{"id":3124,"date":"2017-05-01T16:45:20","date_gmt":"2017-05-01T11:45:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/desiwriterslounge.net\/blog\/?p=3124"},"modified":"2017-05-01T16:46:40","modified_gmt":"2017-05-01T11:46:40","slug":"book-review-mohsin-hamid-exit-west","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/desiwriterslounge.net\/blog\/2017\/05\/book-review-mohsin-hamid-exit-west\/","title":{"rendered":"Book Review: On the Porosity of Mohsin Hamid\u2019s Prose and Exit West\u00a0"},"content":{"rendered":"

When I opened a copy of Mohsin Hamid\u2019s The Reluctant Fundamentalist<\/em> (2007) I received as a gift a few years ago, the white spaces between lines of prose printed in large fonts first drew my attention\u2014at the time I thought, I must be reading too many Norton anthologies, where the real estate of the page is at such a premium that the condensed fonts and spaces most closely resemble crawling ants\u2014but even as I began reading Hamid\u2019s novel, the spaces between the lines did not recede from the horizon of my consciousness, physically lingering in my peripheral vision and bleeding into my experience of the language, which was not particularly dense, and I remember wondering why and how are these physical gaps on the page assuming significance and contributing to my sensual saturation. Then I read Moth Smoke<\/em> (2000), How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia<\/em> (2013), and now that I\u2019ve read Exit West<\/em> (2017), I know that in Hamid\u2019s novels physical and figurative gaps always replenish the spare prose.<\/p>\n

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The question underlying Exit West<\/em> seems to be how do we form<\/em> connections across spaces?<\/strong><\/h5>\n<\/blockquote>\n
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Hamid\u2019s novels are poets\u2019 novels\u2014that is, they are narrative poetry in prose. Poet Rachel DuPlessis says that poetry \u201cis the kind of writing that is articulated in sequenced, gapped lines and whose meanings are created by occurring in bounded units . . . operating in relation to . . . pause or silence.\u201d As such, one of the hallmarks of narrative poetry in print (think of Vikram Seth\u2019s The Golden Gate <\/em>(1986)) is the material gaps on the page (spaces between lines or stanzas) that momentarily thwart the story\u2019s progress. The eyes of the reader come to tarry at the end of a line of verse, often enjambed, or the end of a stanza, before moving onward in search of the answer to what-happened-next. Hamid\u2019s paragraphs frequently operate as stanzas do in narrative poetry and toward the end of How to Get Filthy Rich<\/em> and in Exit West<\/em>\u2014especially, the latter half of this recent novel\u2014a paragraph\/stanza is composed of one sentence that, to use DuPlessis\u2019s phrase again, is \u201cdraped\u2026across several lines.\u201d<\/p>\n

It is worth noting that gaps, silences, pauses, and paragraphs do not function as bounded units in narrative poetry alone\u2014they work in the same way in all kinds of writings to some degree\u2014but in narrative poetry these units hold our attention, prompting us to recognize the formal artifice and the fact that the language has been molded to serve an aesthetic end, the syntax has been stylized, and what we have before us is not an imitation of everyday speech or a reflection of life as it occurs every day. Nonetheless the formal artifice at its best also manages to affect and seduce us in ways only aesthetic objects can. Hamid\u2019s novels with their multiple (somewhat fantastic) frames and lingering gaps are unabashed in their celebration of artifice\u2014their own literariness\u2014as they explore political possibilities of form.<\/p>\n

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The question underlying Exit West<\/em> seems to be how do we form<\/em> connections across spaces? The novel traces the entwined journeys of Saeed and Nadia, lovers from an unnamed city in the East that is on the brink of destruction, where young men play soccer with severed heads of corpses. They escape the city where war has warped daily life through magical doors that take them to Greece, England, the US, and so on. Of course, this makes the novel timely\u2014especially for a Western audience (who are arguably still the ones sitting across the table from Hamid\u2019s narrators), who in the aftermath of Brexit and the US Presidential election seem to have discovered anew the treachery of borders, the meaning of closing doors; scenarios with which audiences in the East (or to use another transnational term, those in the Global South) have been more intimately acquainted for a longer span of time.<\/p>\n

As in his previous novels, Hamid uses strategies to specifically locate the identities and experiences of some characters and places while several other elements and entities in the novel remain indeterminate and fuzzy. Most characters in Exit West<\/em> are anonymous, and apart from the protagonists Saeed, Nadia, and Saeed\u2019s parents, the characters are etched with minimal details such that the reader must fill the contours with their own knowledge, which also tests the readers\u2019 ability to resist stereotyping when extrapolating from sparse details about ethnicities and backgrounds. So, we are told that Saeed works at an advertising agency at the outset and that Nadia, for their date in the city under siege, happens to choose a Chinese restaurant, which used to be run by a family that had settled there after the Second World War but has recently emigrated to Canada. Such details while rounding off Saeed\u2019s and Nadia\u2019s characters also gesture toward lives that ultimately lie outside the scope of the novel.<\/p>\n

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…Even though Hamid writes, \u201cwhen we migrate, we murder from our lives those we leave behind,\u201d his overall attitude to migration is optimistic and this optimism is a double-edged sword.<\/strong><\/h5>\n<\/blockquote>\n
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Saeed and Nadia\u2019s journey through the doors is not free of hardship and pain. They struggle to make both ends meet in Mykonos, London, and later in the Bay area. They are also swindled by agents from their own country on the way. Even when they have a roof over their head they live with the constant fear of eviction given that militants are always inching closer, using the same doors that the refugees are taking, and the law enforcement forces in the West, which generally support the nativists, are coming to clear migrant ghettos. Migrants with more money and resources live close to the center of the cities whereas the ones with depleted resources are desperate enough to take chances that lead them to their doom. In addition, Saeed never completely comes to terms with their leaving of the city and his father.<\/p>\n

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