An Interesting Read for Our Times:  

Exit West by Mohsin Hamid

After finishing my latest book club title, immediate comparisons between Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West and Colson Whitehead’s Underground Railroad  came to mind. Whitehead reimagines the system for moving slaves to freedom as a real train moving through underground tunnels. Entrances to the “stations” are well hidden and those who board the trains don’t know exactly where they will end up but are willing to risk the ride to attain freedom.  Hamid uses a similar device in that doors to rooms turn into portals that transport refugees from their homelands to somewhere in the West. Characters don’t know where the doorways will lead, but they are desperate enough to walk into the darkness. 

Early on, the narrator comments, “Location, location, location, the realtors say.  Geography is destiny, respond the historians” (11).  And, geography, both real and virtual, is not only what in part defines the lives of the characters but also provides or denies access to knowledge, relationships and the larger world. Saeed and Nadia, the main characters, live in some unnamed Middle Eastern country where, because of war, it becomes increasingly an untenable place to be.  As gunmen encroach further and further into the city, they become physically cut off from each other and must rely on texting and calling.  The writer addresses the power of the technology saying, “In their phones were antennas and these antennas sniffed out an invisible world, as if by magic, a world that was all around them, and also nowhere, transporting them to places distant and near, and to places that had never been and never would be” (39). By communicating through the phone, Saeed “became present without presence, and she did much the same to him” (40).  Yet, the virtual world can only go so far.  “The city’s freewheeling virtual world stood in stark contrast to the day-to-day lives of most people. . .who went to sleep unfed but could see on some small screen people in foreign lands preparing and consuming and even conducting food fights with feasts of such opulence that the very fact of their existence boggled the mind” (42).  Hamid slowly builds both a feeling of desperation in Saeed and Nadia as well as a sense that no one is coming to their rescue.  

Eventually, the two contract with an agent to help them gain passage out of the country, a short but unsettling trip through a doorway in an abandoned dentist’s office.  “It was said in those days that the passage was both like dying and like being born, and indeed Nadia experienced a kind of extinguishing as she entered the blackness and a gasping struggle as she fought to exit it, and she felt cold and bruised and damp”  (104).  They emerge in Mykonos and live for awhile in a large refugee camp, but while life there is safer, its quality leaves a lot to be desired.  After Saeed and Nadia go through another door and end up in London, they squat in an elegant, unoccupied (by the owners) home and are soon joined by other refugees.  After weeks of living in dirty conditions, Nadia luxuriates in a hot shower.  When Saeed tells her, “It’s been forever. This isn’t our house” (125), she insists that she needs a few more minutes to wash her clothes.  “What she was doing, what she had just done, was for her not about frivolity, it was about the essential, about being human, living as a human being, reminding oneself of what one was” (126). This scene suggests to the reader that something we take for granted – being able to be clean, to wear clean clothes – is not a given for Nadia or tens of thousands of others who flee horrible living situations.  

After they have been in the London house for awhile, Saeed discovers another house filled with refugees from his country and he tries to get Nadia to agree to move into that house. Nadia, meanwhile, has bonded with the inhabitants of her house and attends their council meetings where she is welcomed and accepted.  Here, Hamid begins to pose several of his central questions:  What is the source of belonging?  Where is one’s allegiance?  Do humans always eventually sink into tribalism when they feel threatened? Nadia asks Saeed why they would want to move.  “’To be among our own kind,’” he replies.  She questions what makes them “our kind,” and he tells her that they are from their country. “’From the country we used to be from,’” she counters. She argues that they have left that place and implies that in doing so they have also left behind that identity. London gradually becomes more like the country they left, with fighter aircraft streaking through the sky and tanks and armored vehicles on the streets.  It’s not clear if this is the British gov’t. dealing with the refugees squatters or a response to the militants who have apparently been using the doors to spread their violence to other parts of the world. This idea reflects the likes of Al Qaeda and the Taliban who both occupy physical geography but also export their terrorism around the world.  

Nadia and Saeed move a third time to San Francisco where they encounter an entire hillside of refugees. Saeed is “drawn to people from their country, both in the labor camp and online.  It seemed to Nadia that the farther they moved from the city of their birth, through space and time, the more he sought to strengthen his connection to it, tying ropes to the air of an era that for her was unambiguously gone” (187). This difference in their responses is part of their increasing separation from each other.  They must ultimately decide to assimilate or remain a separate group – a situation that faces all immigrants.

Initially, the author comments that “In Marin there were almost no natives” (197) referring to the Native Americans who first populated North America.  However, he goes on to say, “And yet it was not quite true to say there were almost no natives, nativeness being a relative matter, and many others considered themselves native to this country, by which they meant that they or their grandparents or the grandparents of their grandparents had been born on the strip of land that stretched from the mid-northern-Pacific to the mid-northern-Atlantic, that their existence did not owe anything to a physical migration that had occurred in their lifetimes” (197-198).  Saeed wryly observes that the people who have this attitude tend to be light-skinned “and stunned by what was happening to their homeland, what had already happened in so brief a period, and some seemed angry as well” (198).  A jab at Trump’s nationalism and the racism of his followers?  This brings to mind the fact that Nadia wears a full body, traditional Muslim robe.  Saeed assumes she is devout but quickly learns that she does so only as a means of protection, that men are more likely to leave her alone.  She smokes pot and takes hallucinogenic mushrooms, has pre-marital sex and is fairly secular in her outlook.  “Nadia frequently explored the terrain of social media, though she left little trace of her passing, not posting much herself, and employing opaque usernames and avatars, the online equivalent of her black robes” (41). Thus, this sense of anonymity, both physical and virtual, is also juxtaposed with the ideas of belonging and connection.  

Towards the end of the book, there is a brief anecdote about a wealthy, old woman in Palo Alto who has lived all her life there and had, at one time, “known the names of almost everyone on her street, and most had been there a long time. . .Now she knew none of them, and saw no reason to make the effort. . .every year someone was moving out and someone was moving in. . .and all sorts of strange people were around, people who looked more at home than she was. . .and when she went out it seemed to her that she too had migrated, that 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” (209).  Thus, Hamid seems to be, by juxtaposing “nativeness” and “migration” making the case that where we are nowand how we currently see ourselves defines who we are, and that the separation created by geopolitical lines, skin color and cultural identity is a tenuous one at best.  Like Whitehead, Hamid offers us a different lens through which to view our world.

Scottish Author Ian Rankin 

comes to Washington DC

Local writer Neely Tucker interviews Ian Rankin at Politics and Prose at the Wharf.

Before my husband joined me in retirement, I would look wistfully at the Post literary calendar for the week, noting author readings and talks that we might like to attend but would not due to their time (weeknight around rush hour) and location (often downtown).  Now, however we are freer to indulge!  Recently, we ventured down to the newly developed Wharf waterfront area in southeast Washington where a branch of the independent book store, Politics and Prose, hosted Scottish detective novelist Ian Rankin.  It was a terrific way to spend the evening (dinner first at Hank’s Oyster Bar) as Rankin is an interesting and convivial author.  He was interviewed for about 45 minutes by Post contributor and novelist Neely Tucker and then he took questions from the audience of about 50 for another 15 before signing copies of his newest work, In a House of Lies.  

First, a word about Rankin’s work.  He has penned numerous novels in his detective series as well as several plays and a graphic novel.  Several of his books were made (unsuccessfully, he says) into television, but he thinks a new series may be out next year that gives the stories the time they need to develop.  Rankin’s first John Rebus novel was not intended as the start of a series but because Knots and Crossesdid so well, his publisher urged more and soon readers were treated to more novels with the crusty Edinburgh detective.  As the series developed, Rankin brought in several other recurring characters: detectives, Siobhan Clarke, Rebus’s younger partner, and Malcolm Fox, an internal affairs cop initially out to get Rebus.  The crime bus in Edinburgh, “Big Ger” Rafferty is frequently Rebus’s nemesis. Rankin says he painted himself into a box with Rebus, who is 58 when the series starts.  A friend wrote to him and reminded him that the compulsory retirement age is 60.  After a few books, Rebus is forced into retirement but later comes back to work cold cases.  Inevitably, they connect with current cases and Rebus again joins his old colleagues. 

Rankin admits that he has no idea what the ending will be when he starts writing and claims that this is true with many writers that he knows.  He completes a first draft (which he lets no one else read) in which he works out the plot, usually deciding on a plausible ending about 2/3 of the way through, and then goes back and does several more drafts, fine-tuning the language and fixing things that don’t makes sense – like the dog.  A couple of books ago, Rebus ends up adopting a dog that he names Brillo.  Rankin says he was through his second draft of the next book before his wife asked what he’d done with Brillo; he’d forgotten about him.  In the most recent book, she pointed out that Rebus is gone from home too long to leave Brillo and that Rankin needed to work dog feeding, walking and care into the story.  The Brillo stories brought a laugh from the crowd as did Rankin’s example of a translation problem.  When his books are translated into French, they include footnotes to clarify Anglo clichés and cultural references.  In one book, he makes an analogy to Kansas and Toto, referring to what he assumed is a well known book and film.  The footnote indicates that he is referring to two 1980’s American bands.

Mysteries are often dismissed as lighter weight, a genre that is enjoyable but which does not have the gravitas of better literature. Rankin suggests that mysteries are a way to explore why people do things, specifically commit evil acts.  A detective as the protagonist has the ability to move through all of the rungs of society, from street criminals and homeless people to the wealthy who live privileged lives in gated communities.  Rankin’s novels, like most detective stories, feature murders, although unlike American mysteries in which people are likely to be victims of gunshot, his victims die in many other ways.  He points out that few people in Scotland have guns, aside from hunting rifles.  Even the police don’t carry guns.  Scotland is also a small country, about 5 million, with an annual murder rate of about 60.  Rankin mentions a fellow Scots mystery writer, Ann Cleeves, who has a series set on the Shetland Islands.  She’s going to have to set her stories somewhere else, he says, as there is actually no crime there and, he asks, where’s the criminal going to go?  With this, he mimes swimming.  

We stood in line to get our books signed which gave me the opportunity to tell him we are contemplating a trip to Scotland and ask him where he thinks we should visit besides Edinburgh.  He seems puzzled that anyone would make his homeland their vacation destination – “It’s not very big, you know” – but mentions that this is a 500 miles drive up through the northern part of the country. “Beautiful, but not much up there.” But, he adds, that if we come to Edinburgh, we should let him know (ha!) and definitely hit his and Rebus’s favorite drinking establishment, The Oxford Bar.