A New World Order: Exit West and the Evanescence of Migratory Life
BY STAFF WRITER SIMONE WALLK ’21
Source: Amazon
In moments of personal and political desperation, all we can hope for is escape, change, or movement — anything to disappear. And yet leaving a past life behind is unendingly complicated. The interpersonal mess that results from migration is the subject of Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West, where characters cross miles in moments, crawling out of door-like portals into foreign lands as if “dying and being born” at once. Hamid probes these metaphorical deaths and births, painting a precise emotional portrait of the limbo that is migration.
Through his system of portals, Hamid limits discussion of the journey of migration and turns our attention to the personal effects of leaving home. At the center of his tale of transitions are Nadia and Saeed, lovers meeting secretly in an unnamed city. Nadia’s conservative dress conceals her liberalism, ardent feminism, and drug use. She and Saeed, a more devout Muslim who works in advertising, develop a romance that burgeons as their city languishes under military occupation. Hamid contrasts Nadia’s outward piety and inward rebelliousness with Saeed’s growing faith, noting how their unlikely bond is made all the more romantic by the perilous conditions in which it takes place. As day-to-day life in their city becomes near impossible, Nadia and Saeed decide to risk leaving all they know behind by crossing a portal westward.
From here on, Exit West becomes another novel, not a war-time romance featuring a charmingly relatable couple, but a futuristic portrait of the tragedies and serendipities of migratory life. With fairy-tale like prose, Hamidemploys fantastical and lyrical modes to capture the aftershocks of migration. He writes with linguistic ambiguity, a halting syntax that mirrors Nadia and Saeed’s liminality: “Every time a couple moves, they begin, if their attention is still drawn to one another, to see each other differently, for personalities are not a single immutable color, like white or blue, but rather illuminated screens, and the shades we reflect depend much on what is around us.” Both migration and love, we learn, are capricious; the love you expect to be your sustenance might unravel with the uncertainties of life in transit.
The growing gulf between Nadia and Saeed embodies Hungarian literary theorist George Lukacs’ concept of transcendental homelessness, a sense of disordered ruin in the modern world that leaves spiritual and emotional gaps. How might relationships and communities resist disintegration in this world of flux, Hamid ponders, proposing religion as a possible solution. Saeed finds a pan-Islamic community abroad that helps him mourn the evanescence of migratory life: “He prayed fundamentally as a gesture for what had gone and would go and could be loved in no other way,” for his parents and lost love and everything ephemeral. Hamid quells fears of migrant fundamentalism through Saeed’s gentle spirituality, yet both Nadia and Saeed remain transcendentally homeless, estranged from one another and their new world. Reading their grief is a precarious experience made pleasant by Hamid’s lyrical prose.
Hamid’s lyricism is reminiscent of Jhumpa Lahiri’s writing, but his occasionally dystopian prose recalls Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, another story of constant movement testing interpersonal ties. Like McCarthy, Hamid operates by allegory. Nadia and Saeed are the only named characters in Exit West, traversing a path characteristic of modern migrants: from the Middle East to Greece to London and beyond, westward bound. In their anonymous origin, Nadia and Saeed symbolize contemporary refugees. They are cosmopolitan and liberal, sympathetic to Hamid’s western audience, whose very world they might disrupt. Hamid’s mission — a successful one — is to make the migrant’s life legible and provoke empathy for their plight.
But Exit West is not only focused on Nadia and Saeed. It becomes a global narrative through vignettes featuring migrants seeking security, money, pleasure, and adventure. Here, too, Hamid uses allegory to explore the motivations of modern migrants. We meet a migrating Tamil family, captured by surveillance feeds upon crossing a portal and subsequently apprehended; a suicidal British accountant fleeing mundanity through a door to Namibia; and a pair of aging gay lovers traveling the world. In Hamid’s portal world, a current of trading places underlies everyday life.
Hamid suggests that today’s 65 million displaced people (a United Nations estimate) represent a new world order. This is not a far-fetched suggestion, as economic, political, and environmental instability constantly drive migration from all corners of the globe. Yet Hamid envisions normalcy, a far cry from today’s ad-hoc refugee camps and our politicians’ ad hominem attacks on migrants. In London, Nadia and Saeed assimilate through a labor for land system that promotes economic stability for Brits as well. He redefines the meaning of “native” in California, subversively imagining that white Americans are now as homeless as the Native American tribes their ancestors evicted. Still, Hamid cautions that this new world order will uphold the contemporary power structure. Metaphors of dark and light London — the latter defined by freedom of movement and electricity, the former by checkpoints and violent darkness — expose the “haves” and “have nots” of a migrating world. Despite their freedom of movement, Nadia and Saeed are subject to life on the margins of the West in literal darkness.
Though Hamid turns political at times, his vision lacks declarative statements beyond his call for migrant humanity. Instead, he evokes the psychological conflicts of all those displaced by migration, from migrant to citizen. Take Nadia, who wears a black robe as a defensive mechanism against sexual assault. Outwardly embodying Islam, she sees a real-time photograph of herself online and wonders “how could she both read this news and be this news.” Nadia realizes this is not her image — and nor does she represent what her robe reflects — yet she is news for the British; Hamid enters the psychological domains of both migrant and nativist through his speculations on a world of portals.
While Hamid’s spiraling plot might not hold every reader, his prose is worth the wait. His sentences flow with universalisms, generalized statements crafted with linguistic precision that gives life to his painful themes. “When we migrate, we murder from our lives those we leave behind,” he writes, evoking the ineffable permanence of moving away from family and friends. Generalizations like this one allow Hamid to analyze the fleeting bareness of migratory life.
Abounding with detail, Hamid’s prose is most poignant when he describes violence as mundane through metaphor: a car bombing that “felt in one’s chest cavity as a subsonic vibration like those emitted by large loudspeakers at music concerts,” implying the normalized shock of everyday war. Battle is “an intimate experience, combatants pressed close together,” and the blood of a dead neighbors appears “as a stain in the high corner of Saeed’s sitting room.” Oscillating between universalisms and figurative language, Hamid’s prose resembles the precarious liminality of his characters.
Exit West is a world of dualisms: pain and love, grief and opportunity, universalism and particularism, emotional stasis and unceasing movement. Hamid reinvents the clichéd immigration narrative through fusing genres, an impersonal tone, and allegory into a cry for the necessity of recognizing migrants’ humanity and doing something — anything — to adapt to the new reality of their constant presence. Exit West is a grave, delicate recognition of the fleetingness of life in the face of movement; “for one moment we are pottering about our errands as usual and the next we are dying, and our eternally impending ending does not put a stop to our transient beginnings and middles until the instant when it does.”