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Essay on One’s Past is Like a Shadow

Decent Essays

Zadie Smith’s White Teeth epigraph “What is past is prologue,” means that what has occurred in the past has led up to what is happening in the future or present. Smith illustrates the struggles three families go through for identity, legacy, striving for a good future while holding onto the traditions of the past, and maintaining ones religion or beliefs. Through the text, the thematic significance of the past occurs often with the recurring flashbacks which sometimes goes as far back to 1857; with Samad’s mutinous great-grandfather and 1907 with Irie’s past about her great-grandmother and white colonial great-grandfather. The novel takes a comical and ironical approach to alleviate the tension that is actually occurring in the …show more content…

Alsana does not want her children to endure life in Bangladesh she says, “I am crying with misery for those poor families and out of relief for my own children!...at least they will not die in the streets like rats” (274). For her the longing is still there and she embraces her culture, but she realizes that the conditions are not suitable at the moment for return. Later in the novel Samad displays a common feeling of people in the diaspora to Irie when he realizes that his and his sons’ lives are not in his control and there is nothing he can do about the way their futures will turn out: “These days, it feels to me like you make a devil’s pact when you walk into this country…you want to make a little money, get yourself started, …but you mean to go back!...Cold, wet, miserable; terrible food, dreadful newspapers—who would want to stay? In a place where you are never welcomed, only tolerated…and I begin to believe that birthplaces are accidents.” (554) This breakdown really shows how people in the diaspora experience a feeling of loss. Even Irie manifests this feeling even if she was born in England; she longs to know her roots and history of who she is. There is an interesting scene when she goes to get her hair done because to her it is the worst part of her identity that she would like to change, Neena says to her, ‘“What have you done? You had beautiful hair, man. All curly and wild.”

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