Zadie Smith is the author of the novels White Teeth , The Autograph Man , On Beauty , NW , Swing Time and The Fraud ; as well as a novella, The Embassy of Cambodia; three collections of essays, Changing My Mind, Feel Free and Intimations; a collection of short stories, Grand Union; and a play, The Wife of Willesden, adapted from Chaucer. She is also the editor of The Book of Other People. Zadie Smith was born in north-west London, where she still lives.
By
the same author
FICTION
White Teeth
The Autograph Man
On Beauty
NW
The Embassy of Cambodia
Swing Time Grand Union
The Fraud
NON-FICTION
Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays Feel Free
Intimations: Six Essays
PLAYS
The Wife of Willesden
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First published by Hamish Hamilton 2000
This 25th-anniversary edition published 2025
001
Copyright © Zadie Smith, 2000
Foreword copyright © Zadie Smith, 2025
All rights reserved
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Acknowledgements xiii
Foreword xv
White Teeth Twenty-Five Years Later
Foreword
The book you have in your hands is the product of love. It was 1997 when I began it, and I was filled with love. For my friends and my family. My neighbourhood. The housing estates and the chicken shops, the parks and the libraries, the schools and the clubs. I loved the wild mix of people – Caribbean, Irish, English, African, Indian, Pakistani, Bengali, Polish, Italian, Greek Cypriot, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Catholic, Protestant, Sikh and Atheist1 – with whom and around whom I had been raised, housed and educated. I loved being young. Some people say youth is wasted on the young, but I really remember being conscious of possessing something precious, a quality that could not possibly last, and was my responsibility to treasure. I wanted to capture the moment! I went about my task fearlessly, without thinking about it too much, and with all the pent-up energy that comes naturally to the young. Look at this amazing place, these extraordinary people, remember it, get it all down, soon it will be gone. Later I realized that this elegiac tendency in me is not actually that common in young people, who are usually having too much fun to worry about time and its passing . . . But I was the child of a man who was already sixty when I was ten. You could say elegy came naturally to me.
Anyway: I was speaking of love. So many beloved things are captured in these pages, and with an energy that blows my mind now, all these years later. I’ve just opened a random page, for example, and found Samad singing some lyrics from I’ll Bet She
1 I am missing some folks out in an attempt to keep this foreword short – you’ve got a lot of pages ahead of you.
Is!, a ‘rediscovered mid-fifties musical’ which I apparently had the inner resources to invent from whole cloth, just so he could do that. The things you can manage in your early twenties! Which reminds me that the greatest love to be found preserved in this debut is the love of language itself. White Teeth is the obvious product of an English Literature student, one who loved that literature so intensely she felt compelled to try and add to it, in her own idiosyncratic way. Many loves of mine have since changed, transformed, faded or been lost in the intervening years – but not that one. The energetic novel you have in your hands is, first and foremost, a book made out of other books. It is constructed from other people’s novels, which I ripped apart, turned inside out and repurposed for my own use, so I might better describe my little corner of the world – my people. I still live in that little corner. I am still with my people. White Teeth is by now a part of our collective history: I really love it for that. Finally, if White Teeth likewise inspires any young person to break up this particular English novel, strip it down and use it for parts, well, then it will have completed its literary purpose in this world, and made its presently middle-aged author truly proud.
Zadie Smith North West London 3rd September 2024
