You sit at home, or school, or in a coffee shop—wherever you may be—reading this on your laptop, tablet, or cellphone. At the same time, someone is risking their life as they are crossing a wall, desert, or ocean, simply seeking a place to call home. This is the life of a refugee. Mohsin Hamid, author of Exit West, wrote a story following the journey of a young couple, Saeed and Nadia, as they seek to escape their unnamed home country after it was engulfed by civil war. The couple plans to make their escape by passing through mysterious portals that began popping up around the globe, possessing the ability to transport people across the world. This is precisely the novum that Eva Menger talks about in her essay, “‘What it feels like to be an other’: imaginations of displacement in contemporary speculative fiction,” where she “demonstrate[s] how the genre of speculative fiction can help us imagine a the world for refugees.” Although Menger’s assertion that speculative fiction helps us imagine the world for a refugee is true, the use of speculative fiction in Hamid’s Exit West overshadows one major component of the refugees’ endeavor: the journeys they must take to reach their new homes. By using this novum, Hamid prevents us from viewing a large part of the scope of the refugees’ lives.
As mentioned before, Exit West is a novel that follows a couple that decides to emigrate from their unnamed, war-torn country. However, they do so with the use of magical portals. This example of speculative fiction, along with others, “increase the depth of a readers empathy for characters who can be, or should be, just like the reader,” as Nguyen puts it in his “NYT Book Review of ‘Exit West.’” This genre seems to enable the readers to empathize with the characters and story: a refugee story, which is an alien position to most. But how does speculative fiction enable this us to empathize? According to Menger, “Exit West… [is] not just far away from us in a geographic sense, but… equally far removed from our psychological reality,” explaining that under no circumstances should readers be able to understand, relate, or empathize with the context of this story. However, Menger then considers the genre of speculative fiction, concluding that it “can bridge this gap by literally bringing the refugee narrative closer to the readers reality. By placing… experiences at the readers doorstep, [Hamid] makes them part of their imagination.” This “brings the world of the refugee closer, suggesting that there is no real difference between the reader and the refugee.” An example of this could be seen in the novels use of the novum that are portals.
But what is a novum? As Menger describes it, a novum
“must imitate the sorts of things that stimulate science in the real world; establishing distance from reality… The magic doors through which Saeed and Nadia travel are by no means scientifically plausible; yet the way in which they distance the reader from his or her own word is what allows them to question reality.”
But what about reality is it that we are questioning? For starters, what could these portals be replacing? They replace the perilous journeys that refugees must make. Hamid does not discuss transitions from one country to another at length—he substitutes them with portals. Although he does, however, associate the pain and discomfort with migration when characters pass through the portals, Hamid chooses to abbreviate the perilous journey into a few lines.
Migration can be hard for anyone. It’s especially hard for someone stuck between homes during the transition period, which is often the case for refugees. Some refugees could be stuck waiting for months to years—as was the case for Taimaa, a Syrian refugee. For Taimaa, it took over nine months for her and her family to discover true refuge in Berlin, Germany. In the meantime, her family was stuck, hiding in Syria, or a refugee camp, or Estonia, where their living conditions were not suitable. This nearly year-long ordeal held much significance for the family, and surely would not be something that could be swept under the carpet; however, that’s just what Hamid is doing in his novel—brushing over the transitions, replacing them with a portal.
How then, if these moving periods are so pivotal to the refugees’ life, can critics agree that the genre of speculative fiction, as used in Exit West, can provide insight on the lives of refugees, while still leaving a portal in the place where their journeys should be?
