Exit West: Hidden Realism and Dystopian Technologies

“The ‘black mirror’ […] is the one you’ll find on every wall, on every desk, in the palm of every hand: the cold, shiny screen of a TV, a monitor, a smartphone.”

Charlie Booker, The Dark Side of our Gadget Addiction

What is 70.8 million? Is it 686.76 pounds of sand? Is it two times the population of Tokyo, the largest city in the world? Is it three times the distance, in light years, from the Earth to the center of the Milky Way?

No.

70.8 Million is the number of refugees currently displaced in the world (UNHCR). All of these people, each with their own joys and worries and ups and downs; each a human being, and Hamid creates a story to encompass all of them. Of all the various techniques Hamid used to create this masterpiece, the teleporting black doors are most centrally displayed. They provide the means for Saeed and Nadia, as well as all other refugees, to escape from country to country instantly, instilling a unique tone in the novel. Despite the seemingly fantastical nature of the doors, Exit West is quite firmly set in realism. The teleporting doors are in fact essential to creating the realism in Exit West by portraying the realism of emotion in the protagonists, Saeed and Nadia. The microscopic closeness Hamid portrays Saeed and Nadia with allows him to create such an all-encompassing work of literature.

The Missing Link: An Absence of Speculative Fiction

Eva Menger claims in her essay What it feels like to be an other: Imaginations of displacement in contemporary speculative fiction that Hamid portrays the refugee experience so effectively through the use of Speculative Fiction. The ‘novum’, which Menger describes as “the necessary concept introduced in SF texts to make proposed worlds possible,” is the main supporting evidence she uses to support her claim that SF is what allows Exit West to so accurately portray the refugee experience (Menger 81). This seems like a sound theory, except for the notable lack of novums in the novel. The ‘magic’ black doors are nothing more than a creative metaphorical object used to create ‘emotional realism,’ the term used to describe the concept that realistically capturing ones emotions is the clearest way to paint an accurate picture of the individuals experience[1]. The doors are not used to create a fantasy experience and “establish a distance from reality” as Menger claims, but to create empathy with the novel’s protagonists by establishing a closeness to reality (81). The emotional accuracy Hamid portrays Saeed and Nadia’s refugee experience cannot do anything but draw the readers closer to themselves, and thus reality.

The Distortion of Time

Since the black doors cannot be the novum, that puts into question what they actually are. The black doors are nothing more than an explanation for Hamid’s distortion of time. The distortion of time is what makes this novel so emotionally accurate. The philosophical concept of ‘Solipsism’ essentially  states that nothing can be proven to exist outside of the mind, which is most discernable when our minds are proven to be inaccurate (Thornton, Solipsism). A very relatable example of this is how an hour of a boring class seems to take much longer than an hour of relaxing with friends or doing fun activities. A more academically rigorous example is presented in a study on the cognition of schizophrenic subjects. A certain patient in this case study “reported that he had, in brief moments, a feeling that only the objects in his current field of vision were real, as if the rest of the world, including most familiar places and persons, did not really exist,” a phenomenon experienced by everyone as an infant, called ‘object impermanence’ (Parnas, Self). On this train of thought, it is believable that many refugees block the traumatic events, like the actual migration from place to place, completely out of their minds. If this retrograde amnesia occurred, the refugee would be left with an abrupt chasm between past experiences and future expediencies, with no form of transition between them. Menger acknowledges this possibility, albeit in the context of novums, through exploring the concept of the habitus in the novel. She describes the habitus as the relationship between past experiences and the consequent ability to anticipate future events (Menger 85). Because a refugee’s past experiences are isolated from their future expectations, based on the concept of the habitus, a refugee has no way to anticipate what the future holds in store for them. This feeling is mirrored in the novel by the reader. Every time Saeed and Nadia teleport through a black door, the audience is only left to wonder where the novel while turn next, giving each location its own distinct feeling. This feeling is aided through refreshing the supporting characters in each new location, since, according to Hamid, “when we migrate, we murder those from our lives that we leave behind” (Hamid 98). The most notable difference between each location to the readers is the difference in the people surrounding Saeed and Nadia. The beginning of the novel is marked by the presence of family –

“Saeed’s Father then summoned Nadia into his room and spoke to her without Saeed and said that he was entrusting her with his son’s life, and she, whom she called daughter, must, like a daughter, not fail him, whom she called father, and she must see Saeed through to safety and he hoped that she would one day marry his son and be called by mother his grandchildren.” (Hamid 97)

– but shifts to the presence of strangers as they migrate.

