295 Text Analysis

You Should Know Up Front This is Not a Love Story

            Mohsin Hamid’s novel Exit West details the mass migration that is not only a very present and impending occurrence in many western nations, but will likely only increase in the coming years and which, depending on those asked, is still hotly debated as being either celebratory or threatening. Some readers of this novel might misunderstand its message as a cliché old trope of a redemptive love story set amidst a ruthless and apocalyptic world, however, this view diminishes Hamid’s illustration of the refugee experience in a hostile sociopolitical landscape and neglects the intense individuality of Nadia and Saeed as well as their own personal journeys of self-discovery, migration and adaptation. Reducing them to a mere relationship in a love story fails to understand the greater implications Hamid suggests in his novel about how time and migration operate as unavoidable natural forces acting universally, and what migrants and their destinations owe each other. Exit West rejects the classic love story in favor of an unabashedly honest depiction of the modern migrant’s experience of connection and isolation from the world around them through a roaming narrative structure and use of magical realism.

            While rules about the common elements and conventions of a love story as a literary genre are quite varied, and at times opposing, there is enough understanding to know that Exit West does not fit into this category despite some popular opinions. One of the most crucial aspects to a love story is that the relationship must be central to the plot, which Saeed and Nadia’s arguably is not. Their relationship in some respects is a driving force at times, but their love does not inform the biggest messages in the novel, which instead focuses more generally on the experience of migration, specifically for refugees coming from war-torn countries. In a small sense the journey and eventual dissolution of Nadia and Saeed’s love is representative of some of Hamid’s suggestions about the transience of time, and the constant movement underlying everything in the novel, but in a larger sense, the novel focuses more on the idea of the modern migrant’s experience in which the modern migrant is everyone. Hamid expresses this idea most clearly in a sub story about an “old woman who had lived in the same house her entire life” (Hamid 207). From birth, through life with her parents, then life with her two husbands, her children and even her grandchildren, she had never moved from this one house, and yet the world still moved around her, until she looks up one day and realizes that without ever taking a step away from where she was brought as a newborn, “she too had migrated” (208), and everything around her was different, and she was different. And she comes to the realization that “everyone migrates … we are all migrants through time” (208). This short story comes toward the end of the novel just before Nadia broaches the topic of moving out of their Marin, California home to Saeed. At this point Hamid has introduced many different sub stories amidst the exploration of Nadia and Saeed’s travels, and has made it clear that while not everyone in this changing world of his are themselves migrants, or refugees, the mere fact of living subjects everyone to the same irresistible forces of time that affect everything else. Time and migration are connected in this novel in the sense that they act in similar manners: uprooting people from the familiar and thrusting them into unknown terrain, they make every moment fleeting because at once every moment is past, present, and future. Eventually the London authorities give up fighting against the mass migration and the futile attempt at controlling the doors, “Perhaps they had grasped that the doors could not be closed, and new doors would continue to open, and they had understood that the denial of coexistence would have required one party to cease to exist, and the extinguishing party too would have been transformed in the process” (166).  Hamid’s suggestions about time implicate everyone as a victim as well as perpetrator against their own efforts to resist the change that comes naturally, because even resistance will result in a “transformation.”

            Exit West explores the universal effects of the working relationship between time and migration in this novel, but also shows how even though migration unifies in a sense, it also divides in many ways too, aside from the obvious division between migrants and nativists. Similar to the old woman’s story of standing still and watching the world around her change, thus changing her as well, Nadia too experiences the same feelings of being adrift in a timeline she isn’t sure where she fits into. Those lost, isolating feelings accompany even those migrants who travel with loved ones. One day in London, she sits in front of a building across from troops and a tank reading the news on her phone and becomes convinced that she sees an image of herself in the news sitting in front of a building reading the news on her phone across from troops and a tank, “and she had the bizarre feeling of time bending all around her, as though she was from the past reading about the future, or from the future reading about the past, and she almost felt that if she got up and walked home at this moment there would be two Nadias” (157). Time seems to bend just in reading the passage; Hamid creates this kaleidoscopic, circus-mirror effect with his words that simultaneously confuse and distort logic in Nadia’s mind as well as in the reader’s. It’s about at this moment in the novel that all of the metaphorical, hypothetical, philosophical discussions, musings, and fleeting thoughts about the impact of Time’s presence in the novel, in the discussion about the ethics of migration, and in the lives of everyone real and fictitious living on this planet, start to blur together and create a dizzying feeling for the reader and character alike. That loss of balance that Nadia notices works to illustrate the disconnect from who she once was and the person she is actively becoming, and exemplifies how lost migrating can make a person feel, adrift somewhere in time and history but unsure where yet.

The concept of Nadia splitting in two as a result of this momentary break with reality illustrates that same idea that migration inevitably changes the person as much as it changes the location. Here Hamid represents this transformation as a literal splitting up of Nadia from her old self, the one still reading on the steps of the building, and her new self, the one getting up and walking home. For a second, the novel entertains the idea that perhaps there are multiple timelines coexisting in which Nadia is still the same Nadia from her country, or from her childhood, or from a future representation of herself, or even a new one yet all happening at the same time because there is no “current” in the same sense that there is no current moment in time, since as soon as you think about the current moment, it’s gone and replaced by a new one.

