Different Interpretations Of Migration In Exit West By Mohsin Hamid
While Saeed interprets migration as a process of losing the past, Nadia interprets it as a process of gaining the future. Saeed’s more nostalgic orientation towards the past and Nadia’s orientation towards the present indicate the different relationships each character has to the place of their birth. Saeed is close with his family and lives in his family home. As a man, he also inhabits the city space differently in the sense that he has more mobility, freedoms, and access to education. He is also better connected to the spiritual and religious pulse of the city than Nadia, who is disinterested in religion. In other words, Saeed imagines their city as a place where he can put down roots, and is disappointed to discover that he must leave.
In contrast, Nadia is out of sync with her city. Even before militants take over, she seeks out informal, underground spaces and subverts her society’s normative expectations for women. She is involved with the youth music scene, loses her virginity, and collects American music albums. She also does not pray, something that marks her as something of an outcast in the city. Moreover, Nadia’s relationship with her family, unlike Saeed’s with his family, is at first fraught and eventually nonexistence. The city has less resonance, culturally and spiritually, for Nadia than it does for Saeed. In other words, Nadia has fewer reasons to stay and fewer reasons to miss the things and people she left behind.
Nadia and Saeed’s attitudes, and as a result, their different relationships to their city shape their engagements with each city that they later visit. In Mykonos, Nadia wants to explore. In London, Nadia actively integrates into the Nigerian community while Saeed integrates into a house full of his own people. In Marin, Nadia finds employment in a cooperative despite the fact that her black robe marks her as an outsider. Meanwhile, Saeed decides to get involved in the preacher’s congregation because it feels spiritually and culturally familiar.
For Nadia, their decision to leave the city liberates her to seek out new forms of community. However, Saeed seeks ways to replicate the place and culture he left behind, even in these new places. Both the characters adapt and make concessions to their new surroundings, but do so in different ways and to different degrees. Their different interpretations of migration, as either loss or gain, set the stage for their eventual separation.
