Word: samad
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Thirty years after the war in which they fought together, Archie is reunited with his best friend, the Bengali Muslim Samad Iqbal. “White Teeth” follows the Iqbal and Jones families before and after the reunion. Samad and his feisty wife Alsana raise their twins, Magid and Millat, while Archie and Clara raise their daughter Irie. The children attempt to eke out their place in English society, not really belonging to the culture of their parents or the place where they were born: “Millat was neither one thing nor the other, this...
...Connell’s Poolroom, Samad and Archie’s home away from home, represents the new Britain; neither Irish nor a poolroom, it’s owned by Abdul-Mickey, an Arab with bad skin whose family names “all sons Abdul to teach them the vanity of assuming higher status than any other man, which was all very well and good but tended to cause confusion in the formative years.” Abdul-Mikey adds the second—English—name as a sort of qualifier for the first...
Archie floats serenely above the new racial order, buoyed by his belief in the power of the coin toss. But Samad, confronted with a hostile, foreign culture and a young, indifferent wife, retreats into what he thinks he knows best: his own culture and religion. Smith makes it clear, however, that the latter—already irrevocably changed by his life in England—is reaching for a past that never existed...
Smith is at her parodic peak when depicting the characters’ cultural misunderstandings, and their casual racism. In a flashback where the pair are lost in a tank, waiting out a war, Samad and Archie’s talk inevitably turns to girls, specifically Samad’s unborn betrothed. This amuses Archie. “‘Where I come from,’ said Archie, ‘a bloke likes to get to know a girl before he marries her.’ ‘Where you come from it is customary to boil...
...Samad and Archie’s stories, as well as the stories from their long-suffering young wives’ points of view, make up the first and best half of the book. But “White Teeth” changes once Smith takes up the mantle of the new generation, the products of cross-cultural fertilization. Smith provides a snapshot of Archie’s daughter Irie writing feverishly in her diary. Her depiction of overwrought adolescence is pitch-perfect: “8:30 P.M. Millat just walked in. He’s sooo gorgeous but ultimately...