Mirror Teeth: Absurdity at its finest!

After seeing Mirror Teeth ( which I adored!), I found some of it reminding me of the lectures that Dr. Baillie has been giving the past few days. Dr. Baillie has mentioned often that Post-Colonial literature often deals with ethnic characters not feeling "at home" in the place that they live, even when they were born there. This is a common theme that Salman Rushdie also touches on in his essay Imaginary Homelands.  


Rushdie discusses how there's always a sense of feeling like a stranger in a homeland where you don't really understand the culture. He also discusses how you always feel like your true homeland is the place where you culture is, even when you aren't even born in that country. I found that the character of Kwesi in Mirror Teeth fit this model perfectly.

When we are first introduced to Kwesi, he is a bit of a shy and timid young man who really doesn't have his own opinions on things; he'd rather listen to what other people tell him. But when we see Kwesi after he has moved to the Middle East with the Jones family we suddenly see a different side of him. We see Kwesi dressed in a suit and making powerful speeches about his thoughts on business and economics.  Even though he was born in London we can clearly see that he's more comfortable in his native country, or a country that's at least a bit more similar to the one his family would have been from.

But in the end, Kwesi dies. This leads into another point made by Dr. Baillie and by Rushdie; that ethnic people born in a different country often don't really fit in anywhere, and are often forced to straddle two cultures. Kwesi's death could symbolize how he's not really accepted into either London or Middle-Eastern society. We see hope in him that he's finally found a place where he belongs, but in the end it's not meant to be.

This is a tangent that has nothing to do with Post-Colonialism, but this play reminded me a lot of the play La Leçon written by French playwright Eugène Ionesco in 1951. La Leçon is a lot like Mirror Teeth in that it's an absurd play that uses both dark humor and sexual references as a source of social commentary. But instead of the lives of ethnics, La Leçon focuses on the state of the education system in 1950s France. And, like Mirror Teeth, it's very effective about getting that message across and showing us how inept and corrupt a social institution might actually be.