“when we migrate, we murder from our lives those we leave behind.”
Civilian. Air-strike. Escape. Refugee. A cycle beginning to regenerate person to percent forms instinctively. A scattered list of countries comes flooding to mind; pictures of blood and horror spill into the mental image. A list of casualties and deaths begins to surface. Stats surge our consciousness. The psychological toll of entering new countries and fleeing war-torn homes lies washed up on the shore, unattended. Mohsin Hamid sifts through the suppressed emotional damage and resurfaces it through a new approach, diverging from describing physical pain, but exploring an emotional journey taken by Saeed and Nadia in the novel Exit West.
Polluted with grief and pain, this weighted topic of the refugee crisis is humanized through an adverse pair adding an air of comic relief. Nadia’s bold, lively energy and Saeed’s timid nature flourishes into a relationship filled with whimsy and wholesome encounters. For instance, Nadia answers Saeed’s questions by unveiling why she wears a flowing black robe, “so men don’t [mess] with me,” while riding off on her jet black motorcycle (a true iconic intersectional feminist). She learns the art of “how best to deal with aggressive men and with the police, and with aggressive men who were the police.”
Breaking away from cultural practice, Nadia lives alone in a studio working for an insurance firm. Contrasting to her lack of connection to her family, Saeed resides at home, following tradition. She differs significantly from the somewhat conservative and lovestruck Saeed, who smokes shrooms for the first time alongside her and wears the same long gown and headscarf to meet her secretly. The playful images shared by the two contrasting personalities add an attachment to their condition; the normal lives they upheld before the occupation of their country and peace of mind becomes highlighted, a concept fogged over and forgotten by the stark representation of refugees.
The story is set in “a city swollen by refugees, but still mostly at peace, or at least not yet openly at war.” By leaving their country nameless, Hamid removes the readers’ personal bias and previous knowledge, instead forcing the overseer to examine the psychological journey of two separate individuals facing identity conflict in a new environment.
Sensing a shift in the atmosphere, Saeed startlingly proclaims, “The end of the world can be cozy at times,” while curled up under a blanket in a lightless room with Nadia. As their country spits under civil war, they too become torn under the pressure of leaving everything they know and blindly entering unfamiliar terrain.
Quickly, bright images of helicopters and drones replace stars. Saeed looks up disappointedly, “The sky has become too polluted for much in the way of stargazing.” Cell phone signals, the only median of connecting the two disconnect, are abruptly intercepted, and the internet is shut off. Public services close. Electrical and water supplies are cut off. Identities target people. One after another, the world seems to close in rapidly on the two, and a finding a way out is no longer an uncertain thought in the back of their mind but one echoing with urgency.
Rumors of secret doors begin to incite curiosity among the pair, and the physically debilitating transmigration vanishes through entering a door. Even with passageways that are distinguishable from one another, “the doors to richer destinations, were heavily guarded, but the doors in, the doors from poorer places, were mostly left unsecured.” While a reader would believe the problem of migration is solved by the simple act of fleeing, or in this case passing through a doorway, Hamid challenges this misconception by glazing over the traumatic process of travel. Instead, he focuses on the sequence of hardships that unfold post-immigration.
Saeed’s father confronts his slim chances of survival in a country engulfed in anarchy. Ultimately, he fears he will weigh his son down.
“He knew above all else his son must go, and what he did not say was that he had come to that point in a parent’s life when, if a flood arrives, one knows one must let go of one’s child, contrary to all the instincts one had when he was younger, because holding on can no longer offer the child protection, it can only pull the child down, and threaten them with drowning, for the child is now stronger than the parent, and the circumstances are such that the utmost of strength is required, and the arc of a parent’s, in reality one sits atop the other, a hill atop a hill, a curve atop a curve, and Saeed’s father’s arc now needed to curve lower, while his son’s still curved higher, for with an old man hampering them these two young people were simply less likely to survive.”
This tale circles tenacious survival and the anchoring weight of choices made along the journey towards maintaining persistence, even when challenged with a society nearing dystopia. Saeed’s father chooses to stay behind in the land his wife is buried in, while Saeed and Nadia fight to escape being buried alive. Despite Saeed and Nadia continuing to navigate through the doors in search of escape and arrival we, too, “are all migrants traveling through time.”