosia could not leave the island with him on the next ship out, he ruined the best chance most Jamaicans had of aid by causing three American ships to be sent away. In this way, his story symbolizes English colonialism; Durham is so affronted by the idea that anyone else might be “more equipped to save this little island than the English” that he causes a huge amount of suffering to people he claims to want to love and protect (300).

Ambrosia’s story likewise illustrates the destructiveness of English colonialism—and the associated project of “educating” colonized people along Western lines. While Durham was away, Ambrosia ended up in the care of an Englishwoman who was a devout Jehovah’s Witness. Ambrosia in turn converted, interpreting the earthquake as the apocalypse and responding with “ecstatic” prayer and declining Durham’s offers of help in favor of religious faith.

Mangal Pande—a real historical figure who did in fact fire the first shots in the 1857 Sepoy Mutiny—is in Smith’s novel as the great-grandfather of Samad Iqbal. Although Pande himself does not appear in White Teeth, several stories about his actions do.

According to many historians, Pande was not only a traitor but a fool; they describe him not as someone taking a principled stand in support of his country or religion but rather as a man who impulsively shot at his commanding officer while high on bhang (a drink made from cannabis). When faced with arrest, Pande tried and failed to kill himself, further underscoring his incompetence. Given that this official version of history has largely been promulgated by the British, there is reason to think it is biased. The British did not leave India until 1947, and it would have been in their interest to put a negative spin on the origins of the Sepoy Mutiny.

Unsurprisingly, Samad has a very different account of what happened. In his telling, Pande was a devout Hindu whose actions were the “siren to the nation to take up arms against an alien ruler” (215) and who therefore paved the way for independence a century later. Clearly, Samad is not an impartial judge of history either; he is deeply invested in the idea that his ancestor was a national hero, both because it makes Samad seem more important and because it affirms his identity as a Bangladeshi (which he feels is threatened by life in England).

Ultimately, Pande is more important as a symbol than as a character. Archie and Samad’s endless debates about Pande’s real significance do not shed any light on the truth story, but they do demonstrate the way humans use interpretations of history to construct their identities.

Horst Ibelgaufts is a Swedish gynecologist who tied for 13th place with Archie in track cycling at the 1948 Olympics. Ibelgaufts keeps in touch with Archie, sending him occasional letters that often seem to refer to events in Archie’s life that Ibelgaufts could not possibly know about. Whether this “strangely prophetic nature” is real or imagined (163), Archie begins using Ibelgaufts’s letters, like his coin, whenever he has a major decision to make. This subplot reflects the novel’s interest in themes of fate and chance.

FATE—an acronym for Fighting Animal Torture and Exploitation—is a radical animal rights group that Joshua joins: “From the very beginning their extremist credentials were impeccable, FATE being to the RSPCA what Stalinism is to the Liberal Democrats” (396–397). Its founders are Joely and Crispin, a married couple in their late 20s who have somewhat different ideas about the future of the group.

Crispin, who was at one point imprisoned for firebombing a laboratory, favors the use of outright terror tactics; Joely, on the other hand, used her husband’s jail time to soften the group’s image and broaden its appeal. Privately, Joshua suspects that Crispin prefers tactics that bolster the “Crispin-role-of-glory” (401), but since Joshua is infatuated with Joely, his feelings about Crispin are not objective. Overall, Crispin comes across as stern and short-tempered, while Joely—who resembles a younger version of Josh’s mother—is affectionate, understanding, and even flirtatious.