Exit West

“Nadia looked him in the eye. ‘You don’t say your evening prayers?’ she asked. Saeed conjured up his most endearing grin. ‘Not always. Sadly.’”

There is some layered irony in this early exchange between Nadia and Saeed, as it is Saeed who will be revealed to be the more traditionally religious of the two. Nadia’s donning of a traditional pious persona is more of a means for her to preserve her independence. 

“He was aware that alone a person is almost nothing.” 

This refers to a minor character in the book: a thief, or perhaps simply a refugee, hiding out in the closet of an upper-class home. However, the quote reflects interestingly on the book as a whole, which is full of refugees and characters who have lost their usual contexts of home, work, and family. Rather than this loss making them “nothing,” it more often causes them to form a new community of disenfranchised people. 

“In times of violence, there is always that first acquaintance or intimate of ours, who, when they are touched, makes what had seemed like a bad dream suddenly, evisceratingly real.” 

This refers to Nadia’s cousin, who is killed in a car bombing in the early days of the war in her country. While his death serves to bring the war home to her, she is also unable to attend his funeral because she is estranged from her family. Saeed, therefore, becomes something more important than a lover to her: in visiting her cousin’s grave with her, he becomes her surrogate family and her connection to the reality of the war. 

“They were achingly beautiful, these ghostly cities—New York, Rio, Shanghai, Paris—under their stains of stars, images as though from an epoch before electricity, but with the buildings of today.” 

This image of cities without electricity—from a series of art photographs that Saeed shows to Nadia—evokes the darkening of their own city in a time of war. Yet it also evokes the light of the sky and a kind of common ground between these “ghostly cities” all over the world. It suggests an alternative future and a new, more resourceful way to live after devastation.

“It was as if they were bats that had lost the use of their ears, and hence the ability to find things as they flew in the dark.” 

Saeed and Nadia are dependent in a bodily way upon their mobile phones; they not only serve as maps for them, and as ways for them to communicate with one another, but more intimately as a kind of antennae. It is a dependency that makes them seem like half-machines, even while it is also quite familiar and ordinary. It anticipates the more overt futuristic surrealism of the magical doors. 

“War in Saeed and Nadia’s city revealed itself to be an intimate experience, combatants pressed close together, front lines defined at the level of the street one took to work, the school one’s sister attended, the house of one’s aunt’s best friend, the shop where one bought cigarettes.” 

Saeed and Nadia’s city during the war is a dark mirror image of its peacetime self, with familiar comforting landmarks turned into battle zones. It anticipates the community of refugees that will, conversely, come to seem to Saeed and Nadia like a new kind of family. 

“The effect doors had on people altered as well. Rumors had begun to circulate of doors that could take you elsewhere, often to places far away, well removed from this death trap of a country.” 

The doors in this novel are quietly introduced. A first, the reader has no idea of either their magic or their centrality in the novel. They initially seem like just another quotidian reality that has been slightly altered in a wartime city. Windows in such a city become vulnerable openings to be covered up, and doors become possible escape portals.  

“Nadia called Saeed’s father ‘father’ and he called her ‘daughter.’” 

Nadia is not a generally traditional character, despite her wearing of a traditional long robe. However, she finds herself comforted by her new role as surrogate daughter to Saeed’s grieving father; nor does she find this role to be in conflict with her love for Saeed. Her independence and progressivism does not preclude her need for connection and ritual. 

“The plastic rubbish bags that covered Nadia’s windows were still in place, except for one, which, along with the window itself, had been destroyed, and where the window had formerly been a gash of blue sky was now visible, unusually clear and lovely, except for a thin column of smoke rising somewhere in the distance.”

This description of the blue sky through Nadia’s covered-up windows in her partially bombed-out apartment building evokes an incidental beauty that can be found in devastation. It anticipates later instances of such beauty in the novel, such as the beauty of Nadia and Saeed’s shantytown dwelling in Marin, California. 

