Exit West

The magical doors through which Saeed and Nadia go are hard to find at first and seem like either wishful rumors or euphemisms for smuggling. Their first experience of going through a door—from their own country to Mykonos—is likened both to dying and to being born: “It was said in those days that the passage was both like dying and 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” (98). The doors become more commonplace as the novel goes on, however, so that they are eventually known not only to an underground network but to government officials as well. By the time that Saeed and Nadia are in London, the existence of the doors is acknowledged—although grudgingly—as a new reality: “Perhaps [government officials] had grasped that the doors would 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).

The passage of the doors also changes over the course of the novel, becoming more flexible and less arduous. At the beginning of the novel, Saeed and Nadia understand that they cannot go back through the doors, or they will risk death at the hands of the militants in their country, who know about the doors’ existence. Yet as the doors become more widespread, we also see them being used for purposes other than escape. We see various minor characters using them for purposes as diverse as brief vacations in Rio, reunions at orphanages in Tijuana, and impulsive moves from London to Namibia. All of these stories are happy ones, and none of the characters involved are refugees. The suggestion is not so much that Saeed and Nadia find a place in the world, by the novel’s end, as that displacement becomes an increasingly common condition. The doors seem to symbolize both a powerful new technology and the increasing rootlessness and globalism of our world.