Displacement

~ Exit West, by Mohsin Hamid ~

While all four of Hamid’s novels have been well written, I thought his first (Moth Smoke) and this fourth, Exit West, were the most beautiful: moving, resigned yet optimistic, tackling complex and controversial topics with thoughtful geopolitical commentary while focusing on specific, fascinating characters.

Saeed and Nadia meet as young adults in an unnamed city, where Saeed works in an advertising agency and Nadia in an insurance company. Saeed lives with his parents as do most young adults in that culture. Nadia is not easily categorized: she lives alone, rides a motorbike, does not pray regularly, but wears a full length black robe ‘so men don’t fuck with her’.

As a relationship develops between the two, their city slips by degrees into chaos. Hamid describes the civil war only in vague terms of ‘militants’ and ‘nationalists’ thus preserving the sense that this could be anywhere. First there are gunshots and rumors. One day, cellphone service stops. As the stores empty, people start stockpiling and hoarding, then electricity and water stop flowing. Yet Saeed and Nadia, like most people, simply adjust to each new change — taping over windows, moving furniture in front of doors, digging trenches to serve as bathrooms — and continue their increasingly circumscribed lives as the militants take over the city.

Until Saeed’s mother gets hit by a stray bullet and dies instantly. Traditional funeral arrangements are not possible, and Nadia moves in to help despite a few raised eyebrows at this unorthodox arrangement. The country is described as a ‘major global crisis’ in the occasional world news, but it is the snippets of horror that stay in the reader’s mind: the time Saeed’s father sees some boys playing football and realizes that the ‘ball’ is a human head.

In a world full of doors, the only divisions that mattered now were between those who sought the right of passage and those who would deny them passage.

Hamid has chosen not to focus on their journey of escape, but on the before and after. There are dark ‘doors’ between countries, and refugees simply emerge on the other side. For Saeed and Nadia, this is the Greek island of Mykonos, in a refugee camp where ‘people of many countries and hues — but mostly falling within a band of brown that ranged from dark chocolate to milky tea’ live in hundreds of tents and lean-tos. A few months later, they are lucky enough to find a portal to London where refugees have taken over fancy unoccupied house in Chelsea. At first the refugees are randomly scattered, then houses become ethnic clusters.

Nigerians were initially the largest among many groups of residents, but every so often a non-Nigerian family would relocate out of the house, and their place would almost always be taken by more Nigerians, and so the house began to be known as a Nigerian house, like the two on either side.

Intermittent sections of the novel describe other migrations quite independent of Nadia and Saeed’s. A Mexican mother returns across the border to take her daughter back with her. In Amsterdam an old man watches another old man emerge from a ‘door’ on successive days, and a relationship develops. In Tokyo, a man sees two Filipinas step into a street and follows them, ‘fingering the metal in his pocket’. And a trickle of people flow the other way: a heartbroken Londoner finds a home and purpose in Namibia.

The entire novel is of course very relevant in current times, but some paragraphs stand out.

The news in those days was full of war and migrants and nativists, and it was full of fracturing too, of regions pulling away from nations, and cities pulling away from hinterlands, and it seemed that as everyone was coming together, everyone was also moving apart. […] Some said Britain had already split, like a man whose head had been chopped off and yet still stood, and others said Britain was an island, and islands endure, even if the people who come to them change, and so it had been for millenia, and so it would be for millenia more.

Nadia and Saeed move through another door, this time to Marin County, California.

Many others considered themselves native to this country, by which they meant that they or their parents or their grandparents or the grandparents of their grandparents had been born on the strip of land that stretched from the mid-northern-Pacific to the mid-northern-Atlantic, that their existence here did not owe anything to a physical migration that had occurred in their lifetime. It seemed to Saeed that the people who advocated this position most strongly, who claimed the rights of nativeness most forcefully, tended to be drawn from the ranks of those with light skin who looked most like the natives of Britain — and as had been the case with many of the natives of Britain, many of these people too seemed stunned by what was happening to their homeland, what had already happened in so brief a period, and some seemed angry as well.

Over the year described in the book, Saeed and Nadia’s relationship frays thread by thread, and this is beautifully described: both the longterm connection between the two as well as the slow loss of intimacy.

By the end, it hardly matters to the reader what becomes of the two main characters, who seem specific at the beginning of the novel but more representative towards the end. It is clear that only an accident of history separates the refugee from the reader, and that roles could be reversed at any time.

Exit West, by Mohsin Hamid. Riverhead Books, 2017