Saeed and
Nadia are young people embarking on a romantic relationship as civil war breaks
out in their unnamed country. When their
lives in a war zone become untenable, they decide to flee through magical doors
that serve as portals to other countries.
They end up in a migrant camp in Greece and then travel further to the
West. As they deal with exile, their
relationship changes.
The country
of their origin is never specifically named because the author wanted to
emphasize that Saeed and Nadia’s situation is almost universal; the focus of
the book is on the dilemma of refugees world-wide. There is also no description of harrowing or
life-and-death journeys; the writer was not interested in portraying the
physical hardships endured by migrants but wanted to focus on the psychological
impact of migration.
Hamid
certainly wants to draw attention to the various reasons for mass migration: “All over the world people were slipping away
from where they had been, from once fertile plains cracking with dryness, from seaside
villages gasping beneath tidal surges, from overcrowded cities and murderous
battlefields . . . ” He also wants to
emphasize what it really means to leave
one’s life behind: “when we migrate, we
murder from our lives those we leave behind.”
And there are no promises for refugees:
will they be met with acceptance or will they feel “unmoored, adrift in
a world where one could go anywhere but still find nothing”?
Hamid wants
to emphasize that we are all migrants; an old woman who has lived in one house
her entire life realizes that her neighbourhood has changed: “every year someone was moving out and someone
was moving in . . . and all sorts of strange people were around, people who
looked more at home than she was, . . . more at home maybe because they were younger, and when she
went out it seemed to her that she too had migrated, that everyone migrates, even
if we stay in the same houses our whole lives, because we can’t help it. We are all migrants through time.”
In fact,
Hamid wants to draw attention to what all people have in common: “loss unites humanity, unites every human
being, the temporary nature of our being-ness, and our shared sorrow, the
heartache we each carry and yet too often refuse to acknowledge in one another.” The glimpses into other lives interspersed throughout
the narrative serve to show similarities in our experiences: everyone wants sanctuary and acceptance. Perhaps, instead of “building walls and
fences and strengthening their borders,” and wishing “people would go back to
where they came from,” it would be better to live in a world without borders.
Change is
one constant throughout the book. Saeed
and Nadia change locations several times; the dynamics of their relationship
keep shifting; periodically, the narrative moves away from the main story to
brief vignettes involving other people in other parts of the world; and the
book could even be labelled as genre-shifting.
The point is that everything is transient: “that is the way of things, with cities as
with life, for one moment we are pottering about our errands as usual and the
next we are dying, and our eternally impending ending does not put a stop to
our transient beginnings and middles until the instant when it does.”
Characterization
is used to challenge our pre-conceptions.
Saeed, the male, is quiet and pious while Nadia, the female, is
independent and sexually assertive. Though
Nadia is not religious, rides a motor bike, and uses drugs, she wears a black
robe associated with conservatives. Saeed prays regularly but he prays “fundamentally
as a gesture of love” and because prayer allows him “to believe in humanity’s
potential for building a better world.” Hamid
wants to shake up gender and religious stereotypes.
I cannot
say that I always enjoyed reading the book.
I disliked the paucity of dialogue and the distancing third person omniscient
point of view. Nonetheless, it is a very
timely novel which explores the impact of migration. It asks the reader to consider thoughtfully
the plight of refugees regardless of where they came from and where they find
themselves.
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