Essay 2 draft

I grew up forcing my brother to watch princess movie after princess movie. I was enthralled by the feeling of happiness that always seemed to gush from the characters – most importantly, their looks of euphoria as they rode off into the sunset together, engulfed in their love for one another and nothing else. From a young age, this dogma was shoved deep into my mind: a story can’t have a good ending unless the two love interests live happily ever after. I couldn’t imagine a story any different. This traditional narrative plot is a universal one that has been so deeply engrained in so many of us. Yet, when we look at Exit West, Mosin Hamid does not uphold our romantic expectations for this book. Our protagonists, Nadia and Saeed do not get married and run off into the sunset together. They break up. Hamid breaks our expectations. Hamid also challenges our other conventional narratives including our expectation that the protagonists will be the central  story, or, on a more global scale, how we expect migration to be world-ending.

But, Hamid fails to uphold this central theme to the end of the book. He presents a final scene where Nadia and Saeed meet again years later, and their interaction provokes feelings of longing and ‘what ifs’ in our mind about what their relationship might have been. Hamid is fulfilling, at the very least, our desire for closure and a final reunion. If Hamid is finally upholding our want for a romantic ending, why does it leave me so grossly unsatisfied? By satisfying our narrative expectations about the traditional romance story at the end of his novel, Hamid undermines his efforts to rewrite conventional plots and place protagonists and migration in a new light. And the crazy thing is, Hamid comes agonizingly close to avoiding this mistake.

One of the most traditional narrative patterns is a constant emphasis on the protagonist(s). After all, the author wants to make you fall in love with these characters that they have crafted and carved through their fingertips, like no other story could compare.  However, Hamid strikes his own path. When I first started reading Exit West, I was confused by the seemingly random interludes to other stories that felt like they don’t belong. Hamid gives us vivid descriptions of new locations and characters, inviting us to enter into a new storyline, and then completely drops them. We never return to one of these plots again.  I think Hamid intentionally includes these side plots to emphasize to us that, although a book might only tell one story, there are a plethora of other stories that are worth telling.

Any one of the vignettes might have been even more enthralling or compelling than our story that focused on Nadia and Saeed. My favorite vignette finds a powerfully-built main having a smoke outside a bar. Although the scene starts out calm, it begins to heighten when two teenage Filipino girls step out of what we later discover to be a magical door. Instantly, Hamid’s powerful prose makes it evident that these girls are in danger. Hamid describes the girls through the lens of this possibly dangerous man, by saying, “They seemed emotional: perhaps excited, perhaps frightened, perhaps both…He watched the girls walk. Considered. And slipped into a walk behind them, fingering the metal in his pocket as he went” (31). The powerful part of this vignette is that we never hear anything more about these characters. These girls and their fate remain a mystery, but we are left, anxious for their fate and desperately wanting to read more. However, even though Hamid resolutely chips away at our expectation throughout the book, he fails in the last chapter. By taking us back to the protagonists, he leaves us thinking about the protagonists and the protagonists alone. If he had left us with a different storyline, he would have been able to more effectively break our traditional views towards conventional plots.

Change, especially drastic change like migration, is something we have been programmed to view in a negative light. So many books, articles, and politicians screaming on tv portray migration to be a harrowing, destructive thing, with no solution in sight. Nasia Anam explains how public discourse often views migration as “apocalyptic” (653). Nonetheless, Anam goes on to describe how Hamid breaks this cycle. Exit West portrays one of our biggest fears – change – as something that is simply normal. She says, “This is perhaps the most radical aspect of Hamid’s novel: its insistence of defusing the apocalyptic by normalizing it and integrating it into the fabric of human life” (674). Hamid breaks one of our conventional narratives by portraying migration as something that can happen without being world-ending. Hamid best implements this idea in Exit West while Nadia and Saeed are in London. Tensions are rising and the refugees are scared. An attack seems inevitable while these foreigners huddle in their stolen homes. And then, the tension lifts. Electricity is turned on. The refugees breathe again. Hamid describes how this required bravery from the London locals and newcomers. After all, “courage is demanded not to attack when afraid” (166). Both groups were afraid, but that fear did not have to lead to violence. Is this situation realistic? Critics such a Goyal would scoff and robustly disagree. However, Hamid is still breaking our expectations and showing us how migration can be different than what we expect. (this whole stuff here is pretty weak go back there).

Hamid portrays this idea of migration not having to be world-ending by showing us on a more micro level how change itself doesn’t have to be world-changing. He explains this by saying, “How do we become comfortable with everything changing and the fact that we will lose everything we have by the end of our individual lives?…Optimism isn’t that I’ll live forever; optimism is that, in the face of a recognized temporary life, I can still find beauty and meaning and connection and something worthwhile”(2). We can still find beauty and meaning, even in the changing. Hamid portrays this point well in Nadia’s character arc. Throughout the book, we get glimpses into her sexuality, like her deep friendship with the girl in Mykonos(118,200). However, its not until the end of the book that Nadia explores her sexuality through her relationship with the cook. Hamid describes their relationship as slowly budding up in a natural, almost gracefully casual way (218-219). In essence, Hamid shows us that change, even something drastic like exploring one’s sexuality, doesn’t have to be life altering.

Hamid uses Exit West as a platform for our conventional narratives to be shaken. Yet, he almost destroys all of his work in under two pages. This novel ends 50 years later with Nadia and Saeed meeting again in a city that hadn’t changed much, and their meeting is one that leaves me sad and wishful of what their relationship could have been. What if their relationship had worked out? Could they have put in a little more effort? It leaves me solely focused on these characters, and, more importantly, desperately clinging onto the past, unwilling to accept the change that was desperately needed for both Nadia and Saeed. When we leave them slowly drifting apart, we’re excited about their new lives, and only slightly sad that they are leaving each other behind. We leave them excited for change, which is what Hamid is striving to plant in our minds. By having us return in the final scene to Nadia and Saeed, Hamid reverts us back to our original way of thinking, and almost solidifies our views, instead of breaking them.

However, Hamid has the perfect ending already written into his novel, just the page before. As we leave Nadia and Saeed slowly drifting their separate ways, Hamid transports us to a secluded village in Morocco where we find a maid who is mute and, most importantly, terrified of change. This maid, in many ways represents us, the reader. We are scared of change, and if you disagree with me there, you might be lying to yourself (food for thought). Hamid describes the maid as being someone who felt like her life was fragile and that she herself was fragile too. The maid felt like, “She was not wanted by the world, and here she was at least known, and she was tolerated, and that was a blessing” (224). By refusing to leave her current life, the maid strips herself of the ability of finding better. She is too scared to try. The maid’s daughter did leave and accept the change of leaving. However, she still comes back to visit. We glimpse into a meeting where they sit, drinking coffee while “Look[ing] out at the reddening dust rising in the south” (225). This imagery raises up a feeling of something ominous approaching, and the reference of it coming from the south makes us wonder if this foreboding thing is the idea of migration. The daughter asks the maid to come. The maid says no, but she gives her daughter’s hand a kiss, a kiss described almost in an intimate, if not quite erotic way. Hamid leaves us with a kiss – our fairytale ending. But, this kiss is between characters who are not our protagonists. This kiss is happening in the midst of refugee movement. This kiss is a warning to us about the dangers of avoiding change. In essence, this kiss is a perfect way to end Exit West.