“[A]nd so by making the promise he demanded she make she was in a sense killing him, but that is the way of things, for when we migrate, we murder from our lives those we leave behind.” 

Nadia promises Saeed’s father that she will remain by Saeed’s side until they are both safe. This promise seems to Nadia to be a betrayal of Saeed’s father, even while he is the one demanding the promise. Not only is she leaving him behind, she is also leaving behind his values and his wishes for them as a couple, for she knows that he would like for them to marry and to have children someday. The smallness of his wishes for them seems an acknowledgement on his part that their being migrants is a whole new identity, and that they now belong more to the world than to their own particular culture. As it turns out, Nadia will fulfill her promise to Saeed’s father; she will stay with him until he is safe, but she will not marry him.  

“It was said in those days that the passage was both like dying and like being born, and indeed Nadia experienced a kind of extinguishing as she entered the blackness and a gasping struggle as she fought to exit it.” 

The magical doors through which Nadia and Saeed escape to new destinations resemble a new type of technology that is clumsy at first and increasingly streamlined as it evolves. This passage refers to Nadia’s first passage through the doors, from her country to Mykonos. Later, once she and Saeed have been through the doors a few times, the passage itself will be taken for granted and unremarked upon.  

“In the late afternoon, Saeed went to the top of the hill, and Nadia went to the top of the hill, and there they gazed out at the island, and out to sea, and he stood beside where she stood, and she stood beside where he stood […] and they looked around at each other, but they did not see each other, for she went up before him, and he went up after her, and they were each at the crest of the hill only briefly, and at different times.” 

This passage shows the beginning of a distance between Saeed and Nadia: a distance that sneaks up on them in the same way that the revelation of their going up the hill at different times sneaks up on the reader. It anticipates the rift that grows between them once they move from this camp in Mykonos to the squat in London. More broadly, it shows the limits of any relationship, however close: the fact that two people can take the same walk and see the same view, but still have completely separate experiences. 

“But there was no way back to his father now, because no door in their city went undiscovered by the militants for long, and no one returning through a door who was known to have fled their rule was allowed to live.” 

The magical doors begin as being related only to war and to desperate situations requiring escape; they are doors that only go in one direction. As the novel progresses, however, not only desperate characters use the doors, nor are the doors used only for escapes. They are sometimes used for more banal purposes, such as taking vacations or for quieter emergencies, like rescuing children from orphanages. The suggestion is that the rootlessness experienced by the migrants in this novel gradually becomes a worldwide condition.  

“He reminded himself that he needed to cut lengthwise if he was serious, up his forearm and not across it, and though he hated the idea of pain, and also of being found naked, he thought this was the right way to go […] But the nearby blackness unsettled him, and reminded him of something, of a feeling, of a feeling he associated with children’s books.”

A minor character is distracted from his suicidal plans by the presence of a door, which reminds him of a dark fairy tale. It is interesting that it is this blackness that “unsettles” him, even while he is planning to kill himself. It is as if it recalls him to the world, which he has been trying to escape. He ultimately gives in to the temptation of going through the door and ends up making a new life for himself in Namibia. 

“They felt closer on nights when they were making these plans, as though major events distracted them from the more mundane realities of life, and sometimes as they debated their options in their bedroom they would stop and look at each other, as if remembering, each of them, who the other was.”

Saeed and Nadia begin their romance as a haven in a war-torn city; later, in more peaceful surroundings, they seek escape from their claustrophobic intimacy by contemplating global events. Because their romance begins in a time of strife, it is as if strife is what they are accustomed to, as a couple; if they cannot find it around them, they find it in one another.  

“The trains kept running, skipping stops near Saeed and Nadia but felt as a rumble beneath their feet and heard at a low, powerful frequency, almost subsonic, like thunder or the detonation of a massive, distant bomb.” 

Saeed and Nadia have come from a besieged wartime city, and it causes them to see the latent violence even in a relatively peaceful city like London. They also know instinctively that, as migrants and outsiders, this violence is potentially directed toward them.  

