The End of the World as We Know It

Zadie Smith presents ideas and situations of multiculturalism in the novel “White Teeth.”   However, her ideas and situations presented can be further adapted into sociological definitions, such as: Cultural assimilation and Structural assimilation.

Cultural assimilation is when individuals from one culture adopt aspects of a new dominant culture, such as: religion, language, and norms (Wiki).  Cultural assimilation is shown in the novel with the Spanish cleaning lady at Archie’s former home.  She says, “Meester Jones, what now?  Kitchen sink, si?” (Smith 8) and “Welcome, senor” (Smith 8).  The Spanish cleaning lady demonstrates cultural assimilation with language by learning English, the dominant language in America. In addition, cultural assimilation is illustrated with Clara, who is Jamaican.  Smith writes, “Clara Bowden, aged seventeen, was gangly, bucktoothed, a Jehovah’s Witness, and saw in Ryan a kindred spirit” (Smith 24).  Jehovah’s Witness originates in Alleghany, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (Ref).  Clara, being a member of this religious group, has demonstrated cultural assimilation by religion because she has taken on a practice of religion, from the dominant culture.

Structural assimilation is when an ethnic group is fully incorporated into a society and they have access to institutions, such as government and education (wikW).  Samad Iqbal demonstrates structural assimilation with having access to educational and governmental institutions.  Smith writes, “It starts innocently.  Casually.  You turn up at the annual spring fair full of beans, help with the raffle tickets…you’re implicated in the school, you’re involved in it.  Sooner or later you stop dropping your children at the school gates.  You start following them in” (Smith 106).  Samad is of Muslim ethnicity and he is allowed in to the school to participate in weekly school meetings or able to speak his opinions, coming from a Muslim perspective, and to be able to help change the school system, previously established by the dominant English people.

Sociologists believe that full assimilation of an individual cannot happen unless cultural and structural assimilation, both occur (Wiki).  Even though, both assimilations happen for some characters in the novel, there are still many racial related barriers that come in between different ethnic groups, such as racial slurs.  Unfortunately, there is no answer or solution to mend these barriers.  Which makes sense why Smith ends the book with all storylines and characters coming together at an event and with no clear direction where anyone is going.  I guess mankind will have to learn to fully assimilate by trials and errors.

Works Cited

What is the difference between cultural assimilation and structural assimilation?  Copyright 2010.  Wiki.answers.com>…Categories>History Politics and Society.  Dec. 1, 2010.

Changez seems to be, at the beginning of his tale, a normal young man with a story that is not so different from that of many other young men who have immigrated to America. He came to America from a less fortunate country with fewer opportunities based on his studies and went to a great school on a scholarship. He graduated with top grades and got himself a very good job, and he even fell in love with an American woman. It seemed pretty clear that Changez was loving the American way of life, finding assimilation into this new culture to be fairly easy to do. One would be hard pressed to find any reason to think that he didn’t like America. Then he dropped the bombshell, so to speak.

“I was the product of an American university; I was earning a lucrative American salary; I was infatuated with an American woman. So why did part of me desire to see America harmed?“

Changez was in fact referring to the attacks of 9/11 and his reaction to them. He confides in the American stranger by telling him that when he learned of the attacks, he simply smiled. This reaction infuriates the stranger, and only confuses Changez. He can not seem to understand fully why he would be happy about this occurrence despite his best efforts to fit in  and become part of this American culture. He seems to thoroughly enjoy his experiences and encounters in America up to the attacks of September 11th yet he finds some sort of sick satisfaction in a tragic attack on it. He goes on to say he was not happy about the people dieing in the attacks but rather that he got to see America brought to its knees for once. I began to think about all the wars America had fought in and came to a pretty simple realization. America has fought all it’s wars, almost exclusively, on the soil of other countries. It is very rare, with the exceptions of Pearl Harbor and 9/11, that American blood is spilled in America during war. Perhaps this lends to America’s air of invincibility and also accounted for Changez reaction to these attacks. I find it possible that Changez was not happy that America was attacked, but moreso happy that its result was to reveal that as a country America is not invincible, just like the rest.

