Exit West: A Novel by Mohsin Hamid 'We are all migrants through time.'

By JESSE KORNBLUTH

I was planning to link to Break of Day, Colette’s charming memoir about her mother. It hits all the nostalgic notes: France, mother-love, and it ends in 1928. Then I saw a link about immigrants taking jobs from Americans in 2023, and now we get a story like this: Three McDonald’s Franchisees In Kentucky Pay $212k In Fines After Federal Investigations Find 305 Minors — Including 10-Year-Olds — Working Illegally. And why are underage American kids working? Because illegal immigrants aren’t showing up for work, fearing they’ll be arrested and deported. And Lord knows no one needs another bummer. But…

I was reminded of “Exit West,” the best serious fiction I’d read in 2017. I wasn’t the only one to think this. It made many 10 Best lists. It was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize. When Mohsin Hamid won the inaugural Aspen Words Literary Prize — one of the largest literary prizes in the United States — for “Exit West,” he gave dignity and perspective to immigrants. Like this:

“I wanted to portray migrants as heroes, not criminals. But more than that, I wanted to show that everyone is a migrant, even those who never move geographically, because moving through time, aging, is itself a form of migration… Instead of inevitable conflict, I wanted to find a space of recognition, of mutual and shared sorrow, between the person who has moved to a foreign country and the person who has begun to feel foreign in the country of their own birth. And I wanted to suggest a future of radical migration that expressed elements of optimism, because if we can’t look to the future with optimism we are prone to exploitation by political nostalgia, leaders who promise to make the future like the past.”

“Exit West” is short: 230 pages. Just two main characters. A love story, of sorts. Which is to say: original in every sentence. [To read an excerpt, click here. To buy the paperback from Amazon, click here. For the Kindle edition, click here.]

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Nadia and Saeed live in a country that’s “swollen by refugees but still mostly at peace, or at least not yet openly at war.” They’re young professionals, blessedly unaffected by the chaos soon to overtake their lives — their first date is at a Chinese restaurant. Hamid’s gaze is objective to the max:

It might seem odd that in cities teetering at the edge of the abyss young people still go to class — in this case an evening class on corporate identity and product branding — but that is the way of things, with cities as with life, 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.

There are 65 million stateless people in the world today. Why shouldn’t Nadia and Saeed be among them? [Implied question: Why shouldn’t I? Why shouldn’t you?] Quite soon, it becomes time to leave. When they go, it’s not like those terrifying boat trips across the Mediterranean, with overloaded vessels and incompetent crews and small children washed up, dead, on resort beaches. In a dazzling bit of writing that’s like science fiction, they simply go through doors —“doors that could take you elsewhere, often to places far away, well removed from this deathtrap of a country.”

That’s all the plot you need to know. More to the point, perhaps, is my experience of reading this book: it changed the way I think. I often quote my Buddhist reading: “The ground is not solid.” I mean that in the sense that I no longer trust the economy or government or any infrastructure, that I feel we’re on our own now, that our only useful resource is the support we get and give to friends and lovers and family. Hamid goes further. For him the ground is really not solid — the entire planet is restless, searching, literally on the move.

“We are all migrants through time,” Hamid writes.

Exactly.

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This post was previously published on headbutler.com.

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