Mohsin Hamid, Exit West: A Novel
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In the last month or so, I finally read Percival Everett’s James (just as great as everyone says—couldn’t stop reading it, wept over the ending, etc.), Miranda July’s All Fours (deliberately unnerving and squirmy, defiant, earnest, and very intriguing in its take on what it means to make a home, emotionally and physically), and Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These (devastating, in that Claire Keegan way). But Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West turned out to be what I wanted to write to you about. A lot of people are writing brilliantly about these brand-new books, so it feels like they’re covered. And although Exit West is the oldest of these books, it felt like the one most immediately in conversation with the news I also can’t stop reading. Also, Ron’s teaching it. So I also reread it, and we’re talking a lot about this novel that feels honest about the daily costs of war, the fear and boredom and dislocation of life as a refugee, but that’s essentially hopeful and a pleasure to read. The worst can sometimes happen. But there are other fates besides the very worst, for many people, and there’s something to be learned from inhabiting an experience that’s full of loss but not only loss.
Hamid has a high concept approach: what if doors/portals opened up all over the world so that people could escape war zones by stepping through the doors into other countries? Apart from this one fantastical element of the premise, the book is all realism. If such doors existed, some people would guard them, some people would profit by promising to show others doors and taking their money and disappearing, and some people would use the doors to help others. Hamid conveys how it feels to never know what’s coming next. Every move into the darkness is a risk, a hope that the disasters of somewhere else could be less intense than the disasters in your home country.
Saeed and Nadia begin their relationship in an unnamed Middle Eastern country (there are likely speculations, but I’m going to respect Hamid’s decision not to give it a specific name and history, with all of the apparatus of cause and effect). Here’s the book’s opening paragraph:
In a city swollen by refugees but still mostly at peace, or at least not yet openly at war, a young man met a young woman in a classroom and did not speak to her. For many days. His name was Saeed and her name was Nadia and he had a beard, not a full beard, more a studiously maintained stubble, and she was always clad from the tips of her toes to the bottom of her jugular notch in a flowing black robe. Back then people continued to enjoy the luxury of wearing more or less what they wanted to wear, clothing and hair wise, within certain bounds of course, and so these choices meant something.
This distant, knowing narrator genially introduces us to a world where war is coming, but that war gets no more than an offhand clause so far. The tone is that of a tour guide at a lesser-known historical site: the narrator describes Saeed and Nadia according to their public presentations (his beard, her covering, and how the two fit into expectations that are not yet requirements). This sense of distance and observation persists, even when the narrative is most intimate, and yet as a reader, I feel fully immersed in their journey, their relationships with each other and with families, and what happens over the course of the novel.
The passage that I’m thinking about today covers a moment in the story when they have moved from extreme conditions to the relative comfort of a squat in London, where the “nativist extremists” have begun to react to the presence of sizable number of refugees:
In London, Saeed and Nadia heard that military and paramilitary formations had fully mobilized and deployed in the city from all over the country. They imagined British regiments with ancient names and modern kit standing ready to cut through any resistance that might be encountered. A great massacre, it seemed, was in the offing. Both of them knew that the battle of London would be hopelessly one-sided, and like many others they no longer ventured far from their home.
The operation to clear the migrant ghetto in which Saeed and Nadia found themselves began badly, with a police officer shot in the leg within seconds as his unit moved into an occupied cinema near Marble Arch, and then the flat sounds of a firefight commenced, coming from there but also from elsewhere, growing and growing, all around, and Saeed, who was caught in the open, ran back to the house, and found the heavy front door locked shut, and he banged on it until it opened, Nadia yanking him in and slamming it behind him.
They went to their room in the back and pushed their mattress up against the window and sat together in one corner and waited. They heard helicopters and more shooting and announcements to peacefully vacate the area made over speakers so powerful that they shook the floor, and they saw through the gap between mattress and window thousands of leaflets dropping from the sky, and after a while they saw smoke and smelled burning, and then it was quiet, but the smoke and the smell lasted a long time, particularly the smell, lingering even when the wind direction changed.
That night a rumor spread that over two hundred migrants had been incinerated when the cinema burned down, children and women and men, but especially children, so many children, and whether or not this was true, or any of the other rumors, of a bloodbath in Hyde Park, or in Earl’s Court, or near the Shepherd’s Bush roundabout, migrants dying in their scores, whatever it was that had happened, something seemed to have happened, for there was a pause, and the soldiers and police officers and volunteers who had advanced into the outer edges of the ghetto pulled back, and there was no more shooting that night.
The next day was quiet, and the day after that, and on the second day of quiet Saeed and Nadia removed the mattress from their window and dared to venture outside and forage for food but there was none to be found. The depots and soup kitchens were shut. Some supplies were coming through the doors, but not nearly enough. The council met and requisitioned all provisions in the three houses, and these were rationed, with most going to the children, and Saeed and Nadia getting a handful of almonds each one day, and a tin of herring to share the next.
The compression and restraint of this passage echo the eventual pulling back of the Nativist forces, so that the tragedy stops short of the slaughter of thousands of people. But it’s already tragic, and Hamid doesn’t raise the narrative tone to try to emphasize the horrors. The voice of the narrator remains informative, apparently calm, nearly casual: “A great massacre, it seemed, was in the offing.”
We don’t need a heightened tone to feel the danger our characters are in as Saeed nearly gets locked out and Nadia yanks him inside. As they hide and wait, we don’t hear how they feel, don’t track their bodily sensations. It’s just a recitation of the facts, with the loudspeaker announcements shaking the floor, the rain of leaflets, the smells of catastrophe and violence and smoke.
