In the book Exit To The West by Moshin Hamid, community is a very important aspect of life. Similarity to real life, being around people who understand you and your views on the world can be an amazing feeling. While one can find community in a person, but having a group of people you can talk to about things is amazing. This is shown throughout the book, through Saeed’s attachment to him and Nadia’s neighbors in Britain, and his connection to the preacher’s daughter.

To begin, One of the book’s big showings of how important community can be is when Nadia and Saeed go through their first door to Britain. When they’re meeting the new people in this foreign place, Nadia has a much easier time adjusting compared to Saeed. Nadia is able to better empathize and talk with the Nigerian people they meet, while Saeed struggles to make friends unfamiliar with their culture. He ends up making friends with their next door neighbors who come from their home country, he becomes confused about how Nadia doesn’t feel a similar way. This all stems from the differences in the communities and environments they were raised in. Nadia being a woman in a community that had a very strict set of rules women had to live by, she struggled to fit in because they refused to understand her. Meanwhile Saeed being a man in this community allowed him to better accept their culture and become more in tune with it compared to Nadia.

Moving forward, A second example the book gives, is when Saeed builds a connection to the preacher’s daughter. The connection they build is based around Saeed’s homeland and where the preacher’s daughter’s mother is from, because the preacher practices the religion from Saeed’s homeland. She understands Saeed’s ties to religion and family and how these two things tie him to a community he has been separated from. Giving him a new family to share these interests with, this is something Nadia can neither do for Saeed nor understand. She knows how important religion is to Saeed and how it connects him to his family, but she cannot understand it on any level past empathy for Saeed, she doesn’t much care for their homeland’s religion. She never bonded with many in that community besides Saeed, and her family was never that close. Their views on the culture of their homeland created a rift in their relationship

The importance of one being able to bond with those around them through means of similar interest,  and gain access to a community that they can converse with is extremely important. Humans are social creatures through nature, and this book helps show it. Once Saeed and Nadia were no longer able to converse, they’re relationship began to slowly dissolve. Even though they still loved each other, they were unable to relate to one another. Opening a door to a new part of their lives, a part where they were not together.