Exit West

Nadia and Saeed’s new door has led them to an abandoned apartment in London, which has been taken over by squatters. Nadia and Saeed are dazzled and bewildered by the luxury of their surroundings, after the refugee camp and their abandoned city. They have an apartment to themselves, with a shower and a washing machine. However, their new living situation is more fraught and complicated than it seems to be at first. Their presence in the building is resented by nativists, and they and the other migrants must constantly defend their territory against police.

In retaliation against the migrant occupation, the government turns off all of the electricity in their building. Nadia and Saeed feel an increasing distance from one another and begin to wander alone through the strange city during the day, where they encounter both cruelty and kindness from the natives. They meet volunteers who dispense aid yet are also chased by a mob.

There is a scene of a suicidal London native, who decides—in a reversal of the usual migrant story—to escape his depression by going through a door to Namibia. Here, he finds contentment and disappears by degrees from his old life. 

With their new London dwelling increasingly under siege, Nadia and Saeed turn to separate groups in their dwelling for solace. Nadia befriends the Nigerians in her own building, beginning to attend their weekly meetings, although she is the only Middle Eastern woman there. Saeed, meanwhile, finds a house that is full of his own people and finds comfort in their company, even though they are more traditional than he is. He tries to convince Nadia to move with him to their house, even though they would have to give up their privacy as a couple and to sleep on different floors, the house being segregated by gender. Nadia refuses to move.

Their two groups have different ideas about how to navigate the war waged against them by the local government. The Nigerians suggest peaceable resistance, whereas Saeed’s group believe in righteous tribal rebellion. The leader of Saeed’s group suggests a new division of humanity into believers and unbelievers. After an attempted takeover by the government, there is an unexpected cessation of hostilities:

Perhaps they had decided that they did not have it in them to do what would have needed to be done […] Perhaps they had grasped that the doors could not be closed, and new doors would continue to open, and they had understood that the denial of coexistence would have required one party to cease to exist (164).

In another isolated scene, one that is hopeful rather than menacing, a mother returns through a door to collect her child from an orphanage in Tijuana, Mexico, and to take her back to where she lives. This is also a scene of returning somewhere through a door, rather than going somewhere strange and new.   

Nadia and Saeed remain in London, but along with other refugees in their community have been put in a worker’s camp. This is the government’s way of accommodating the refugees’ need for shelter while also building new shelters: “In the formerly protected green belt around London a ring of new cities was being built, cities that would be able to accommodate more people again than London itself” (167).

Nadia and Saeed’s existence in the camp is more peaceful, even while their own relationship continues to fray. Their work is segregated by gender, and they work under different supervisors, both of who are white natives. While at the camp, Saeed receives word from a refugee cousin of his that his father has died, not from an attack but from untreated pneumonia. He and Nadia both mourn his father’s death in different ways; Saeed feels alone because of Nadia’s refusal, even while she is mourning, to pray.

New refugees continue to arrive at the camp; the camp runs on a system of seniority, with the workers who have been there the longest receiving the most benefits from their work. Old workers are also in charge of welcoming and settling new workers. One day Saeed welcomes a strange white non-English-speaking family, perhaps Germanic or Scandinavian: a father, a mother, and a daughter. He is struck by the speed with which they settle into their new quarters and also by their diffidence: “[He suspected that] they were ashamed, and that they did not yet know that shame, for the displaced, was a common feeling, and that there was, therefore, no particular shame in being ashamed” (184).

In an effort to salvage their relationship, Nadia suggests to Saeed that they go through another door, to “the new city of Marin” (189). He agrees to the move. This chapter is also intercut with another tale of unrelated travelers. These are two elderly men, one Brazilian and the other Dutch, who eventually become a couple. The Brazilian man shows up one day in the courtyard of the Dutch man’s apartment, having apparently arrived there through a magical door in the garden shed. Although the Dutch man is initially suspicious of him, he soon begins to return his greetings, and even goes through the door with the Brazilian man for a brief visit to Rio.