Exit West
is one of the few books within the magical realism genre that I not only
managed to warily accept, but also actually liked. Even though that particular
genre has always evoked in me a sense of what-the-hell and an urgent desire to
fling the object of my disgust out of a window, with Exit West I not only kept
reading, but I also thoroughly enjoyed the experience.
A large
part of this enjoyment was based on the fact that our main characters are
rooted in a Muslim setting or exhibit Islamic tendencies. Even though that
might not hold true for every character and in every situation (spoiler: our
main heroine is a bi-sexual, both protagonists indulge in drugs taking, there’s
quite a bit of groping around pre-marriage), just the familiar background and a
context that I can relate to helped me enjoy it a bit more. All other magic
realism I had read so far (Hundred Years of Solitude by Marquez, American Gods
by Gaiman, Beloved by Morrison) had so thoroughly disillusioned me (except
maybe Midnight Children by Salman Rushdie, which in retrospect I might have loved
because my subconscious cultural preference came into play), that I was
hesitant going into this story, but Hamid didn’t let me down. In Exit West, in
a city embroiled in civil war, normal doors leading to kitchens, bathrooms,
bedrooms suddenly change into vortexes which can carry humans from one country
to another. Sort of like Narnia’s wardrobe, except instead of appearing in a
magical land you appear in another country.
Rumors had begun to circulate of doors that
could take you elsewhere, often to places far away, well removed from this
death trap of a country.
The appeal
of this story isn’t just in the subtle allegory of these doors and what they
mean, or the various countries that our characters end up in, but also in our
characters themselves, who weren’t just two dimensional portraits of what
Muslims are expected-to-be-like/are-stereotyped-into-being but rather complex,
multidimensional personalities. Our two protagonists, Saeed and Nadia, live in
an unnamed country caught in the throes of a violent war. It’s a slow beginning,
with Saeed living with his parents and Nadia content to live on her own. Having
fought off the demands of her family, Nadia exhibits all the traits of a self-established
woman who also chooses to willing adorn an abaya - a black cloth that covers
her whole body and is most often seen as being representative of Muslim women
and their ‘oppression’.
She learned how to dress for self-protection,
how best to deal with aggressive men and with the police, and with aggressive
men who were the police, and always to trust her instincts about situations to
avoid or to exit immediately.
Even though
the story is largely about the chemistry between our protagonists, the setting
is what lends this book its strength. With the background of the bloody
fighting and the escalating tension in the city, both characters are forced to
take more and more desperate measures to stay in touch and to keep their
relationship alive.
Without work there was
no impediment to Saeed and Nadia meeting during the day except for the fighting,
but that impediment was a serious one.
Eventually,
after a couple of horrific scenes which are both chilling as well as numbing –
the crowd playing football with a severed head, the mother shot through the
window of a car, the sexual assault at a crowded bank – both of them decide to
move on. The doors they use take them from a campsite in Greece to a squat in
London and then a shanty outside San Francisco, through multiple doors and also
multiple changes in their personalities as well as their relationship.
Saeed for his part wished he could do something
for Nadia, could protect her from what would come, even if he understood, at
some level, that to love is to enter into the inevitability of one day not
being able to protect what is most valuable to you.
The story
focuses mostly on these characters, but
the narrative is also interspersed with short moments where other characters –
the mother in Tijuana, the maid in Marrakesh, the Tamil-speaking family in
Dubai – all travel between doors, providing us with brief interactions between
migrants and natives, old and young, the lost and those wanting to find. These
stories are a formal device which might have been awkward had it been less
deftly handled; in Hamid’s hands they provide a side story which seeks to cast
a focus on the humanity we all share, and work very well.
People vanished in those days, and for the most
part one never knew, at least not for a while, if they were alive or dead.
Probably
what gives this novel its most compelling quality are the real-life
ramifications of what Hamid has taken on as his subject matter. The mass movement of people from conflict-ridden areas, the civil wars in the Middle East, and the shutting down of borders between countries to keep refugees out are all realities we are living through right
now. And books like Hamid’s, which choose to weave through their narrative all
the complexities of such a reality, help
us understand the situation better while at the same time reminding us that for
people like us, who are watching these events unfold from such a distance, this
is something we need to pay attention to.
Recommendation
This book
was both easy to read – nice flow in the writing style, an author’s command
over the language – as well as important, because it tackled something very few
authors are daring to do. Definitely recommended.