"Exit West By Mohsin Hamid: Refugee Crisis Through Magical Realism"

Find my extended review of Mohsin Hamid's Exit West for The Incisive Journal here. Disclaimer:  This article contains spoilers.  Skip paragraphs 6 and 7 to avoid them.

I am a bibliophile. But what I also am is broke through most of the month. A very normal condition for someone who recently changed jobs, have to pay rent and put food in their tummy while  living a couple of states away from the parents who once did all this for me only to be taken for granted until a brief time away. So, when I came across Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West impacting readers across the world in my Social Cataloging Site and driving Bookstagrammers crazy in my Instagram, I am not proud of it but I sent puppy eyed messages to my loving father asking him to order it for me. And he did. I got back home after a few long months and my father presented me with this perfect welcome back “gift.” Exit West is my first Mohsin Hamid book but certainly not the last.

Let’s forget for a minute, the beauty of the writing, the literary treat the book offers. Relevance is one of the biggest achievements of this book.

According to the UN High Commissioner for refugees, more than 65 million people have been displaced from their country of residence and/or origin, due to social and political conflicts, violence or human rights violations. This is the highest ever since World War II, constituted mainly by 5 nations – Syria, Afghanistan, The Lake Chad Basin, South Sudan and Somalia. The book stands wildly significant for me being from a country where the idea of burning Rohingya Muslims alive is applauded by privileged apathetic trolls bend over their computers and iPhones hurling abuses and threats, wherein we could’ve ended up on the wrong side of the border just as easily, by mere accident of birth. The same accident that lets me complain about being broke while I can very well feed, shelter, clothe myself well in a world where that remains a luxury to many.

In this beautiful book, Mohsin Hamid talks about the fate of millions of Nadia’s and Saeed’s, our protagonists, pot smoking youngsters from “a city swollen by refugees, but still mostly at peace, or at least not yet openly at war” in an unspecified country. Nadia is the independent working woman who chose being abandoned by her family over being a slave to nonsensical societal norms and propriety, daring to earn and live alone while Saeed is homelier and more conservative but when they meet and discover their budding love in a world that was just beginning to fall apart around them, they decided to hold onto each other a little tighter. Their seemingly normal lives are soon shaken by civil war from where magical doors take them to refugee camps across the globe here they need to build their lives from the handful of belongings they could fit into a backpack. These magical doors, guarded by the militants or the military, hard to find and expensive to get through, are a convenient metaphor to un-complicate a complicated, twisted reality, the migratory journey itself.  The story focuses on how the world and the people in it matures around these god forsaken times rather than the journey itself. But beyond the label of refugees, migrants and religion, Saeed and Nadia are human beings, youngsters, just like you and me, excited by that song, a magic mushroom, a tight rolled joint. Like it could’ve been you or me.

And while you relax thanking god for having been spared of these casually yet powerfully conveyed perils of 65 million fellow humans, he tells you, “…. everyone migrates, even if we stay in the same houses our whole lives, because we can’t help it. We are all migrants through time….and when we migrate, we murder from our lives the ones we leave behind.”

It also gets to me how subtly he takes us through the life of the once passionate couple as they grow apart unable to preserve what they had once, to remain unscathed after the tiresome journey that almost consumed them. “In the late afternoon, Saeed went to the top of the hill, and Nadia went to the top of the hill, and there they grazed out over the island, and out to the sea, and he stood beside where she stood and she stood beside where he stood and the wind tugged and pulled at their hair, and they looked around at each other, but they did not see each other, for she went up before him and he went up after her, and they were each at the crest of the hill only briefly, and at different times.”

No, it is not a happy ending for Nadia and Saeed’s romance. But it is a happy ending for the individuality and friendship they share. Of course I did feel uncomfortable reading the ending where the protagonists does not rekindle their relationship and walk holding hands towards the sunset. But that’s just the years of conditioning our movies and literature inflicted on us, reiterating the notion that the boyalways gets the girl. But maybe, it’s not about the boy and the girl and if they end up in each other’s arms at the end of the day. May be it is about how the boy and the girl blossomed into who they are today. Survivors with a journey they could be proud of. Chillingly casual and hauntingly mundane in the midst of the end of worlds, this book is definitely a good read.

Ardhra Prakash(14th Novemeber 2017)