ABSTRACT
Zadie Smith's characters are frequently on the move, even though many of her writings are specifically located in North West London, an area that has repeatedly been described as multicultural and representative of the glocal culture of the twenty-first century. In fact, the narrator of White Teeth specifies that the lives of the Iqbal family, of Bengali origin, will be marked by the traumatic migratory movement from ex-colony to colonial centre and the repetition of this traumatic journey and the feeling of unsettlement throughout different generations. The pain of slavery has travelled across space and time, up to the point of being practically ubiquitous, reworked under different guises that continue to oppress others. There is already strangeness and movement within the home itself. It is not simply a question then of those who stay at home, and those who leave: as if these two different trajectories simply lead people to different places.
