Jamaica Kincaid's My Mother's Autobiography and Zadie Smith's White Teeth are texts that primarily concern the process and results of colonization. Both follow the progression of post-colonized generations, and both describe the struggle of the marginalized culture to define itself under the weight and control of the dominant culture, yet White Teeth follows colonization to its historical conclusion: immigration. We see a cultural reaction from destabilized colonized nations following the settler homeland. What then is the effect of these processes on the colonized and immigrants? Are they the same thing? And what is the natural conclusion of these forms of cultural tension? The result is the same in both texts, even if the processes are addressed at different moments of their development: a cultural identity cannot survive whole in a constant state of duality. Something has to be worked out for a generation to emerge that can exist contained, unambiguous, and self-defined. White Teeth shows us the long and winding list of events that lead to this generation's resolution, which it sees as a promising development, while My Mother's Autobiography takes a much more pessimistic view, where the only peace to be had is through cultural loss. The immigrant, as Smith describes him, has a future, while Kincaid's colonized does not. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay Popular discourses on immigration are imbued with ideas of hope: the land of opportunity, hope for our children, a tolerant safe haven, and so on, while discourses on colonization generally consist of mourning an ineffable loss and for the domination of an implacable dominant culture. Both authors seem to adhere to these influences, and therefore the creation of the “uprooted” generation, represented in both texts, is imbued with their respective attitudes. The uprooted colonized subject, as embodied by Xuela herself in the Autobiography, is without a future and without a past, while the uprooted immigrant, symbolized by Irie's nameless daughter in White Teeth, has emerged from the shackles of the past, which is what provides its future. Xuela's disenfranchisement is evident; it is the very basis of his character. Her mother died at the moment of her birth, as she so often invokes, and in that act she is defined as the daughter of death, the product of a defeated and overwhelmed culture, without roots. At first she is overwhelmed by this loss; her recurring dreams of a faceless mother and frequent letters to her father show Xuela's desire to find her roots. He does not shake this belief until her miscarriage, when his decision not to procreate becomes his decision to withdraw his ultimate claim on her. culture – his legacy. "I had never had a mother, I had only recently refused to become one, and I knew that this refusal would be total." (97) Her refusal to give birth and therefore to recreate herself in subsequent generations is a refusal to take part in the progress of a dead culture. It has separated itself from any place in the earth's past or future; in essence, she has resigned herself to her death as an agent of a vanished culture. It becomes her own culture, rooting her sense of self and love in what is inalienable about her: her body, her smells and her corporeality. Her romance with Roland also informs this. Xuela loves Roland because he represents herself – the only person she truly loves because he is the only person who cannot be taken away from her or redefined. Like her, he is a rootless creature – notfor the loss of a mother but for the lack of a homeland. “He wasn't a hero, he didn't even have a country; he came from an island that was between the sea and the ocean, and a small island is not a nation. And he didn't have a story; it was a small event in someone else's story, but he was a man... He was crude, but he acted as if he were precious." (167) Like Xuela, Roland is rootless, but his reaction to this homeless man is to become a colonist himself, as we see through his many extramarital conquests. Xuela refuses to be colonized and has no interest in colonizing, because her only love and satisfaction comes from owning herself; she is an allegorical island in her own right; for itself. Her romance with Roland cannot therefore sustain itself, because one cannot love without colonizing, while the other cannot be colonized. The plot of White Teeth, on the contrary, begins much earlier in the process of creating this isolated generation; traces the roots of cultural identity back several generations, as far back as World War II and before, with the birth of the daughter of Irie, the cultural free agent, which does not occur until the end. Her mother is mixed Caucasian and black, her father an unknown twin from a family divided by different cultural impulses, Irie's daughter is the product of many cultural tensions and conflicts, yet she has emerged from them, liberated. It is just as likely that his father is Magid as Millat, the two Bengali twins, and no blood or behavior test can ever prove which. She is, in essence, both the daughter of the anglicized Magid and the militant Muslim Millat, and yet the daughter of neither. “At first this fact seemed unspeakably sad to Irie: he instinctively sentimentalized the biological facts, adding his own invalid syllogism: if he was not someone's son, didn't it follow that he was nobody's son?... A perfectly plotted