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Essential question: How do we form and shape our identities?

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https://www.biography.com/people/zadie-smith

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Zadie Smith is a novelist whose first book, 'White Teeth,' was a sensation, instantly putting her on the literary map.

Synopsis

Famed author Zadie Smith was born in London, England, on October 25, 1975. At age 21, Smith submitted some 80 pages of what would become White Teeth to an agent, and the book was published in a few years later to rave reviews, winning numerous awards, including the Whitbread First Novel Award. It was also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Smith's third novel, On Beauty, was a finalist for the Man Booker Prize and won the 2006 Orange Prize for fiction.

Smith's fifth book, Swing Time, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction and was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2017. In 2018, her sixth book, Feel Free, won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism.

In March 2022, Smith was awarded the PEN/Audible Literary Service Award previously given to Toni Morrison, Stephen Sondheim and Margaret Atwood. She is the youngest recipient ever to receive the prize.

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Zadie Smith is a novelist whose first book, 'White Teeth,' was a sensation, instantly putting her on the literary map. Famed author Zadie Smith was born in London, England, on October 25, 1975.

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https://www.thekindredvoice.com/blog/reinvention-after-divorce

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Editor's Note: This article first appeared in of Holl & Lane Magazine.
I've often found myself wondering why you don't get new identity papers when you get a divorce. Looking back now, I know that if I had received some, I would have missed out on an amazing opportunity to grow and become the woman I am today.

I was married young by today's standards. I met my husband online in early 2001 and after conversing electronically for nearly six months, we had our first date. From that moment on, I would spend no more than a handful of nights without him. We became inseparable, wanting to do everything together. The things we had as individuals - friends, the places we frequented, even our possessions - became "ours". We went to "our" favorite restaurant for dinner. We saw "our" friends on the weekend. Long before we ever said "I do," we had signed up for joint ownership on pretty much everything in our lives.

It happens in most marriages, I suspect. In those early honeymoon years, you spend all your time meshing two lives into one. You even see it in Hollywood, when a celebrity couple is no longer known by their individual names and instead by their couple name, like "Brangelina". For the next fourteen years, I was not an individual anymore. I'd become half of a pair.

The process felt right at first. It felt like this was how it was supposed to be done. "Half of a pair" sounds like a nice idea, something you might see on a cute wedding card. While the first few years of the relationship felt like I was becoming something greater than one, I was quickly giving up my individuality. Without realizing it at the time, I was letting go of hobbies I enjoyed when I was single. I pulled all of my friends and family into the "joint" circle I had created with my husband and left no one for me to call my own. I told myself that if I didn't spend every moment with him, I wasn't a good wife and by doing that, I presented myself as part of a package deal which further undermined my identity as an individual. I began to feel like I wasn't whole, alone.

My marriage fell apart nearly a decade later. All of the friends and family I now shared with my husband began to choose sides and many of them chose his, severing their relationships with me. I had to give up half of my belongings, my family, and my home. These were painful enough, but what hurt the most was the fact that I no longer knew who I was without my husband by my side. Divorce is often seen as the failure of two people rather than the failure of a relationship and I definitely felt like a failure. I struggled to look in the mirror without feeling like I had let everyone down, myself included. I was living in fear of being alone.

I didn't like who I had become, so I decided to take advantage of my situation and work on getting back to the person I was before I lost myself. The divorce was hard, but that period of time right after everything was finalized was more difficult than I had expected. Much like the process of metamorphosis when a caterpillar spins herself into a cocoon and reemerges as a beautiful butterfly, I knew I also had to reinvent myself. This was my opportunity to create a new me.

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Rediscovering Myself After a Divorce - The Kindred Voice

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Editor's Note: This article first appeared in of Holl & Lane Magazine. I've often found myself wondering why you don't get new identity papers when you get a divorce. Looking back now, I know that if I had received some, I would have missed out on an amazing opportunity to grow and become the woman I am today.

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https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/21/books/review-white-teeth-by-zadie-smith.html

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Credit... Diana Ejaita

from the book review archives

A satirical, multigenerational family saga set during the waning of the colonial British Empire, this 2000 debut established its author as a prodigy of the novel form.