“People began to emerge from the upstairs room where Nadia and Saeed had themselves first arrived: a dozen Nigerians, later a few Somalis, after them a family from the borderlands between Myanmar and Thailand. More and more and more.” (Hamid 123)

The differences between before and after migration is what puts the distortion of time into context. Since what is ‘real’ depends so much on the subjective mind, depicting time as distorted is more accurate to the human experience.

Technology: Black Mirror in Exit West

The popular television show Black Mirror, by Charlie Booker, is a collection of short stories all depicting the dystopian effects of technology. Technology plays an essential role in Exit West. At the beginning of the novel, technology is portrayed as a positive enhancement to Saeed and Nadia’s lives, “allow[ing] Saeed to access Nadia’s separate existence” during a time of strife in their city (Hamid 40). Technology’s ability to have a positive impact is what ultimately reveals technology to be a dystopic element. At the end of the novel, “[Nadia] and Saeed did not communicate” despite that “wireless data signals [were] strong”(221). Phones are, at a basic level, how first-world countries view the refugee crisis. And as Exit West is most likely intended for a first-world audience, phones are how the first-world relates to the refugees. Phones are the audience’s portal to the refugees, the fact that the technology is ultimately displayed in a negative manner reveals some of Hamid’s underlying commentary on technology. Technology has so much ability to help the refugee’s, but we, as people living in first world countries, just as easily ignore the refugee’s presence online. Hamid displays the trend of ignorance in the novel through the nativists’ reaction to the portals. At first they try to ignore the doors, then they attempt to block the doors, mirroring how hostile many countries are, both virtually and physically, to refugees (Hamid 127).

Hamid creates a powerful social commentary on the refugee crisis through cleverly displayed realist literature. His use of emotional realism allows him criticize people who choose ignorance over empathy. The empathy instilled into the audience by Exit West is very deep, and likely to inspire awareness, if not change, to a large population of first-world citizens.

Honor Code: DD

Works Cited

Brooker, Charlie. “Charlie Brooker: The Dark Side of Our Gadget Addiction.” The Guardian, The Guardian, 23 Jan. 2018, www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/dec/01/charlie-brooker-dark-side-gadget-addiction-black-mirror. Accessed 11 Feb. 2019.

Accessed 11 Feb. 2019.

Hamid, Mohsin. Exit West. New York: Riverhead Books, 2018.

Menger, Eva. “‘What It Feels like to Be an Other’: Imaginations of Displacement in Contemporary Speculative Fiction.” Studies in Arts and Humanities 4, no. 2 (January 30, 2019): 79–95. https://doi.org/10.18193/sah.v4i2.141.

Parnas, Josef, and Louis Arnorsson Sass. “Self, Solipsism, and Schizophrenic Delusions.” Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 8, no. 2 (June 1, 2001): 101–20. https://doi.org/10.1353/ppp.2001.0014.

Thornton, Stephen. “Solipsism and the Problem of Other Minds | Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.” Accessed November 5, 2019. https://www.iep.utm.edu/solipsis/.

“UNHCR – The UN Refugee Agency.” Accessed November 5, 2019. https://www.unhcr.org/.

[1] According to an Oxford reference from The Dictionary of Media and Communication (1 Ed.) by Daniel Chandler and Rod Munday, Emotional Realism is described as “a representational quality in a narrative that is felt to be ‘true-to-life’ by audiences in terms of the enactment of recognizable subjective experiences.”