In 2018, “six people died each day attempting to cross the Mediterranean” (United). These were no ordinary people; they were refugees seeking asylum in a new country to call home. Most of us don’t know what exile is like—fleeing from home, hoping to find another in some faraway land—but this is the life of a refugee. Mohsin Hamid comes close to helping us understand—or does he? His fictional tale, Exit West, follows the journey of a young couple, Saeed and Nadia, as they seek to escape their unnamed home country after being engulfed by civil war. The couple planned to make their escape by passing through mysterious portals that began popping up around the world, possessing the ability to transport people across the globe. The portals are what Eva Menger talks about in her essay, “What it feels like to be an other,” where she “demonstrate[s] how the genre of speculative fiction can help us imagine the world of refugees” (Menger 92). Although Menger’s claim that portals help us understand refugees, the use of them in Hamid’s Exit West overshadows one major component of refugee endeavors: the six lives lost each day. Hamid uses portals to sugarcoat the refugee experience, and in removing such a pivotal aspect of their experiences from Exit West, he fails to foster understanding of the lives of refugees.
Eva Menger, as mentioned before, claims that “speculative fiction… can offer readers a new way of understanding,” being able to “bring the world of the refugee closer to that of the reader,” which “encourages readers to visualize the alien position of the refugee” (Menger 88- 92). Viet Thanh Nguyen agrees with Menger in his “NYT Book Review of ‘Exit West’” that “Hamid aims to increase the depth of a reader’s empathy for characters who can be, or should be, just like the reader” (Nguyen). Both scholars agree that the portals enable understanding of refugees, but how can readers understand if they are missing an entire chapter of the refugee story: the turbulent transitions from one country to another? Menger goes on to divide the refugee experience “into a before and after” (Menger 92). But what about the period in between that everyone seems to be neglecting?
For many refugees, finding asylum can take months or years—as was the case for Taimaa, a Syrian refugee. Though it took Taimaa and her family over nine months to discover refuge in Berlin (Baker), Hamid condenses transcontinental travel into a split-second jump through a portal. He unrealistically sugarcoats this experience by depicting migration as an instantaneous jump. However, that’s not to say that he sugarcoats the entire refugee experience.
Hamid acknowledges the pain and difficulty associated with leaving home, as he describes one man’s experience passing through a portal:
“He wriggled with great effort, his hands gripping either side of the doorway as though pulling himself up against gravity, or against the rush of a monstrous tide. His neck followed his head, tendons straining, and then his chest… With a final push he was through, trembling and sliding to the floor like a newborn foal.” (Hamid 8)
Though passing through portals is depicted as being difficult and strenuous, Hamid still compares passage to being reborn. Additionally, throughout all 231 pages in Exit West, nothing terrible ever happens to the characters passing through portals. However, if portals still represent refugees migrating from one country to another, we know the consequence-free resolutions in Exit West shouldn’t be true.
On October 26, 2019, the Washington Post published an article regarding the discovery of “39 bodies in the back of a sealed truck,” they suffocated (Hau Dinh). One victim had “hopes of pursuing a career as a nail technician in Britain,” and another, sent this final text to her family: “I’m so sorry mom and dad… My journey abroad doesn’t succeed. Mom, I love you and dad very much. I’m dying because I can’t breathe” (Hau Dinh). These victims, like many others, were seeking refuge; however, their journeys were not as easy as a jump through one of Hamid’s portals, yet he still portrays them so.
Another story comes from Doaa, a 19-year-old Syrian refugee. She, and her lover, Bassem, fled from Egypt to Europe on an old fishing boat and “on day four… the boat capsized” (Ghosh). Doaa recalls “watch[ing] the propeller cut a child to pieces,” and that “there were corpses everywhere” (Ghosh). After days adrift, “Bassem had… reached his limit. His last words were, ‘I am sorry my love. Please forgive me.’ He drowned before her eyes” (Ghosh). These stories are undeniably part of the refugee experience but remain untold in Hamid’s Exit West. Because Hamid sugarcoats refugee migration, replacing these realities with portals, he withholds the truth from the readers and fails to foster the understanding of refugee lives that Menger and Nguyen so strongly believe he has accomplished.
Menger and Nguyen both commend Hamid for his use of portals as speculative fiction to bridge the gap between refugees and readers. Menger claims that with the use of portals, Hamid offers “ample possibilities to create a fuller understanding of the unknown” (Menger 92). However, portals are the very devices used to undermine the actual refugee experiences as he stamps down a portal in place of the real-life, traumatic experiences that refugees must endure. By sugarcoating refugee migration, portraying it to be as easy as an instantaneous jump through a portal with zero consequence, Hamid fails to foster understanding of refugees by excluding a pivotal component of the refugee experience in his novel: the six lives lost each day crossing the Mediterranean.
Work Cited:
Baker, Aryn, et al. “Finding Home: A Year in the Life of Syrian Refugees.” Time, Time, https://time.com/finding-home/.
Ghosh, Iman, et al. “3 Real Stories from Refugees.” World Economic Forum, https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2015/12/3-real-stories-from-refugees/.
Hamid, Mohsin. Exit West. Penguin Random House, 2017.
Hau Dinh, Giap Nguyen and Danica Kirka | AP. “’I’m Dying’: Relatives Await Answers in Smuggling Case.” The Washington Post, WP Company, 26 Oct. 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/more-vietnamese-fear-relatives-are-among-39-dead-in-truck/2019/10/26/3e22c1fe-f7b5-11e9-b2d2-1f37c9d82dbb_story.html.
Menger, Eva. “‘What it feels like to be an other’: imaginations of displacement in contemporary speculative fiction.” Studies in Arts and Humanities [Online], 4.2 (2018): 79-95. Web. 29 Oct. 2019
Nguyen, Viet Thanh. “NYT Book Review of ‘Exit West’: A Refugee Crisis in a World of Open Doors.” PBS, Public Broadcasting Service, 15 Mar. 2018, https://www.pbs.org/newshour/arts/nyt-book-review-of-exit-west-a-refugee-crisis-in-a-world-of-open-doors.
United Nations. “Six People Died Each Day Attempting to Cross Mediterranean in 2018 – UNHCR Report.” UNHCR, https://www.unhcr.org/en-us/news/press/2019/1/5c500c504/six-people-died-day-attempting-cross-mediterranean-2018-unhcr-report.html.
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