WHITE TEETH by Zadie Smith | Review first published April 30, 2000

Zadie Smith's debut novel is, like the London it portrays, a restless hybrid of voices, tones and textures. Hopscotching through several continents and 150 years of history, "White Teeth" encompasses a teeming family saga, a sly inquiry into race and identity and a tenderhearted satire on religious antagonism and cultural bemusement. One might be inclined to assume that Smith, who began writing the book when still a Cambridge undergraduate, has bitten off more than she can chew; one might even feel a little huffy that one so young (she is 24) has aimed so high. Is it open season on Henry James's baggy monster? Yet aside from a rather wobbly final quarter, Smith holds it all together with a raucous energy and confidence that couldn't be a fluke.

"White Teeth" begins as the story of an Englishman, Archie Jones, and his accidental friendship with Samad Iqbal, a Bengali Muslim from Bangladesh. The two men met in 1945 when they were part of a tank crew inching through Europe in the final days of World War II. They missed out on the action, and over the next three decades have continued to do much the same. Archie is something of a sad sack, a dull but decent fellow who tied for 13th in a bicycle race in the 1948 Olympic Games; he has failed at many things, including marriage (he got the Hoover in the divorce settlement) and a suicide attempt that begins the novel. Samad, in spite of looking like Omar Sharif, is now a downtrodden waiter in a West End curry house, and is obsessed by the history of his great-grandfather, Mangal Pande, who allegedly fired the first shot of the Indian Mutiny in 1857 (and missed).

By the mid-1970s Archie has married again, this time to a six-foot Jamaican teenager named Clara, a beauty in spite of lacking her top row of teeth; they have a daughter, Irie, who will become the steady center of the narrative. Samad has opted for an arranged marriage with a Bengali, the fiery Alsana, though whatever grief he's endured from his helpmeet is nothing compared with the trials of raising his two sons, Magid and Millat. Both families, the Joneses and the Iqbals, make their home in the tatty but vibrant suburb of Willesden in northwest London, a melting pot of race and color that is maintained by and large at an amiable simmer. Archie's prosaic bloke-in-the-pub outlook could be seen as representative: "He kind of felt people should just live together, you know, in peace and harmony or something." Samad, on the other hand, values difference and craves debate. At a school governors' meeting, for example, he questions the Christian relevance of the Harvest Festival: "Where in the Bible does it say, 'For thou must steal foodstuffs from thy parents' cupboards and bring them into school assembly, and thou shalt force thy mother to bake a loaf of bread in the shape of a fish'? These are pagan ideals! Tell me where does it say, 'Thou shalt take a box of frozen fish fingers to an aged crone who lives in Wembley'?"

This conflation of the high and the low - biblical morality juxtaposed with the mundane details of domesticity - is key to Smith's frisky and irreverent comic attack. At one point Samad is doubtful about disclosing a secret to his friend Zinat, who protests her trustworthiness: "Samad! My mouth is like the grave! Whatever is told to me dies with me." But the passage goes on to point out: "Whatever was told to Zinat invariably lit up the telephone network, rebounded off aerials, radio waves and satellites along the way, picked up finally by advanced alien civilizations as it bounced through the atmosphere of planets far removed from this one." Here it's the ancient solemnity of an oath bumping up against modern technology that strikes off comic sparks.

This juxtaposition is related to the larger way in which the novel plays with the gap between expectation and reality, most vigorously dramatized in Samad's offspring, the "first descendants of the great ocean-crossing experiment." Samad demands too much of his twin sons, Magid and Millat, and pays a calamitous price. He packs Magid back home to be educated, but the son returns eight years later with a pukka English accent and a serene atheism. As for Millat, he begins as a superstud and troublemaker, graduates to mobster machismo - his touchstones are "The Godfather" and "Goodfellas" - before pledging himself to the militant fundamentalist Keepers of the Eternal and Victorious Islamic Nation, or KEVIN (they're aware they have "an acronym problem"), and demonstrating against Salman Rushdie in 1989.

