Postcolonization

During the first part of white teeth you’re introduced to different people, who seem to be dealing with post colonization on one level or another. On one level the commune where Archie finds refuge, represents what Bressler describes as the ‘other’ the ones who are being “watched for the reason that they are different because each person represent colonization from Clara the Jamaican to Wan-si the Chinese. And on the other hand you have Archie who from a gender perspective Archie suffers “a collapse of [his] ego” (239) when his wife divorced him and not knowing what to do any more he intentionally keeps going back to the house he once shared with her to be verbally abuse by the maid and his in-laws. It’s as if Archie was being colonized by his wife because he stayed married to a woman he did not love, because to him “marriage [was] like buying a pair of shoes, taking them home, and finding they fit [but] for the sake of appearances he put up with them” (white teeth, 7), in a sense being the master or the colonizer while his wife was the colonized who was eventually driven insane because she like other “women [were no longer] daylight in Archie’s life” (white teeth, 7). As Bressler points out one of the main concerns of post colonialism is that it “highlight[s] the struggle that occurs when one culture is dominated by another [causing the] colonized to be removed from history” (Empire writes back, 238).