“Some in dark London blamed these incidents on nativist provocateurs. Others blamed other migrants, and began to move, in the manner of cards dealt from a shuffled deck during the course of a game, reassembling themselves in suits and runs of their own kind […] all the hearts together, all the clubs together, all the Sudanese, all the Hondurans.” 

The refugee crisis is seen here as a conflict that turns even refugees into their own sort of nativists, causing them to privilege their own group of people over other groups. It is also seen as a conflict that affects everyone, even privileged minor characters who attempt to stay uninvolved. The card game metaphor suggests that nativism of any sort is a desperate gamble, one that might work in the short run but not long-term.  

“[T]he only divisions that mattered now were between those who sought the right of passage and those who would deny them passage, and in such a world the religion of the righteous must defend those who sought passage.” 

This is a militant refugee from Saeed’s country speaking, defending the use of violence against nativists. Because he is couching his defense in familiar religious language, Saeed finds himself agreeing with him, even though he is the very sort of man whom he would have avoided in his own city. His displacement has caused him to become more tribal and conservative, even while it has made Nadia more cosmopolitan.  

“[S]he almost felt that if she got up and walked home at this moment there would be two Nadias, that she would split into two Nadias, and one would stay on the steps reading and one would walk home, and two different lives would unfold for these two different selves, and she thought she was losing her balance, or possibly her mind, and then she zoomed in on the image and saw that the woman in the black robe reading the news on the phone was actually not her at all.”

This passage involving mobile phones, and the almost metaphysical confusion that Nadia feels while looking at what she believes to be an image of herself on her own phone, shows the latent surrealism of our contemporary reality. It shows the strangeness of our technology, and the speed with which news is recorded in our time. It also shows Nadia’s estrangement from herself, as a Muslim refugee in London. She sees herself and her traditional costume from a distance, as if through the eyes of a nativist, to the point of mistaking herself for another woman in an identical costume.  

“To flee forever is beyond the capacity of most: at some point even a hunted animal will stop, exhausted, and await its fate, if only for a while.” 

While this passage refers to Nadia and Saeed’s difficulty in leaving their London squat—as exhausted as they are from their voyages—it also refers to their difficulty in separating from one another. The weariness that they feel is intimate, as well as logistical and physical; and they feel hopelessly stuck in their relationship, as well as in their London squat. 

“Every time a couple moves they begin, if their attention is still drawn to one another, to see each other differently, for personalities are not a single immutable color […] but rather illuminated screens, and the shades we reflect depend much on what is around us.” 

Nadia and Saeed are newly revealed to themselves and to one another over the course of their voyages. Their uprooted new surroundings bring out different latent parts of themselves that might have remained hidden had they never left their own country. Saeed discovers in himself a new need for custom and tradition, while Nadia discovers the full extent of her own unconventionality.  

“Tales were told at these places that people from all over now gathered to hear, for the tales of these natives felt appropriate to this time of migration, and gave listeners much-needed sustenance.” 

In Saeed and Nadia’s final home in Marin, it is the natives who are outnumbered by the migrants. The natives are looked to, in the way of Native Americans, as sources of history and stories. As they are in the minority, they are no longer a threat, and they seem to belong to a distant harmless past. 

“[T]he apocalypse appeared to have arrived and yet it was not apocalyptic, which is to say that while the changes were jarring they were not the end, and life went on, and people found things to do and ways to be and people to be with, and plausible desirable futures began to emerge, unimaginable previously […] and the result was something not unlike relief.” 

The Marin where Nadia and Saeed have settled is a landscape of upheaval but is also a strangely peaceful one. The shantytown where they live is one that accommodates the “apocalypse” of the refugee crisis, and also of global warming. Marin is also where Nadia and Saeed navigate the smaller upheaval of their separation as a couple, and they find that this, too, is not the end of the world.