Although he was just the son of the Tallis’s maid, Robbie Turner had been living a charmed life. It seemed to have been like a story out of a fairy tale. Jack Tallis, his mothers employer, had agreed to pay for his education, regardless of where he intended to go and how long he planned on attending. He was good friends with Jack’s kids while he grew up, and rarely had to do much work. His fantasy, however, came crashing down on his head just while another persons fantasy was getting started.  Briony’s fantasy about how she saw Robbie rape Lola changed Robbie’s life forever. He went from a promising young man with endless possibilities ahead of him to a rapist faced with jail time and a record marred forever by this terrible event. Robbie faces reality for possibly the first time when he goes to war.

“These rear-area maps were rare. He also took the dead captain’s revolver. He wasn’t trying to impersonate an officer. He had lost his rifle and simply intended to survive.(pg 191)”

Robbie was not trying to pretend to be something he was not, he only wanted to go on living. The war was really the first time Robbie had to worry about anything more difficult than his studies. It appears that this is the first time he is presented with real hardships and must deal with life or death decisions and all simply based on a little girls fantasy. At times one could wonder just what Robbie has to live for considering the permanent mark on his record and his reputation being tarnished. Why not take the easy way out? Then we are introduced to another sort of fantasy and that is the future of Robbie and Cecilia. Robbie holds on to the hopes of a future together with the love of his life, Cecilia. It is seen constantly throughout his travels in France that Robbie clings to this hope as his lifeline in his frantic rush to escape the country. He often feels to make sure that he still has her letters in his pocket and finds himself remembering back to a small moment they shared together or looking ahead to one he hopes to share in the future with her. It is interesting to note that fantasy is what caused Robbie to be in this situation to begin with, but fantasy also helped him to escape it. Fantasy and reality share an interesting relationship in that they can seemingly coexist and sometimes need each other to survive.

Book Review:  Gilead by Mailyne Robinson

Author:  Karl Wolff   Published:  May 09, 2010

url: http://blogcritics.org/books/article/book-review-gilead-by-marilynne-robinson/

Marilynne Robinson is not a prolific author, but like fellow slow writers Thomas Pynchon and Alexander Theroux, each of her novels is a finely hewn literary masterpiece. Gilead reveals literature at its finest. Taking the form of letters written to his young son, Reverend John Ames, an old man approaching the twilight of his years, writes about God, history, fathers and sons, and life. According to the summary on the dust jacket, the year is 1956. Past and present commingle as Ames remembers his early life, including his father the pacifist and his grandfather, the fiery visionary abolitionist. Father and grandfather bore the name John Ames and both were preachers.

The idyllic life in the small Iowa town Reverend John Ames calls home ends when John Ames Boughton returns home. Calling himself Jack, he is the son of his friend, Old Boughton, a Presbyterian minister. The specific denomination of Reverend John Ames is not explicitly mentioned, although he makes repeated references to John Calvin’s Institutes and preaching in a shabby little church. (Old Boughton preached at a much more lavish Presbyterian church in town.) The denominational specificity remains a non-issue, since John Ames contemplates both sacred and secular events. Robinson succeeds in humanizing the elderly preacher. John Ames struggles with the tenets of the faith and his own fallibility. His writing gives depth to his humanity and the burden of his call to service. The pendulum swings of his father and grandfather, one a pacifist, the other a warrior and a visionary, give his writing additional tension.

