Mohsin Hamid: ‘If you want to see what tribalism will do to the west, look at Pakistan’
Mohsin Hamid is
depressed. The novelist, twice nominated for the Man Booker prize, has seen the
three places he calls home – Pakistan, America and Europe – betray their
fundamental ideals and become increasingly unwelcoming. In Pakistan, where he
was born, the elected government caved in to a mob of extremist protesters by sacking a
minister they accused, essentially, of being a bad Muslim. In a country created
as a homeland for south Asia’s Muslims, the fight over who fits that bill means
hardly anyone is safe from unfounded accusations of blasphemy. Students have
been lynched arbitrarily and, in 2011, the governor, Salman Taseer, was shot for criticising the blasphemy laws.
To Hamid, the stunning capitulation to the mob signals the breakdown of an
uneasy coexistence between the government, the military and the courts,
allowing “raw power” to rule.
“These are incredibly disheartening times. I
feel more depressed than I have in a long time about the political direction of
Pakistan,” says Hamid at his home in Lahore, where he now lives with his wife
and two children. “Since Pakistan was founded
in 1947, there has been a conflict between the notion that citizens are equal,
and that certain people can ascribe to themselves the right to decide who is
Muslim,” he says. “The question is: who is Muslim enough? And 70 years after
creation, the answer is that nobody is Muslim enough.”
But Pakistan is not
alone in narrowing definitions of who belongs. Hamid thinks western countries
that tout principles of equality fail one group in particular: migrants. That is the topic of
his recent novel Exit West, a story of desperation, love and, ultimately,
liberation, which won him a second Man Booker shortlisting this year following
that for The Reluctant Fundamentalist in 2007. The plot of Exit
West revolves around Saeed and Nadia who secretly fall in love in a
nameless city under siege. When they flee to Europe, they are met with
militarised borders and unfriendly natives whose hostility reminds Nadia of
“the fury of the militants in her own city”. Migration is driven
by touches of magical realism. People travel through mystical doors, emerging
in an instant in faraway places.
Hamid, 46, has himself
divided his life between Pakistan, Britain, where he also holds citizenship,
and the US. He is a product of western democratic traditions but also of life
in a developing nation among countrymen who are desperate to leave but cannot. “That infection
combined with an American constitutional system and European social democracy
results in weird thoughts like, ‘what if people could also move freely?’” he
says, explaining the idea of the doors. “As a mongrelised human being, I don’t
find the world around us satisfactory.”
Hamid skips the
traumatic migrant journey and goes straight to the collision of cultures, which
in the novel gives way to a new and richer world once the migrants settle. In reality, of course,
most migrants are kept at bay in camps, in what Hamid sees as an attempt to
“impose a condition that humanity has never known before, which is an end to
migration”. The only way to achieve that goal, he says, is to militarise
borders and “mete out on the migrants a level of horror that counterbalances
the horror facing them where they’re from so they don’t come any more”.
Pakistan is a model for the kind of things that
occur when the idea of purity is made predominant in your society
That, in turn, reveals
the limits of the “western humanist notion”, Hamid says. “We say we believe
that if you’re black or white, you’re equal, or if you’re male or female,
you’re equal, if you’re gay or straight, you’re equal,” he explains. “But one
of the subversive questions that fiction can ask, and that this book in
particular tries to ask, is why are the child born in Mogadishu, and the one
born in Milan or Minneapolis, not equal?” “The entire system of
the nation state, global governance, democracy has this huge lacuna at the
heart of it,” he says.
At some point,
humanity will see a movement for migrants’ rights, similar to the ones for
women, African Americans and gay people, he says. The alternative will wreak
“such monstrous havoc” both on migrants and those denying them their rights,
that it becomes unsustainable... read more:
