In Exit West, by Mohsin Hamid, I noticed that there were multiple abrupt short stories about random people. When first reading these stories, I didn’t understand the significance of most of them, but I realize now that they greatly built on the themes of the story.

For example, Hamid wrote about an old woman in Palo Alto who had lived in the same house her entire life, but noticed that her neighborhood and society were constantly changing. She claimed that her children “were motivated by money, money they spent without having, which she had never done, always saving for a rainy day, even if only a little” (208). The difference in her children’s values and her own shows how much society can change over time, and even if one doesn’t move, they still experience change because their community as a whole is affected.

Furthermore, Hamid wrote about a mute, elderly woman in Marrakesh who is visited by her daughter and asked to escape the country through a magic door. The maid believed that “she was not wanted by the world, and here she was at least known, and she was tolerated, and that was a blessing” (224). The maid refused her daughter’s request because she couldn’t imagine leaving the only place she had ever known, and she feared how she would be treated as an immigrant. This story served as a vignette to represent the people who couldn’t immigrate to a safer country, whether it be from fear or a situation preventing them.

Mohsin Hamid, the critically acclaimed author of the 2017 novel Exit West, uses very unique syntax in order to make the scene “feel” like it is being elongated or shrunk. Hamid mainly uses a series of sentence fragments connected by commas to blur all the action together, and give the reader the impression that everything happens very quickly. On the contrary, short sentences aren’t uncommon either:  Sometimes sentences are 3 words, and sometimes they take up more than a page. By contrasting these two very different sentence structures, Hamid creates a very interesting perception of events in the story, seemingly making some events fly by while others are dragged on forever. Often times, the action is happening right in front of you and you can’t even tell because of the way that the story is structured. An example of this is the passage describing the woman on the train. The entire train ride is technically one sentence, but it’s more accurately a series of sentence fragments stitched together with commas to form one monster sentence. Hamid uses these technique throughout the novel, among many others, to showcase his unique and creative writing style. 

In the novel Exit West, Mohsin Hamid explores the complexity of the migrant experience. While the journey from home to a new setting is liberating and opens the door of freedom, the journey of exiting one’s closeness of culture, home, and family also opens the door of struggle. When Saeed and Nadia are moving locations, I feel like each city and country represents a different door being either the “normal door” of familiarity or the “black door” of uncertainty.

In the middle of the story when Saeed and Nadia are on the Greek Island of Mykonos, they observe and compare the reasoning or circumstances of being in this certain environment. (enjoyment vs. necessity) There could be some on an island for the reason of vacation and chilling at the beach or people like Saeed and Nadia at a refugee camp with tents and lean-tos who are involved in the migrant experience by constantly reflecting on their past and home while moving for the better of their safety.

I also think that while reading this novel, although both Nadia and Saeed have had experiences of going through the doors of freedom and struggle, Nadia represents the door of freedom while Saeed represents the door of struggle. It is evident throughout the novel that Nadia likes independence, control, and specifically isolation from her family and learning new ideas and being in new environments correlating towards freedom. On the other hand, Saeed had a close relationship with his parents growing up and was enhanced through prayer. But this migrant experience for Saeed was different when he left home and increased how much he prayed a day, moving houses with people from the same country, and even developing a new relationship at the of the novel with the preacher girl. This shows how much he struggled through his constant connection of home in new environments.