The burning might be, as they hear later, something truly terrible, but there’s no official news, no way to be sure: “a rumor spread that over two hundred migrants had been incinerated when the cinema burned down, children and women and men, but especially children, so many children, and whether or not this was true, or any of the other rumors, of a bloodbath in Hyde Park, or in Earl’s Court, or near the Shepherd’s Bush roundabout, migrants dying in their scores, whatever it was that had happened, something seemed to have happened…”
This event could have sparked a desperate counterattack or a shame-and-rage-driven further onslaught, but instead there’s a pause, and the soldiers, police, and volunteers pull back. After, there’s the quiet, the waiting for days before removing the mattress from the window. The household deals with practicalities, protecting the children, trying to manage everyone’s hunger. This doesn’t need more description than the specifics about the tiny amount Nadia and Saeed have to eat. The whole passage about the quiet, the slowly ebbing dread, takes only a paragraph. It is almost, but not quite, fable time. No matter what’s happening, the novel doesn’t follow every flicker of emotion or try to immerse the reader pornographically in the experience to work on our feelings.
The discussion of practicalities ends that passage, but the very beginning of the next section is an equally spare conversation during the aftermath:
They sat on their bed and watched the rain and talked as they often did about the end of the world, and Saeed wondered aloud once again if the natives would really kill them, and Nadia said once again that the natives were so frightened that they could do anything.
“I can understand it,” she said. “Imagine if you lived here. And millions of people from all over the world suddenly arrived.”
“Millions arrived in our country,” Saeed replied. “When there were wars nearby.”
“That was different. Our country was poor. We didn’t feel we had as much to lose.”
They are so philosophical, so reflective. Nadia’s last, telling remark here, however sharp in itself, in context feels almost soft. It’s striking to read this in a time of so much justifiable outrage. Like so many people, I have mostly been in a state of justifiable outrage, if not surprise—my first political march, at the age of seven or eight, was against the war in Vietnam, and then I was astonished to find that my government was napalming civilians, including children. When we’re older, there’s a constant fight to stay open to information, feeling, action, without going under. Sometimes people feel they can’t take in more than they already have.
Hamid’s restraint, though, the sense that this particular story might not end in total disaster, makes Exit West a novel that all kinds of people were able and willing to read. Rereading it, I felt again that Hamid had used compression, restraint, and a sense of how hope keeps persisting as a way of both reminding us not to look away and also telling a particular human story: how world events shape a couple of individuals and their relationship, who they turn into, what becomes of them. The news, mostly, has to present particular people as exemplars of disaster. Someone to feel for, to open our hard, exhausted hearts. Fiction can get more nuanced, more surprising, in its tones, its stories, the possibilities it presents.
• • •
Writing, Publishing, and Teaching
When a new work is forming down in the marshes, writers can fall into a state of an almost physical aversion to writing. We go to the desk or sit in the chair and are propelled away again before we can even open a document or notebook. Since for decades I’ve been writing, giving up writing, going back to writing, and giving up the thought that I ever can or will give up writing, I always hope that the voices that say I am no longer a fiction writer are lying or mistaken (they also don’t think I have any business teaching or writing about writing—they’re Dickensian, or perhaps these are Charlie Baxter’s famous “Fraud Police”). Fortunately, this time, this bout seems to have been, once again, the start of something new. Now the material for the new book is accumulating as if by itself, with constant new ideas, including a ridiculously ambitious additional level that appears to solve all kinds of structural problems. I’m researching and taking notes, happier than I have been in a while. (As long as I’m not looking at the news. Though mostly I am looking at the news.)
Also, I have a very gorgeous cover for Marriage to the Sea. Not allowed to show it to anyone yet. But I’m smitten with it and look forward to sharing it with you.
MPP Contributor News
David Haynes’s complicated, entrancing novella and stories, Martha’s Daughter, publishing this fall, is a book I’d love to see everyone read: full of deep, funny, often challenging character portraits. I was delighted to see his “exclusive” cover reveal in People. One for the “things to look forward to despite everything” list.
In thinking about this new book, I’m remembering something David said in a conversation with Piper Fitzgerald for The Kiln Project a couple of years ago:
PF: We pick a theme every year for The Kiln Project, and this year the theme is "Liminal Space." So, we are asking our undergrads to submit pieces that relate to the theme in some way. I was curious about how you interpret the theme.
DH: I think what's interesting about the idea of liminal space is that in those spaces that are between, there are always interesting things going on. Just as an example, people often ask when writing about identity, how I think about identity. My answer is often about liminal space. And I say, I'm less interested in the conflict of the harsh borders. There are interesting things going on in the liminal space between any kind of marker of identity. There's interesting work there, there's interesting ideas, and interesting energy there. The books that I read that explore identity-I'm much more interested in those that are inhabiting that space between rather than those that are sort of looking from one side or another.
Stuff that’s been inspiring me lately
Wound up watching hours of Cory Booker, which felt like a moral blood transfusion, and have been protesting in crowds of sometimes thousands, which feels great, and then doing necessary writing or calling, which feels less great but has to be done. Meanwhile, in the escaping-to-another-reality hours, I finally watched Mare of Easttown, which was entirely too addictive and also had such beautiful writing and character portraits. I appreciate how the character of Mare doesn’t try to justify herself when people are blaming her for the disasters all around them, mostly caused by someone they love or even their own dear selves. A learning experience, seeing how Kate Winslet pulls off those moments. Not in an apparently noble way. Not at all. It’s more as if Mare can’t be bothered or has no hope of being listened to. But her tired forbearance adds up, along with her other actions (including relentlessly risking her own life), to a deep generosity and a sense that what looks like a wall of complete, hopeless chaos might after all have a door that could well lead to somewhere better than the current reality.