White Teeth

Zadie Smith

Zadie Smith’s White Teeth serves as a vivid lens through which Marta Ibarrondo examines the complexities of migration, memory, and inherited identity. The novel’s layered portrayal of postcolonial London, teeming with contradiction, humor, and cultural hybridity, mirrored Ibarrondo’s own experiences as an immigrant negotiating language, difference, and belonging. The daily act of correcting the pronunciation of her name becomes a quiet ritual of resistance, marking the tension between assimilation and erasure.

To materialize this diasporic tension, Ibarrondo overlays quotations from the novel onto antique British maps, books, and archival photographs, fragments of empire and history recontextualized. The text, rendered in marigold orange, evokes the ceremonial pigments of Indian cultural practices, standing in radiant contrast to the muted tones of the colonial archive. In these works, past and present collide, and the inherited weight of history is made vibrantly and unapologetically visible.