Hamid’s roaming narration of the events in the novel, is another aspect that distorts time and creates a more floating timeline in which everything that has happened, is happening, and will happen occur parallel to each other, informing each other, side by side but never touching. Often when novels use this kind of structure, it’s referred to as ‘fragmented,’ but Hamid’s gentle guidance from one story to the next reads more like meandering through the timeline rather than purposefully breaking it up for a precisely desired effect. He moves with composure in and out of time periods such as Saeed’s and Nadia’s childhoods, teenage years, or other milestones, and in and out of unnamed short sub stories woven between passages about Nadia and Saeed’s journey west. Narrating the story in pieces serves one important function of taking the pressure off of Nadia and Saeed to be the official mouthpieces of the refugee experience, it diminishes their roles in the novel’s overarching narrative and gives voices to multiple different points of view. His style also mimics the same kind of wandering a migrant might take when their only destination is “elsewhere,” and the confusion that comes from not necessarily knowing anything about the countless locations he covers across the globe, or the unnamed strangers he describes reflects the same uncertainty these migrants face when stepping through dark doors sometimes knowing the destination, and sometimes only hoping that it’s better than the place they’re leaving.

            Despite the large number of characters mentioned in this novel, Hamid notably only gives names to two characters, Nadia and Saeed. Even Saeed’s parents are never given names beyond mother and father. He opts instead of names to refer to all other characters by some feature like the accountant, the young woman, the elderly man, the wrinkled man, the cook, the preacher’s daughter and so on. Referring to every character in some of the short sub stories by these monikers gives an allegorical feel to the stories, and makes them feel much more like symbolic representations than real people. For instance, the old woman who lived in the same house all her life is symbolic of nativists who must come to the same realization she does, that migration is not always something you choose, but sometimes something that happens to you whether or not you wanted it. The anonymity also functions to emphasize that people change and migrate so rapidly over time, a young woman may be a young woman in the context of the short story about her, but by the time the story finishes, she will be someone else. The story about the suicidal British accountant who leaves through a door instead of killing himself expresses this concept best. He escapes to Namibia through a door in his flat, and “with that he was gone, and his London was gone, and how long he remained in Namibia it was hard for anyone who formerly knew him to say” (131). The final sentence in his story represents a lot of what the novel as a whole continuously expresses in other characters: the dissolution of past selves as new ones are constantly forming and reforming. As soon as the accountant leaves London, the version of himself that was the suicidal British accountant was gone, and the London that existed with a suicidal British accountant in it was also gone, and he will supplant those old identities with the new ones that form in Namibia which will also be supplanted eventually themselves. His story additionally hearkens back to Nadia’s earlier thoughts about leaving behind Saeed’s father, believing that she might as well be killing him, because “when we migrate, we murder from our lives those we leave behind” (98). Nadia and Saeed’s story expresses this thought more explicitly in the sense that migrating is innately an action of leaving behind everything wherein people who are left behind might as well be dead to you then because they will die before you ever see them again. The accountant’s story takes the same idea and seems to imply that it is also the murder of past selves left behind when migrating.

            The doors Hamid created in order to express these ideas make the complex notions of time and migration more understandable under the guise of a world in which magical teleportation doors exist. This small infusion of magical realism into a story otherwise firmly rooted in present reality adds just enough detachment from veracity for his world to fit together and make sense. The mass migration of refugees across the planet, the warring, the hatred, and the eventual settling at the end becomes much more believable with the help of fantastic elements for a contemporary audience that might question how so many migrants were able to cross literal borders so easily. Hamid’s small adjustment to the typical refugee narrative largely shifts the focus off of the actual journey from one country to the other, as many immigration stories focus on, and instead places it on the characters and what happens next.

            Because of its structure and story elements Exit West is able to illustrate the complex and nuanced concepts of how time and migration affect the world in a global sense, as well as how they internally affect the person on a smaller. These unavoidable constants in life can be freeing as well as jarring, but they will come as assuredly as day will turn to night. Hamid shows that while person informs place during migration, place equally informs person. The narrator describes Saeed’s family’s flat in the opening scenes of the novel, and while doing so discusses how the impending war coming to his country will affect the prices of their real estate, “it was the sort of view that might command a slight premium during gentler, more prosperous times, but would be most undesirable in times of conflict” (11). The casual conversation about machine gun fire, and rocket fire illustrates the detachment from the gravity of the coming circumstances, and ultimate powerlessness to do anything to stop it. He could be fully aware of what will happen to his country, but knowing won’t prevent it from happening, and that paralysis adds to the experience of the migrant being adrift in time somewhere between the past, present, and future, but unable to settle into one yet. “Location, location, location, the realtors say. Geography is destiny, respond the historians” (11). Modern nations and “nativists” have a tendency to forget that everyone exists universally as a part of the same ancient tradition of human rootlessness and movement across borders, of global voyage and mass exodus. Exit West returns to those histories to depict the naturalization of modern mass migration around the world, and genuinely detail the isolating, unifying, and uncertain feelings of abandoning the past in search of a better future.

Works Cited

Hamid, Mohsin. Exit West. Riverhead Books, 2017.