Exit West by Mohsin Hamid

Source of book: Borrowed from the library

 

I can’t believe it has really been ten years since I read The Reluctant Fundamentalist. It stuck with me, in no small part because of the combination of a discomfiting premise, and the excellent writing chops to pull it off. 

 

Exit West is a very different sort of book, but it also explores the question of migration from the point of view of migrants. 

 

How to explain it? Well, the first half of the book seems like a rather conventional, realistic love story. Saeed and Nadia meet cute, and tentatively start a relationship. Alas, they are living in an unnamed city somewhere in the Middle East, perhaps the author’s native Lahore, Pakistan, and the country is descending into an increasingly bloody civil war. 

 

They are kind of the cute opposites: he is conservative by temperament, devout in an introspective but not judgmental way, and rooted to his parents. (They are retired educators, and genuinely decent everyday people.) She, on the other hand, is a rebel: she left her family, burning her bridges behind her, to live alone. In order to keep the gross men away from her, she wears a full black dress - appearing to be a fundie Muslim. But she loves sex, and freedom, and being on her own. She is not really rooted to any one place, let alone a person. 

 

Perhaps in a conventional novel, they would be happy together, but from the start, I think there are hints that they will eventually grow apart. 

 

After Saeed’s mother is killed by a stray bullet, and the city’s infrastructure fails, Saeed and Nadia start looking for a way out. 

 

And this is where the book becomes akin to Magical Realism, or Science Fiction. 

 

Normal ways out of the country are closed, but there are rumors of “doors” - a way of simply walking out where you are to somewhere else, far away. One might call them wormholes, or perhaps view them as a metaphor for the usual ways that migrants travel - at great risk to their lives. 

 

The two of them take the plunge and depart through a door - his father refuses to join them - and find themselves on a journey across the globe, seeking refuge, and a place in the world. 

 

First, there is a refugee camp in Mykonos, then a community of migrants that has taken over vacant mansions in an alternative-world London. Finally, they end up in a shantytown near San Francisco. 

 

Along the way, they find that their visions for the future are different, and by the end, they part - but amiably if sadly. 

 

The book may not have the traditional happy romantic ending, but it is a rather hopeful book. The appearance and proliferation of the doors mean a fairly mass migration around the globe, challenging the very concept of borders (which Hamid opposes - as do many ethical thinkers), and disrupting everyone’s sense of belonging and place. 

 

This last one is fascinating to me, because Hamid points out near the end that ALL of us are migrants. We never end our lives in the same “place” that we started, because things change. As he puts it:

 

[E]veryone migrates, even if we stay in the same houses our whole lives, because we can’t help it. We are all migrants through time.

 

I should also mention that throughout the book, there are little vignettes about people around the globe, connected only to the main story by being migrants of one sort or another - including the old lady referenced in the above quote, who lives her life in the same house, but finds the neighborhood change as time passes. 

 

Hamid’s writing is simple, but beautiful. Part of the hopefulness of the book, as well as the bittersweet ending, is the love with which he writes. Here is the opening, which grabs your attention right at the outset. 

 

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 is an example of the way that a good writer can bring characters to life immediately with a simple, yet effective description. You do not need a lot of detail, necessarily - just enough to create the impression. (Of course, this is filled out as the book goes on.)

 

About midway through the book, when the pair decide to leave, another bit of crucial information is filled in regarding Saeed’s personality. 

 

Saeed desperately wanted to leave his city, in a sense he always had, but in his imagination he had thought he would leave it only temporarily, intermittently, never once and for all, and this looming potential departure was altogether different, for he doubted he would come back, and the scattering of his extended family and his circle of friends and acquaintances, forever, struck him as deeply sad, as amounting to the loss of a home, no less, of his home.

 

Nadia’s concerns are different - she doesn’t have the connection, but worries about being at the mercy of others, between safety and hostility toward refugees. I’m definitely more like Saeed. 

 

Once they find themselves in a refugee camp on Mykonos, they find that it is a lot like where they came from, before the war. 

 

The island was pretty safe, they were told, except when it was not, which made it like most places. Decent people vastly outnumbered dangerous ones, but it was probably best to be in the camp, near other people, after nightfall.

 

I grew up in neighborhoods a lot like that. Generally safe. Except when it wasn’t (and you learned to know), and probably not good to wander around too much late at night. But the vast majority of people were decent. Like most places. 

