‘Black holes in the fabric of the nation’: refugees in Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West

ABSTRACT

This article explores the representation of refugees in Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West, a novel which has been widely celebrated for its response to the refugee crisis of its contemporary moment. In a distinct echo of Salman Rushdie’s claim, thirty-five years earlier, that it ‘may be argued that the past is a country from which we have all emigrated’, Hamid’s novel similarly claims that ‘we are all migrants through time.’ Moreover, like Rushdie’s fiction, Hamid’s novel incorporates elements of magical realism: its protagonists escape their unnamed war-torn city through a ‘door’ that instantaneously transports them to Mykonos, and they subsequently travel through other such ‘doors’ to London and California. Their story is interspersed with a series of vignettes in which other migrants also find themselves magically transported across national borders. As well as considering the ways in which Hamid’s novel seeks to humanise refugees, this article considers the novel’s evocation of a world in which human beings – like capital, images, and (mis)information – have gained access to largely ungovernable networks of instantaneous travel across vast distances. It argues that Hamid’s novel is not just ‘about’ refugees but also constitutes a reflection on how they and their journeys are represented and mediated by actually-existing technologies.

KEYWORDS:

• Exit West
• Hamid
• Mohsin
• refugees
• refugee crisis
• migration

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. It also makes reference to ‘flying robots high above in the darkening sky, unseen but never far from people’s minds’ (Hamid, 2017, p. 83).

2. This kind of synecdoche is, again, characteristic of Hamid’s work. For instance, in The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Changez’s American love interest and his American employer – Erica and Underwood Samson respectively – seem to stand for two different manifestations of the nation (while the former sounds similar to ‘America’, the latter can be abbreviated to ‘U.S.’). See Hartnell, 2010; Ilott, 2014; Morey, 2011; Perfect, 2016.

3. It is significant that, unlike their home city and country, all of the places to which Saeed and Nadia travel are explicitly named. Chambers argues, convincingly, that this is because Hamid ‘wants to call out Western nations by name for their inhospitable treatment of refugees, while lending all migrants a common humanity and a sympathetic ear’ (Chambers, 2019, p. 244).

4. Exit West was published eight months after the U.K. European Union membership referendum of 2016, and readers in Britain are likely to find Hamid’s portrayal of alarmist anti-immigration rhetoric redolent of the political and media discourse surrounding that referendum. In addition, it was published three months after Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, and just five weeks after he took office. The novel’s portrayal of reactionist nativism is clearly evocative of the rhetoric employed by Trump and his team during his campaign and presidency. Indeed, while the novel obviously constitutes a response to the ‘European migrant crisis’, it may also be considered a comment on the Trump administration’s infamous determination to ‘secure’ the Mexico–United States border (two of its vignettes (pp. 45–48; pp. 157–159) make reference to people crossing this very border).

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Michael Perfect

Michael Perfect is a Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Liverpool John Moores University. His main research and teaching interests are in twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature and culture. His first book, Contemporary Fictions of Multiculturalism, was published in 2014, and his work has also appeared in a number of journals and edited collections. He has written for The Guardian’s Higher Education Network and been interviewed on both local and national radio. He is currently writing a book on Andrea Levy for Manchester University Press, and is also working on a project that relates to screen adaptations of contemporary transnational fiction.