The last reference is partly ironic. The dust jacket of "White Teeth" boasts a blurb (an "astonishingly assured debut") from none other than Rushdie himself, and reviews in the British press were quick to identify Smith's rollicking verbal pyrotechnics as a not too distant relative of Rushdie's own. One of the book's historical set pieces, recounting the simultaneous occurrence of Clara's grandmother giving birth and the Jamaican earthquake of 1907, has a whiff of Rushdiesque playfulness about it. But the younger writer has no reason to linger in her elder's shadow. While there are consonances between the two, Smith's style is lighter and less fantastical; what's more, there is a quality, a spirit, in her novel that is not to be found in Rushdie's work, and it might be called humility. There is something provisional and undogmatic about the way "White Teeth" confronts large themes - migration, cultural identity - and knows to stop short of haranguing the reader.

Smith thickens the cross-cultural stew by introducing a third family into the narrative. Irie and Millat are befriended by the white, middle-class Chalfens, who typify a distinctive strain of North London liberal trendiness. Marcus Chalfen is a university lecturer and scientist who's developing a controversial experiment in rodent genetics called FutureMouse. Joyce, his wife, is an earnest horticulturalist who tells Irie and Millat that they look "very exotic" and asks them where they come from "originally."

"'Oh,' said Millat, putting on what he called a bud-bud-ding-ding accent. 'You are meaning where from am I originally.'

"Joyce looked confused. 'Yes, originally.'

"'Whitechapel,' said Millat, pulling out a fag. 'Via the Royal London Hospital and the 207 bus.'"

Joyce proceeds to adopt the wayward Millat as her pet cause, inviting him to live chez Chalfen and paying for his analysis; she's too complacent to notice that her eldest son, Joshua, is an animal-rights renegade who's plotting violent retribution on his pioneering father. This underscores one of the book's most salient conflicts - the need to belong versus the renouncing of patrimony - which Smith attempts to spell out in a grand finale, a fortuitous meeting of parents and children at Marcus's FutureMouse exhibition on New Year's Eve 1992. By this point the novel has squandered a little of the good will it has been so stylishly accumulating, and one wishes that a firmer editorial hand had steered it away from its overeager braiding of plotlines. (A flashback to the mystery of Archie's wartime test of character is at once pat and faintly ridiculous.) The focus becomes fuzzy, and the writing, hitherto so confident, suddenly feels labored and scrappy.

But perhaps this overreaching is a natural consequence of Smith's ambition. "White Teeth" is so unlike the kind of comic novel currently in vogue among young British women - the girl-about-town Bridget Jones wannabe - that its very willingness to look beyond the stock in trade of boyfriends and weight problems is a mark of distinction. Smith's real talent emerges not just in her voice but in her ear, which enables her to inhabit characters of different generations, races and mind-sets. Whether it's her notation of Archie's blokish colloquialisms, Clara's Anglo-Jamaican patois, the banter of two ancient Jamaican grouches or of second-generation Bengali teenagers, the mongrel texture of metropolitan life rises vividly from the page. There is more than virtuosity at work here. Smith likes her characters, and while she is alert to their shortcomings and blind spots, her generosity toward them never flags.

That is why "White Teeth," for all its tensions, is a peculiarly sunny novel. Its crowdedness, its tangle of competing voices and viewpoints, betoken a society struggling toward accommodation, tolerance, perhaps even fellowship, and a time in which miscegenation is no longer the exception but the norm: "It is only this late in the day that you can walk into a playground and find Isaac Leung by the fish pond, Danny Rahman in the football cage, Quang O'Rourke bouncing a basketball and Irie Jones humming a tune. Children with first and last names on a direct collision course." There are reasons, so late in the day, to be cheerful, and this eloquent, wit-struck book is not least among them. - Anthony Quinn

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from the book review archives A satirical, multigenerational family saga set during the waning of the colonial British Empire, this 2000 debut established its author as a prodigy of the novel form. WHITE TEETH by Zadie Smith | Review first published April 30, 2000 Zadie Smith's debut novel is, like the London it portrays, a restless hybrid of voices, tones and textures.

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"Discovering Self After Trauma." | Berginald Rash | TEDxDunLaoghaire