How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
I AM NOT A WAITER. I HAVE BEEN A STUDENT, A SCIENTIST, A SOLDIER, MY WIFE IS CALLED ALSANA, WE LIVE IN EAST LONDON BUT WE WOULD LIKE TO MOVE NORTH. I AM A MUSLIM BUT ALLAH HAS FORSAKEN ME OR I HAVE FORSAKEN ALLAH, I'M NOT SURE. I HAVE A FRIEND—ARCHIE—AND OTHERS. I AM FORTY-NINE BUT WOMEN STILL TURN IN THE STREET. SOMETIMES. (3.81)
Samad struggles with how he sees himself. He is constantly looking at himself through society's eyes; he's actually a lot like Irie in this way. Here, he imagines wearing this description of himself around his neck for everyone at the restaurant to see so that his complex identity does not get swallowed by a far simpler one: waiter.
Quote #2
"Well, well. That's something, isn't it?" said Archie, placing his hands behind his head and lying back to look at the stars. "To have a bit of history in your blood like that. Motivates you, I'd imagine. I'm a Jones, you see. 'Slike a 'Smith.' We're nobody... My father used to say: 'We're the chaff, boy, we're the chaff.' Not that I've ever been much bothered, mind. Proud all the same, you know. Good honest English stock. But in your family you had a hero!" (5.129)
Archie seems perfectly happy to be the "chaff." He has a privileged position as a white Englishman that allows him to feel just fine about being a Jones, or a Smith.
Quote #3
"You don't stand for anything, Jones," continued Samad. "Not for a faith, not for a politics. Not even for your country. How your lot ever conquered my lot is a bloody mystery. You're a cipher, no?"
"A what?"
"And an idiot. What are you going to tell your children when they ask who you are, what you are? Will you know? Will you ever know?"
"What are you that's so bloody fantastic?"
"I'm a Muslim and a Man and a Son and a Believer. I will survive the last days." (5.335-339)
Archie might not be as insignificant or idiotic as Samad says he is in this moment. But Archie is clearly not as concerned about his identity as Samad is about his. Why is it so easy for Archie to just not worry about who he is?
Quote #4
He knew that he, Millat, was a Paki no matter where he came from; that he smelled of curry; had no sexual identity; took other people's jobs; or had no job and bummed off the state; or gave all the jobs to his relatives; that he could be a dentist or a shop-owner or a curry-shifter, but not a footballer or a filmmaker; that he should go back to his own country; or stay here and earn his bloody keep; that he worshiped elephants and wore turbans; that no one who looked like Millat, or spoke like Millat, or felt like Millat, was ever on the news unless they had recently been murdered. In short, he knew he had no face in this country, no voice in the country, until the week before last when suddenly people like Millat were on every channel and every radio and every newspaper and they were angry, and Millat recognized the anger, thought it recognized him, and grabbed it with both hands. (9.201)
It takes a controversy for someone like Millat to have a voice and a face in England. Perhaps, then, it is not surprising that Millat uses voices that are not his.
Quote #5
"What they want," said Millat, "is to stop pissing around wid dis hammer business and jus' get some Semtex and blow de djam ting up, if they don't like it, you get me? Be quicker, innit?"
"Why do you talk like that?" snapped Irie, devouring a dumpling. "That's not your voice. You sound ridiculous!" (9.250-251)
Millat uses different voices at different times, and this time, Irie is annoyed at the voice he's chosen. To echo Irie's question: why does he talk like that?
Quote #6
This 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 fishpond, 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 checkups. 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). (12.107)
The way that people read identity from the outside in is changing; names don't necessarily indicate ethnicity. And this ethnic anonymity provides us with an opportunity to rethink identity. Where does identity come from? And what does it mean?
Quote #7
It was partly for this reason that Irie didn't mention the Chalfens to her parents. It wasn't that she intended to mate with the Chalfens... but the instinct was the same. She had a nebulous fifteen-year-old's passion for them, overwhelming, yet with no real direction or object. She just wanted to, well, kind of, merge with them. She wanted their Englishness. Their Chalfenishness. The purity of it. It didn't occur to her that the Chalfens were, after a fashion, immigrants too (third generation, by way of Germany and Poland, né Chalfenovsky), or that they might be as needy of her as she was of them. To Irie, the Chalfens were more English than the English. (12.110)
To Irie, the Chalfens seem almost impossibly English. She can't see herself or her identity as important or interesting because she is too busy wanting to "merge with them."
Quote #8
I sometimes wonder why I bother," said Samad bitterly, betraying the English inflections of twenty years in the country, "I really do. These days, it feels to me like you make a devil's pact when you walk into this country. You hand over your passport at the check-in, you get stamped, you want to make a little money, get yourself started... but you mean to go back! Who would want to stay? Cold, wet, miserable; terrible food, dreadful newspapers—who would want to stay? In a place where you are never welcomed, only tolerated. Just tolerated. Like you are an animal finally housebroken. Who would want to stay? But you have made a devil's pact... it drags you in and suddenly you are unsuitable to return, your children are unrecognizable, you belong nowhere." (15.193)
Samad talks to Irie about feeling that, in entering England, he has had to give up the comfort and sense of belonging that are attached to the place he's from. The way Samad sees it, you can only hold on to one identity at a time. Do his sons view identity in this way? What about Alsana?
Quote #9
"Yes, M— M— Mark," said Alsana, close to tears at this final snub, the replacement of "Mum" for "Amma." "Do not be late, now."
"I GIVE YOU A GLORIOUS NAME LIKE MAGID MAHFOOZ MURSHED MUBTASIM IQBAL!" Samad had yelled after Magid when he returned home that evening and whipped up the stairs like a bullet to hide in his room. "AND YOU WANT TO BE CALLED MARK SMITH!" (6.282-283)
Okay, is anyone else starting to think it's funny that Zadie Smith's last name is… Smith?
Quote #10
What she didn't know, and what she realized she may never know (the very moment she saw the ghostly pastel blue lines materialize on the home test, like the face of the madonna in the zucchini of an Italian housewife), was the identity of the father. No test on earth would tell her. Same thick black hair. Same twinkling eyes. Same habit of chewing the tops of pens. Same shoe size. Same deoxyribonucleic acid. She could not know her body's decision, what choice it had made, in the race to the gamete, between the saved and the unsaved. (19.143)
Irie does not, and will not, ever know the identity of her baby's father. Magid and Millat are the two possibilities, and they have the same DNA. There's something poetic about Irie's irresoluble uncertainty juxtaposed next to the complete certainty of Marcus's FutureMouse.