thing without coordinates real. A map to an imaginary homeland. But then, after crying and pacing and turning it all over in her mind, she thought, whatever, you know? Anything. It was always going to end this way." (426) Irie's (Whatever) release of responsibility mirrors Xuela's release in her refusal to have children. It is the decision to give up claims to her culture's bloodline, to become a free agent, as Xuela is and as Irie's daughter will be. She has no father, no ties of duty to either Bengal or England. Yet Irie's syllogism, as the tale states, is invalid She is alive, as are Magid and Millat, and their daughter is the daughter of both and neither father. She is free to forge her own identity, taking the elements she wants from the heterogeneous mix that constitutes her background, freeing herself from expectations. parents of both. In White Teeth, it is not the cultural influence of the dominant culture, nor the stubborn persistence of the subjugated culture that causes conflict in the characters, it is the inflexibility of both, and the pressure of the previous generation on the current generation to remain the same. This pressure in the novel results in dysfunction, as depicted in Irie's angry outburst on the bus. “What a peaceful existence. What a joy their lives must be. They open a door and behind it there is only a bathroom or a living room. Only neutral spaces. And not this endless maze of present rooms and past rooms and the things said in them years ago and the old historical shit of everyone everywhere. (426) Irie's daughter is progress, because in her divorce from the cultural expectations of her parents' generation, she is free to forge her own identity, not in lovelessness and isolation as Xuela does, but in relation to a company that can influence and help create.To speak of the disenfranchisement of Xuela's people is not to dismiss them as entirely passive – like Samad in White Teeth, the colonized nation is in conflict between two cultural influences, and this conflict manifests itself in dysfunction. Like Irie, like Magid, like Millat, these people are caught in the middle, bending to foreign laws and speaking French patois, an “illegitimate” mix of European and African languages. Colonization is a process of domination, the cultural conflict of the colonized is closely connected to the discourses of power. Xuela's father is half African and half Scottish, and is the most colonizing presence in the novel. It is his European descent that prevails over his African one, because to be African means to be "other", to be a lack, while to be English means to be a conqueror, an agent of a powerful ruling class. Yet for all his power, Xuela's father is as damaged as she is, incapable of love. He values ​​himself more than anything, as does she, and this is the source of their inability to truly love anything besides themselves, but his self-love is profoundly different from hers. He depends on the power structures of the colonizing nation to have dominion over himself, while Xuela has divorced himself from all those structures to love himself at his most basic bodily level. No matter how much Xuela's father may try to distinguish himself from the lowly Africans of his domain, he is never fully European and never fully in control of himself because his entire sense of self derives from a power structure that has not been created for him. When Xuela's father dies and all of the power of her origin is released from Xuela, she has a reaction not unlike that of Irie's daughter, with her "puppet strings severed." “…And when at last I was a true orphan, my father died without knowing me… all my life up to that time, in all his seventy years, I had feared the time when I would be alone; the two people I came from, the two people who had made me die; but then finally a great peace came over me, a stillness that was not silence or acceptance, just a feeling of peace, of resolve. (223) However great a loss from the past may be, the death of both his parents may result in a freedom not unlike that of White Teeth's paternally unattached son; however, the calm of my Mother's Autobiography is not a positive calm, the calm of resolving tensions and conflicts, it is the calm of the dying person who has surrendered and entered gently into that good night. It is a generation that has lost its roots and has accepted their loss. Such a generation, being metaphorically dead, cannot give life, cannot pass on its dead legacy to the next generation, and Xuela, as an agent of that culture, cannot have children. The immigrant in White Teeth, however, is also a colonizer. as a colonized subject, the power he exercises is not personal but collective. No culture, once it enters England, actively attempts to crush Western culture; instead, a general cultural bleeding occurs, until the original definition of "English" changes. The immigrant is always surrounded by his colonizing potential and can remain much more tied to his cultural traditions in the face of a dominant and threatening culture, in the end he is still, to some extent, tempted and changed to adapt to the land in which he lives. in. Samad is the embodiment of this conflict; his belief in Islam and its “pure” culture is idealized to the point of making it impractical, and his succumbing to English temptations (alcohol, gambling, and his affair with the Englishwoman Poppy Burt Jones) shows.