Setting plays a prominent role in the novel. One normally considers Iowa a caricature of “Real America” (whatever that is), usually asserted by anti-visionaries fearful of big cities, minorities, and progress. In a conversation, Jack Boughton jokingly mentions Iowa as “a bastion of radicalism.” Prior to the Civil War, Iowa existed as a geographic hub of a nation roiling with inner tensions. The state welcomed fugitive slaves from Missouri. John Ames mentions the small town’s many hidden cupboard and tunnels, oddly reminiscent of Palestine’s Occupied Territories and the tunnels engineered by the Viet Cong. At that time, militant abolitionists used the state as a jumping off point in their participation in the violent clashes taking place in Kansas. John Ames’ grandfather raced off to Kansas to “preach abolition” and to fight at the side of another messianic militant riding the engine of Divine Providence: John Brown. (During the 2008 Presidential campaign, Iowa went to the Democratic candidate of biracial ancestry Barack Hussein Obama II. Iowa also displayed its radical tradition by legalizing gay marriage on April 3, 2009.) Continue Reading »

For an author who is constantly struggling for the right words, Marilynne Robinson sure does an amazing job with what words she did find. Her language is one that is expressed in a way that requires no distinction between fiction or non-fiction, in fact I as I read deeper into the text I’ve frightfully came to a realization that there seems to be no allusions and few sub-textual connotations. What potential for deep ambiguous insight has been told straight forward, which I find fitting, because if these are meant to be final thoughts, then it stands to reason that the narrator will leave little room for interpretation or questioning.

This is a book that has been constructed largely on the premise of one old man’s memories, and in exploration of these memories Robinson is creating depth and dimensions to this narrator, as we are vividly told of what is past, but to us, it is present. It is within this naked exposure to one’s most private and intimate knowledge that bonds people together, making the narrator real in our mind, just as his memories are our memories as well.

From what I’ve managed to read so far, this has been my favorite passage, “There is a human beauty in it. And I can’t believe that, when we have all been changed and put on incorruptibility, we will forget our fantastic condition for morality and impermanence, the great bright dream of procreating and perishing because that meant the whole world to us… Because I don’t imagine any reality putting this one in the shade entirely, and I think piety forbids me to try.”(57) In this instance of thought I believe that Robinson was able to finally catch one of those elusive words, “human beauty”, in this single phrase we are able to justify almost any art that man has created, because according to Plato’s wisdom of origin, art is the most imperfect of creation when compared to nature or fortune. In this sense, Robinson admits something that very few people are willing to acknowledge, the fact that there is beauty  in imperfection; the fact that because we are imperfect, we are mortal, which then ensures the need to procreate and most importantly, create memories. Then the final comment of “I think piety  forbids me to try” is so … ugh, lacking in words; to say that his reverence for God has prevented him from imagining a reality without impermanence, a world without memories and appreciation, a world without death and God, without imperfection, makes quite a nerve wrecking thought. Then, there’s also the argument that language provides order, which then constructs reality, thus it would also be a world without language, and thus a world without order, but keep in mind that this is all simply my imagination that can continue infinitely, just as your imagination can as well, at one point we may accidentally prove or disprove God, but that will eventually become a memory as well.

Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist plays with the readers mind.  Its as if Changez is a explaining why he is now the way he is.  When he says ” I have been plagued by paranoia…”  I feel like he could relate to many Pakistani’s.  I myself feel that way some times.  It’s as if some one is always watching you, and even your normal everyday life is under a microscope so you have to be extra normal which in fact isn’t normal and more suspicious.  

Hamid puts pressure on the reader to understand Changez and his struggles with assimilating post September 11, 2001.  He shows how uncomfortable it is to be in a foreign country and to almost be interrogated or looked at with suspicion, the way this American is in Lahore.  The waiter makes him nervous almost every time he checks up on them.  Changez’s way of questioning the stranger is also very condescending, it’s as if he is getting revenge for all those stares he received and stereotypes that were associated with Pakistani’s or Muslim’s in general.  He immediately identifies the stranger as an American rather than a European, the way an FBI agent would be able to distinguish between a Pakistani and an Arab.  

