How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
"Well, take Alsana's sisters—all their children are nothing but trouble. They won't go to mosque, they don't pray, they speak strangely, they dress strangely, they eat all kinds of rubbish, they have intercourse with God knows who. No respect for tradition. People call it assimilation when it is nothing but corruption. Corruption!" (8.86)
Is Samad missing the point with his focus on tradition here? Is tradition really as unchanging and timeless as he imagines?
Quote #2
To Samad, as to the people of Thailand, tradition was culture, and culture led to roots, and these were good, these were untainted principles. That didn't mean he could live by them, abide by them, or grow in the manner they demanded, but roots were roots and roots were good. (8.122)
Samad can't even live up to his own expectations when it comes to tradition. He wants his children to become better upholders of tradition than he is, but they are out looking for their own lives.
Quote #3
If religion is the opiate of the people, tradition is an even more sinister analgesic, simply because it rarely appears sinister. If religion is a tight band, a throbbing vein, and a needle, tradition is a far homelier concoction: poppy seeds ground into tea; a sweet cocoa drink laced with cocaine; the kind of thing your grandmother might have made. (8.122)
That is about the darkest description of tradition we've encountered, and, in White Teeth, tradition often manages to live up to this reputation.
Quote #4
[…] for they were English now, more English than the English by virtue of their disappointments. All in all, then, the headmaster was wrong: Glenard could not be said to have passed on any great edifying beacon to future generations. A legacy is not something you can give or take by choice, and there are no certainties in the sticky business of inheritance. (11.384)
One's legacy is not something people get to choose in White Teeth. And the process of inheriting legacy is deeply muddied. In this way, tradition and legacy are very similar; they get forced upon often unwilling recipients, and those recipients are then burdened by the task of living up to the previous generations.
Quote #5
It was a tradition, in both Mickey's wider and nuclear family, to name all sons Abdul to teach them the vanity of assuming higher status than any other man, which was all very well and good but tended to cause confusion in the formative years. However, children are creative, and all the many Abduls added an English name as a kind of buffer to the first. (8.26)
Here's proof that tradition does not necessarily make any sense. And also proof that tradition is not necessarily fixed—it's subject to change.
Quote #6
Samad blew his top. "Whose tradition?" he bellowed, as a tearful Magid began to scribble frantically once more. "Dammit, you are a Muslim, not a wood sprite! I told you, Magid, I told you the condition upon which you would be allowed. You come with me on hajj. If I am to touch that black stone before I die I will do it with my eldest son by my side." (6.286)
Must father and sons follow the same traditions? Why might Magid and Samad have very different ideas about the traditions that belong to them? This quote asks us to think about where traditions come from and how we come to possess them.
Quote #7
[…] Samad said he'd spent New Year's Eve at O'Connell's for eighteen years and he wasn't going to stop now. (19.115)
Spending time at a pub doesn't exactly go along with the Muslim traditions Samad is so concerned about, but Samad and Archie have their own traditions too. Now, if only Samad could see it this way.
Quote #8
Look at you, look at the state of you! Look how fat you are!" He grabbed a piece of her, and then released it as if it would infect him. "Look how you dress. Running shoes and a sari? And what is that?"
[…] "You do not even know what you are, where you come from. We never see family anymore—I am ashamed to show you to them. Why did you go all the way to Bengal for a wife, that's what they ask. Why didn't you just go to Putney?" (8.155-157)
Alsana doesn't totally dress traditionally, as Samad points out here. She's able to mix her Bengali traditions with elements from the English world around her, and this doesn't seem to torture her in the way it tortures Samad.
Quote #9
A very happy marriage. That summer of '76, what with the heat and the flies and the endless melodies of ice-cream vans, things happened in a haze—sometimes Joyce had to pinch herself to make sure this was real […] In an aimless, happy way, she could hear herself murmuring, an oral version of the toilet-door doodles of adolescents: Joyce and Marcus, Marcus and Joyce. (12.5)
Joyce, despite all her Chalfen intellectualism, is very attached to a traditional notion of family. Though she is successful in her work, she can't help but want to be a wife and mother; she's pretty into traditional gender roles.