Space ‘in Time’ for Them: Ethnic Geographies under Construction, Refugee Traumas under Healing in Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West

• Main Author: Lona Moutafidou
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: School of English, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece 2019-12-01
• Series: Ex-centric Narratives: Journal of Anglophone Literature, Culture and Media
• Online Access: http://ejournals.lib.auth.gr/ExCentric/article/view/7461

Exit West, by Mohsin Hamid, centres on a young couple’s ordeals as they move under a refugee and migrant status towards the west. The dystopian scenario and scenery of war is continually duplicated while the agony of the characters’ deterritorialization is articulated in silenced space travel through imaginary “doors.” These Ithacan journeys are not memorialised in print; instead, they symbolize an unexplored site of trauma in a universe of ethnic geographies under construction. These human landscapes constitute what Arjun Appadurai, in his “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy,” calls ethnoscapes. Ethnoscapes, like Marc Augé’s “non-places,” as elaborated in his Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, are key theoretical terms in this paper. I aim to investigate the spatio-temporal dynamics of the instant entering and exiting of doors as well as the mechanics by which the couple’s traumatic dislocation further interferes with their perception and experience of space, thereby informing their struggle for survival and adaptation to the war and post-war realities documented in the novel. I also aim to examine the last “door” of the novel as a metaphor of a haven-home, reached when the characters’ incessant movement meets its most effective anti-climax in a state of non-paralysed stasis. Keywords: refugee trauma, migration, dislocation, ethnoscapes, non-place.