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

Abstract

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.Word count: 8,534 (including title, abstract, footnotes, and references). 'Black holes in the fabric of the nation': Refugees in Mohsin Hamid's Exit WestThis article explores the representation of refugees in Mohsin Hamid's Exit West (2017), 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 beingslike capital, images, and (mis)informationhave 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.

Disorienting empathy: Reimagining the global border regime through Mohsin Hamid's Exit West

“…4 https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2018/04/angela-davis-speaks-on-immigration-at-harvard/ [accessed on 20/01/22]. 5 Hamid's conceit of the magic doors could be characterised as magical realism insofar as it introduces a fantastical element in an otherwise realistic setting (see Gheorghiu, 2018;Perfect, 2019;Sandhu, 2017). Rodriguez Fielder (2021), however, prefers to talk of "mythological realism" for the mythic tone and omniscient perspective of Hamid's dry prose provide the framework for a fable-like narrative that interweaves realistic and supernatural elements.…”

“…The exclusionary mechanisms of “white borders” (Jones, 2021) eventually prove inefficient to stop the movements of people seeking a better life, and the concluding chapters quicken and expand contemporary trends of migration, portraying “the whole planet on the move” (Hamid, 2017, p. 167). While the social situation improves, hinting at a post‐national future in which borders are vanishing and nationhood is increasingly insignificant, the changes experienced strain the relationship between Nadia and Saeed, who in a sense “migrate away from each other” (Perfect, 2019, p. 192).…”

Exit the Big Other: “Disintegration of the Big Other” Through the Unsymbolizability of Trauma in Exit West

“…However, the previous section of this research laid out some areas of research that Exit West (2017) has a tendency of inviting. One such area that scholars such as Mir (2018), Perfect (2019) and Carter (2021) have looked into is the representation of a refugee crisis in the novel and the representation of migrants who arrive foreign shores as refugees. Obviously, Sadiq, Saleem and Javaid (2020) look into the issues of power and migration.…”

Reconstruction of Cliché Image of Oriental Woman in Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West

“…The beginning of the novel is set, in the unnamed city of an eastern country where political unrest is caused partly by the refugee flows from another unnamed neighbouring country and partly by the dissension between the government forces and the militants. To Michael Perfect (2019), "the names of the protagonists' city and their country are left blank, […] to encourage readers to insert those of their own" (p. 190). Yet, to Shazia Sadaf (2020), the unnamed country is "quite identifiable as Pakistan, and the unspecified militants as the Taliban" (p. 639).…”