No one who reads the news can fail to be aware of the many conflicts burning around the globe—conflicts that usually involve multiple countries, even if the fighting is limited to a single national territory. The unceasing flow of refugees, mainly from the Middle East and Africa, is but the most visible sign that the present geopolitical order rests on shaky foundations. Authoritarian political movements have come to power by vilifying migrants and promising to erect border walls.
“This is the permawar,” as the Pakistan writer Mohsin Hamid notes. “It is everywhere and never-ending, returning with renewed force whenever it seems to have begun to ebb, the greatest trick ever pulled by the greatest mass murderer, Death, who has convinced his victims to fear themselves.”
“It is everywhere and never-ending, returning with renewed force whenever it seems to have begun to ebb, the greatest trick ever pulled by the greatest mass murderer, Death, who has convinced his victims to fear themselves.”
Few writers are better situated than Hamid to reflect on human fears and aspirations in the time of “permawar.” Born in 1971, he grew up between Pakistan and the United States. After obtaining a law degree from Harvard University, he worked as a management consultant in New York and then as a freelance journalist in Lahore.
These experiences informed his early fiction, in particular his second novel, The Reluctant Fundamentalist (Harcourt, 2007), which brought him to international prominence. Framed as a dramatic monologue—like Albert Camus’s The Fall, a clear point of reference—it is the story of a man who leaves behind his glittering career and romantic affairs in New York to return to Pakistan.
His decision is spurred by a growing awareness of how the United States uses its allies among elites in the Global South as a pawn in its geopolitical maneuverings. The sense of betrayal leads to unsettling feelings. “Yes, despicable as it may sound, my initial reaction was to be remarkably pleased,” he [the character] says of witnessing the 9/11 terror attack.
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Hamid has always been a political novelist, though not in the narrow sense of the term. He employs inventive formal conceits—the second-person address, satire of self-help manuals, tropes of noir and fantasy—to look at the problems of globalization in a fresh light. In Exit West (2017), a fable-like story that follows Nadia and Saeeda, two working students from an unnamed city in the developing world, who are forced to flee their country when it is engulfed in a violent civil war.
Rather than escape on a boat with a human smuggler, however, they are able to find magical portals that lead them first to Greece and from there to England, where they end up in a segregated ghetto reserved for migrants named “Dark London.” An allegory for the plight of refugees from the wars in the Middle East, Exit West was praised in the New Yorker as a “novel [that] feels immediately canonical, so firm and unerring is Hamid’s understanding of our time and its most pressing question.”
A wide-ranging essayist, Hamid is as comfortable reflecting on visual art and literature as he is dissecting political issues. He brings a grounded, personal voice to complex, often violent events, making surprising connections between disparate regional histories. For instance, reflecting on the American withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, he confessed to a sense of déjà vu:
As I have seen the heart-rending images from Kabul airport—of thousands of desperate people crowded outside, of babies being handed to soldiers over barbed wire, of men clinging to the sides of aircraft and tumbling from the skies after take-off, of blood staining the ground after a bomb blast—I have asked myself how this can be happening once again. For this is not the first time a western intervention in Afghanistan has ended in horror and chaos.
(The previous intervention was that of the Soviet Union, which in the 1980s propped up a communist government in Kabul and fought a protracted battle against the Mujahadeen—Islamist guerillas who were funded and backed by the United States.)
Similarly, in a provocative essay about the worldwide rise of nationalism, Hamid draws parallels between the politics of purity that destroyed Pakistan—“In the land of the pure, no one is pure enough. No Muslim is Muslim enough. And so all are suspect.”—and the Brexit campaign.
“In some English newspapers today dissenters are called traitors,” Hamid writes. “The ruling party is paralyzed, riven by factionalism. No one is deemed pure enough, brazenly English enough, to govern. Judges, journalists, parliamentarians, citizens: everyone is suspect. How Pakistani it all strikes you.” Several of his essays are collected in Discontent and Its Civilizations: Dispatches from Lahore, New York, and Pakistan (Riverhead, 2015).
In both his fiction and nonfiction, Hamid has brought imaginative resources to bear on the connected crises we are living through: climate change, religious extremism, racism, exile. He strives to put the reader in the shoes of people living through upheaval and upheaval, so that we might empathize with their condition—and perhaps, in the process, learn something new about ourselves.
“All human beings come into existence inside another human being, a human being we call our mother, but we cannot recall that time afterwards,” he writes. “And so reading a book, entering inside another human consciousness, is both a revelation and a return to our source.”
“All human beings come into existence inside another human being, a human being we call our mother, but we cannot recall that time afterwards."
By Ratik Asokan, February 21, 2024