Importance of Family

Introduction

The concept of the family is a term ambiguous. Its shape and content depend on the approach to this matter. In light of the law: a woman with a family with a man connected with the marriage bond and the offspring that persist. Norms governing family relations: the moral and religious as well as moral.

Families in the White Teeth

Archibald “Archie” Jones is trying to commit suicide. He is inhaling carbon monoxide from the exhaust fumes of his running car, which is parked in Willesden Green, a multiracial, multicultural, and mostly immigrant neighborhood of London. Suicide has been Archie's New Year's resolution since the miserable failure of his childless marriage to an insane Italian woman. As with most decisions in his life, he had tossed a coin to determine whether or not he should kill himself. A local butcher saves Archie's life when he sees him in his car, which is parked in the shop's loading area. Archie readily treats this as a good sign that his life has not yet given up on him. 

Reinvigorated by his second chance, Archie, a forty-seven-year-old World War II veteran, attends a random New Year's Day party, or rather, whatever is left of the celebration from the night before. At the party he encounters Clara Bowden, a nineteen-year-old Caribbean and a lapsed Jehovah's Witness. Archie and Clara marry just six weeks later.

Born to a highly religious Jamaican mother, Clara immediately sees her marriage to a native-born Englishman as an escape from the old, convoluted ways of her family. Her mother, Hortense Bowden, was born during a 1907 earthquake in her native Kingston, Jamaica. Hortense's mother, Ambrosia, was fourteen years old at the time of Hortense's birth. Ambrosia had become pregnant by a white English captain stationed in Jamaica. Because of the earthquake, Hortense had considered her own birth a miracle, and for the rest of her life she would be a religious zealot. As a Jehovah's Witness, Hortense excitingly continues to anticipate the end of the world because she is firmly convinced that she must be one of the chosen people.

Samad Iqbal, Archie's best friend for nearly thirty years, had encouraged Archie's second marriage to a younger woman, such as Clara. Samad is married, by arrangement, to Alsana Begum, a woman nineteen years younger. Samad and Archie had met long before the Iqbals' immigration from Bangladesh. Having served together at the end of World War II, the two men feel united in that experience, despite neither having done any fighting.

Clara and Alsana become pregnant nearly at the same time and become close, albeit somewhat slowly and, for Alsana, reluctantly. Clara gives birth to Irie, while the Iqbals welcome twin boys: Magid, the older son by two minutes, and Millat. The three children grow up together and, as the first British-born children of immigrants, go through a process of cultural assimilation much different from that of their parents.

Samad gets obsessively involved with his children's education, attending all parent meetings at their school and ...