Belonging In White Teeth's Novel

White Teeth features a plethora of ethnically, culturally and religiously diverse characters adjusting to new British cultures and building a sense of Britishness and a sense of belonging. The characters go through this journey in the city of London at three different historical periods of time: World War II and the post-war years, the 1980s: a period of social changes, and the late 1990s. The conservative model of a traditional British family – white, middle class, protestant- as the pillar of society is put into question in Smith’s novel through the inclusion of other household representations that point towards an inherent multicultural aspect of British society. White Teeth depicts the process of the city of London becoming a multicultural

This first section of the novel establishes the ground for the mixing of cultures. Archibald, or Archie, is a generic, mundane white man. On the other hand, Samad is a loud, South Asian, short-tempered immigrant. The fates of Archibald Jones and Samad Iqbal are joined during World War II when they are both in the same military division. Their division is formed of five soldiers who are, to say the least, perceived as worthless. They are described as “losers; with men like Archie, with men like Dickinson-Smith (whose governmental file included the phrase ‘Risk: Homosexual’), with frontal lobotomy cases like Mackintosh and Johnson. The rejects of war. As Roy affectionately called it: the buggered Battalion” (Smith, 76). The fact that they were both failures in their lives contributes a great deal to their dynamic later in the novel. Archie and Samad’s friendship is the first example of cultural diversity in White Teeth.“ A friendship that crosses class and color, a friendship that takes as its basis physical proximity and survives because the Englishman assumes the physical proximity will not continue” (Smith, 82). Archie and Samad’s friendship furthers the idea that location is central to the promotion of cultural diversity. Had it not been for the fact that they met during the war, Archie and Samad may have never been friends. The years after the war were a starting point of the contemporary British society characterized by the presence of different ethnicities, mainly those coming from ex colonies (Solomos