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Symbolism In Exit West

Decent Essays

At the beginning of the book Saeed and Nadia meet, at a night class on “corporate identity and product branding.” Saeed invites Nadia for coffee in the cafeteria. They trade instant messages at work, and go for dinner at a Chinese restaurant. Their relationship is happening while their country is heading toward civil war. Hamid writes the story like this deliberately. Exit West is a story about how familiar and persistent human existence is, even at the edge of dystopia. But it’s also a warning against the assumption that the end of the world will leave rich, western countries intact. With that being said, Hamid’s novel is both a tale about refugees playing out against a global migrant crisis and impossibly prescient. When it comes to the future, Hamid states, we will all be migrants, whether we hop from country to country or stay in one place until the day we die. Either way, the world can become unrecognizable in the blink of an eye. What makes Exit West so striking is the ways in which it shows the breakdown of a society, and how effortlessly the cycle begins to repeat itself even when Saeed and Nadia think they’ve made it to safety. In the beginning of the novel, the two live in “a city swollen by refugees, but still mostly at peace, or at least not yet openly at war”, in a country that is left intentionally open to more than one interpretation. It could be Pakistan, Syria, Libya or any other the reader interprets it to be. Saeed works for a company that places outdoor

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