We can’t deny how the world has changed after September 11.  We can only accept the changes and try to deal with them in the sense of controlling our emotions and suppressing those stereotypes, even if its in the back of our minds like every time we are on the subway and there is a “suspicious” person with an unusually large backpack accompanied by some sort of accent.  Even the way Hamid ends the book with an unsure ending with the book, you are almost still undecided of what Changez’s intentions are as well as the American stranger’s intentions, though I think he’s just a normal tourist, but still what was he doing in Lahore, Pakistan during that time period without some agenda.

      Marilynne Robinson’s novel Gilead is composed as an intimate letter from a dying father to his adolescent son. The novel itself portrays the family lives and famial relations of an 19th century rural town. The father, Reverend John Ames narrates his life in great detail in hopes that his son will one day read it and get to know the father he would soon lose. However John Ames does worry that the letter may be ruined or burned by the time his son can read it.

     Evenso, the stories Reverend John Ames mentions are not told in chronological or any specific order. The stories are written as they come into John Ames stream of conciousness, especially when it came to family, friends, hardships,leisure, and the loss of a loved one.Mr.Ames not only talks about his life as a child but compares his life to his son’s which will be entirely different aside from his son not growing up with a father. For one thing, his son won’t mistake any random letters as sermons like he did which means John Ames’ father was a preacher who lived by the book and expected his offspring to do the same. Yet, our narrator Mr.Ames doesn’t impose religion on his son, but lets his wife gradually teach it to him. Then again this could be because he is dying, if he were completely healthy maybe he would have been the one teaching his son about the Lord and His word.

      Because Mr.Ames grew up in a household where his father was a Reverend he perceived certain things differently than your average Joe. Water meant holy water that baptized the young as a new member of the Christian faith in a house of God. Yet water had had a holy meaning until he saw a young couple laughing and rejocing in it much the way Mr.Ames son and his friend Tobias do as he writes in his letter.

    John Ames, his father, and his grandfather all grew up in a different era. The time they grew up in were harder times, yet at the same time were better because people communicated withone another and in doing so were more kindred with one another. For example when John Ames was searching for his grandfather’s grave with his father a woman not only directed them toward his grave site but also allowed them to take shelter in her home a few days while they tidied up the grave yard which had an old cowbell hanging off the fence. Today we would be lucky if someone had enough courtesy to give us directions without seeming irritated.

     As a reader you can’t help but feel for Mr. Ames because the stories he writes in the letter as he is dying would have been things he would have said throughout his son’s life, as father to son. Yet, in the father’s perception this would have been made possible if he weren’t so old. In this novel old seems to have a positive and negative association which is something that John Ames mentions to his son earlier on within his letter. The narrator will acknowledge their hometown as “this old town” and “old Boughton” in respectable way, yet will make condenscending comments about his old age- especially within comparison to his second wife where there’s a huge age gap. At the same time his wife uses old within an affectionate context when it comes to her husband which can be seen within the following passage from the book:

        Just now I was listening to a song on the radio, standing thereswaying to it a little, I guess, because your mother saw me from the hallway and she said, “I could show you how to do that.” She came and put her arms around me and put her head on my shoulder, and after a while she said, in the gentlest voice you could ever imagine, “Why’d you hav to be so damn old?”

           I ask myself the same question.

       Mrs.Ames does call attention to Mr.Ames being old but wishes he wasn’t because if he were younger the doctor could possibly be wrong about his fatal condition and she could grow old with him. Even though Mr.Ames is dying he still makes attempts at enjoying what he has left of his life even though he is unsure as to how to go about executing it. Perhaps his way of enjoying what time he has left is dancing to a song on the radio every now and then. However what matters to him is experience and enjoying life surrounded by those who love you because he had felt alone for a long while before his second wife came into his life and bore him a wonderful son. As the saying goes “do not fear death, but the unlived life” (this quote might have been from that old movie Tuck Everlasting).