Absent Fathers and Trauma in Zadie Smith’s White Teeth

Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (2000) has been extensively mined for its resonances with postcolonial issues of ethnic hybridity and multiculturalism, and particularly for the migrant trauma and cultural and economic marginalization asserted for its main Jamaican/Bengali families which cause so much anxiety over their hyphenated identities. While such readings are valuable, they tend to read the novel’s characters as isolated agents dealing with abstract cultural forces and not as relational family or social members. Specifically, why is every major father in the story a bad one? This work seeks to fill a small but vital gap by drawing on research on emotionally absent fathers to interrogate how the characters of White Teeth are both hurt by and propagate non-fathering, and how this may further the interpretation of the novel.