Mohsin Hamid: Opening West's door wider for Pakistani literature

In January 2017, American President Donald Trump signed an executive order halting all refugee admissions into the United States and temporarily barring visas for people from seven Muslim-majority countries. The move sparked an outcry across the globe — including within Pakistan. Anyone with a heart would be rightly grieved by the nonchalant cruelty of Trump’s ‘Muslim ban’ because of its negative impact on the people who have experienced the most horrific miseries and sufferings recently — such as East Africans and Syrians running from civil wars and violence in their countries. Yet, the outrage in Pakistan did not translate into acts of solidarity with the vulnerable. Our resistance to tyranny and injustice has not been universal – as it should be – but selective and opportunistic. In fact, what we support beyond our borders, we often brutally suppress at home.

Early in 2017, for instance, Pakistan decided to deport Afghan refugee children who had spent their entire lives here, depriving them of a home and using them as pawns in a power play with Afghanistan. In November, we witnessed the state surrender to demands by a group of protesters in Islamabad who openly incited violence against a particular minority community. Non-Muslim Pakistanis continue to face discrimination even when we are agitated at the treatment of Muslim communities in the United States.

Mohsin Hamid’s fifth book, Exit West, is a meditation on all these issues. Published in 2017, it talks about “the temporary nature of our being-ness, and our shared sorrow, the heartache we each carry”. The novel is set in a nameless city and follows the story of two lovers who meet at the threshold of a catastrophe that soon turns them into refugees. It is a reflection on the concept of home and identity and speaks to the plight of 65 million unwanted, stateless migrants who continue to face suspicion, prejudice and hatred in their quest for a better life. Exit West, in Hamid’s own words, “suggests that everyone is a migrant”. It is a quest for a world where being a migrant “is acceptable.”

Hamid knows from personal experience how it feels to be a migrant. Having resided in London and New York for many years, he now lives with his family in Lahore but continues to feel like a stranger in his own country. After experiencing what he calls a “geographic dilemma” and wrestling with a feeling of perpetual displacement for most of his life, he says he has finally come to terms with his inherent strangeness, his international identity. “It is human nature to want to migrate — to feel restless,” he says. “Every person, every family [has] a history of migration.”

This may not be as odd as it sounds. After all, we are a nation founded upon the mass movement of millions of people. “Perhaps, our generation thinks of migration as a resettlement in the West but our previous generations thought of it as moving from what was then India to present-day Pakistan or from one part of Pakistan to another — from rural to urban areas,” he says. Migration, for him, is not just some possibility to prepare for — it is an inevitability we all must learn to accept. “Even if you plan to spend your entire life in the same place, that place will one day become unrecognisable to you.”

Literature has long served as an alternative home for people who feel estranged by their physical, social and political surroundings. Hamid says he writes his books in the spirit of finding compassion and refuge in an imaginary world. His novels, to him, are an effort to confront the persistently tense world of reality. This effort is quite obvious in Exit West that moves between experiment and convention, restlessly pushing against the established categories of narrative form. It has been praised in both national and international arenas for its distinct narrative style and experimental voice and earned a spot on the 2017 Man Booker Prize shortlist — one of the rare accolades in international literature for a Pakistani book.

While Exit West is widely celebrated for making its mark among western audiences, it has garnered quite a bit of backlash as well, especially at home. Like with his previous novels, such as Moth Smoke and The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Hamid has been criticised for pandering to western narratives and writing about the lives of a small and rather privileged group of people — the cosmopolitan urban elite to which he himself belongs. The main protagonists in Exit West brandish a certain urban flair, their romantic inclinations are of a liberal bent and their aspirations those of an upwardly mobile middle class. These are relatively palatable depictions of migrant realities — at least, for a western readership.

Hamid dismisses the allegation of gratifying the West. “I don’t pander to any western fantasy or desire, I challenge them. My novels contain politics that is deeply critical of Pakistan as well as the West.” He is fine with being criticised for his privileged background though. “I am relatively privileged and I should be read, held to account and criticised on that basis,” he says.

He bristles at the mention of his national identity. Such questions are raised to disqualify dissent and exclude people from participating in debates of national importance, he argues and says he has actively tried to evade any restrictive labels. “I don’t write for any particular country. I write for myself and for everyone.” In Exit West, he says, he deliberately set the story in a nameless city and country — partly to resist a censoring impulse in Pakistan that often asks writers if they are Muslim enough or Pakistani enough. “Enough for what? Enough to have a voice in Pakistan?”

Hamid also does not consider himself a representative of Pakistan. “I am not interested in propagandising Pakistan” as a palatable place for the West. Nor does he believe any writer can ever fully represent a society as diverse as Pakistan.

That, however, does not stop him from trying to smash the western perception of Pakistan and its people. “I want to reveal the composite diversity of Pakistan because I believe this diversity causes the Pakistani stereotype to collapse … there are millions of people in Pakistan who are as unPakistani and diverse as I am. There are mullahs and there are prostitutes — they are all here in Pakistan and neither is more Pakistani than the other,” he says, advocating a passionate engagement with the “un-representable” nature of Pakistani society.

Farhad Mirza is a journalist and researcher in migration studies and the philosophy of law at Humboldt University, Berlin. Kanza Javed is the author of 'Ashes, Wine and Dust'.

This article was published in the Herald's January 2018 issue. To read more subscribe to the Herald in print.