Book: White Teeth
Quotes of Book: White Teeth
So shut it. Go on. Try it. Silence. Ah.' She reached into the air as if trying to touch the quiet she had created. 'Isn't that something? Did you know this is how other families are? They're quiet. Ask one of these people sitting here. They'll tell you. They've got families. This is how some families are all the time. And some people like to call these families repressed, or emotionally stunted or whatever, but do you know what I say?'The Iqbals and the Joneses, astonished into silence along with the rest of the bus {even the loud-mouthed Ragga girls on their way to a Brixton dance hall New Year ting}, had no answer.'I say, lucky fuckers. Lucky, lucky fuckers.''Irie Jones!' cried Clara. 'Watch your mouth!' But Irie couldn't be stopped.'What a peaceful existence. What a joy their lives must be. They open a door and all they've got behind it is a bathroom or a lounge. Just neutral spaces. And not this endless maze of present rooms and past rooms and the things said in them years ago and everybody's old historical shit all over the place. They're not constantly making the same old mistakes. They're not always hearing the same old shit. They don't do public performances of angst on public transport. Really, these people exist. I'm telling you. The biggest traumas of their lives are things like recarpeting. Bill-paying. Gate-fixing. They don't mind what their kids do in life as long as they're reasonably, you know, healthy. Happy. And every single fucking day is not this huge battle between who they are and who they should be, what they were and what they will be. Go on, ask them. And they'll tell you. No mosque. Maybe a little church. Hardly any sin. Plenty of forgiveness. No attics. No shit in attics. No skeletons in cupboards. No great-grandfathers. I will put twenty quid down now that Samad is the only person in here who knows the inside bloody leg measurement of his great-grandfather. And you know why they don't know? Because it doesn't fucking matter. As far as they're concerned, it's the past. This is what it's like in other families. They're not self-indulgent. They don't run around, relishing, relishing the fact that they are utterly dysfunctional. They don't spend their time trying to find ways to make their lives more complex. They just get on with it. Lucky bastards. Lucky motherfuckers. book-quoteAnd it goes to prove what has been said of immigrants many times before now; they are resourceful; they make do. They use what they can when they can.Because we often imagine that immigrants are constantly on the move, footloose, able to change course at any moment, able to employ their legendary resourcefulness at every turn. We have been told of the resourcefulness of Mr Schmutters, or the foot-loosity of Mr Banajii, who sail into Ellis Island or Dover or Calais and step into their foreign lands as blank people, free of any kind of baggage, happy and willing to leave their difference at the docks and take their chances in this new place, merging with the oneness of this greenandpleasantlibertarianlandofthefree.Whatever road presents itself, they will take, and if it happens to lead to a dead end, well then, Mr Schmutters and Mr Banajii will merrily set upon another, weaving their way through Happy Multicultural Land. Well, good for them. But Magid and Millat couldn't manage it. They left that neutral room as they had entered it: weighed down, burdened, unable to waver from their course or in any way change their separate, dangerous trajectories. book-quoteThis has been the century of strangers, brown, yellow and white. This has been the century of the great immigrant experiment. 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. Names that secrete within them mass exodus, cramped boats and planes, cold arrivals, medical checks. It is only this late in the day, and possibly only in Willesden, that you can find best friends Sita and Sharon, constantly mistaken for each other because Sita is white {her mother liked the name} and Sharon is Pakistani {her mother thought it best – less trouble}. Yet, despite all the mixing up, despite the fact that we have finally slipped into each other's lives with reasonable comfort {like a man returning to his lover's bed after a midnight walk}, despite all this, it is still hard to admit that there is no one more English than the Indian, no one more Indian than the English. There are still young white men who are angry about that book-quoteIt is a long walk to table twelve. Not in distance, it is only twenty metres in distance, but it is a long walk through the thick smells and the loud voices and the demands; through the cries of Englishmen; past table two, where the ashtray is full and must be cupped by another ashtray, lifted silently and switched for the new ashtray with perfect insouciance; stopping at table four, where there is an unidentifiable dish that was not ordered; debating with table five, who wish to be joined with table six, no matter the inconvenience; and table seven wants egg fried rice whether or not it is a Chinese dish; and table eight wobbles and more wine! More beer! It is a long walk if you are to negotiate the jungle; attending to the endless needs and needless ends, the desires, the demands of the pink faces that strike Samad now as pith-helmet-wearing gentlemen, feet up on the table with guns across their laps; as tea-slurping ladies on verandas cooling themselves under the breeze of the brown boys who beat the ostrich feathers book-quote