 

Throughout the book, there are interesting observations on a geopolitical reality: money is everything. Using a door to get to a poor country? No problem. But the ones to rich countries were well guarded. And guess which countries bear most of the burden to take in refugees? And which freak out. 

 

“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.”

 

It really is all about the money. We have it. We don’t want to share it. And so you have cops working for Texas pushing children back into the Rio Grande rather than…I don’t know, act like decent human beings? 

 

I won’t get into all the details, but during their stay in London, the refugees from around the world end up squatting in abandoned mansions and penthouses, but are eventually targeted for removal. But this leaves the question: what if people just refuse to leave? What do you do? That is the precipice of genocide. Hamid is optimistic enough (and probably right more than not) that when faced with actually doing it, most people will back away. That is essentially what has happened here in California - despite some horrible anti-immigrant sentiment 30 years ago. I’ll quote the book at length, because the passage is really good. 

 

But a week passed. And then another. And then the natives and their forces stepped back from the brink. 

Perhaps they had decided they did not have it in them to do what would have been needed to be done, to corral and bloody and where necessary slaughter the migrants, and had determined that some other way would have to be found. 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, and too many native parents would not after been able to look their children in the eye, to speak with head held high of what their generation had done. Or perhaps the sheer number of places where there were now doors made it useless to fight in any one. 

And so, irrespective of the reason, decency on this occasion won out, and bravery, for courage is demanded not to attack when afraid, and the electricity and water came on again, and negotiations ensued, and word spread, and among the cherry trees on Palace Gardens Saeed and Nadia and their neighbors celebrated, they celebrated long into the night. 

 

So many things to unpack there. First, the sooner that the American Right realizes that you cannot close all the holes, that the “Big Fucking Wall” is an illusion and a joke, and that migrants are here, and will continue to come, the sooner we can actually work toward a constructive solution. (That’s beyond the scope of this post.) The “doors” will continue to be there and will increase - that’s literally how it works. 

 

Second, one of my guiding moral principles of the last 20 years has been that I want to be able to look my kids in the eye with my head held high over what I have chosen to do. Sure, I make mistakes, as we all do, but I try to make them just mistakes, not grave errors of moral judgment. I would rather be a bit too accepting of other than exclusionary. I would rather err on the side of kindness rather than “law and order.” Particularly where the vulnerable are involved. And I certainly do not want a genocide on my conscience. 

 

This is where Hamid’s vision for the future becomes interesting. In a moral sense, there is no justification for denying people opportunity based on the accident of where they were born. None. Thus, migration is a human right.  

 

So, ultimately, some form of “open” borders becomes a moral imperative. And also a simple acknowledgement of the reality that people move. They seek better lives. For themselves and their families. Trying to stop that flow is like trying to stop the tides. 

 

Just like we cannot stop the change of time, we cannot stop the change of place. And, for people like me, this is also an opportunity. My own life had been greatly enriched by living in a multicultural, dynamic state. (I just ate lunch from a Muslim-owned food truck - delicious!) For any of us with open minds and hearts, we too can experience the richness of diversity. It is either that, or we can become bitter xenophobes, constantly lamenting that things have changed. 

 

For the British in this alternate history, they decide on a variation on the Homestead Act, or “40 Acres and a Mule”: the “40 square meters and a pipe” – the chance to build a house on that land, and connection to utilities. Plus the ability to work off the cost and make a living. Nothing huge to provide, but everything to a migrant.

 

I want to end with a final thought on Saeed and Nadia. I was really affected by their story, because it is true to life. We don’t like to admit it, but all marriages, all relationships are temporary. I have a lot of elderly clients, and for many of them, the reason they see me is the death of a spouse. A marriage may last 60 years…but it will end someday. Everything ends. 

 

For Saeed and Nadia, their relationship ends after a few years, and it ends by agreement, not by death - which would have easily happened in their home city. 

 

But no matter how it ended, the ending did not negate the beginning or the middle. What they had for a time was beautiful and loving and precious. 

 

I have been feeling this way about some things in my own life. Things that ended badly still had good, and it is okay to cherish the good things despite the bad. My happy childhood wasn’t negated by the way my parents changed for the worse. The good times I had when I was part of organized religion wasn’t negated because everything went to Trump later. I need not feel guilt for that part of my past, just because things went sour. 

 

We are all migrants through time and change. 

 

And that is what I take from this book more than anything.