Exit West Background

Magical Realism

The people in Exit West use magical doors to travel instantaneously from one location to another. Saeed and Nadia, the novel’s main characters, enter a doorway in an abandoned dentist’s office and emerge on the Greek island of Mykonos moments later. Rebels from the countryside and fighters from as far away as Russia flood an unknown city in the Middle East with lightning speed. These magical doorways create a world without borders as migrants appear in numerous countries and clash with the so-called natives living there, ultimately obliterating the concept of native. These supernatural effects are achieved using realistic detail and characterization. The techniques situate Exit West firmly in the magical realism genre, in which supernatural events occur and are accepted as part of everyday life.

Magical realism was popularized in Latin America in the 1940s, when novelists such as Cuban author Alejo Carpentier (1904–80) integrated surrealist techniques into their fiction. Surrealism came to prominence with French poet and critic André Breton’s (1896–1966) The Surrealist Manifesto (1924). Surrealist writers and painters sought to tap into the unconscious to find ways to merge reality with fantasy. Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez (1927–2014), Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) and Chilean American novelist Isabel Allende (1942–) are among the best-known authors of the genre. Exit West nods to Latin America in the novel’s opening and closing chapters as the place the main characters would most like to travel to. Author Mohsin Hamid pushes the boundaries of magical realism to what can best be described as allegory, a fictional mode in which the narrative symbolically conveys a broader meaning or message.

Still, Hamid has said the doors in Exit West are not as magical as they seem. As a narrative device, they allow the novel to focus on the intimate aspects of displacement and migration rather than on literal struggles. In a 2018 interview with National Public Radio’s Terry Gross, Hamid explained that because of technology, the doors already exist in a way: “We can step through an airplane door and be in another continent” in just a few hours.

Islamic Fundamentalism

The term fundamentalism was used in the early 20th century to refer to conservative Evangelical Protestants who wanted a return to literal interpretations of the Bible and adherence to the Ten Commandments. Fundamentalism in general suggests strict adherence to underlying principles and resistance to change. Islamic fundamentalism follows suit, demanding a strict interpretation of sacred scriptures: the Koran, Islam’s holy book, as revealed to the Prophet Muhammad (c. 570–632), the founder of Islam; the Hadith, the collected traditions and sayings of the Prophet; and the Sunnah, a compilation of legal and social traditions. Together these three volumes form the basis of Sharia, or Islamic law, which prescribes the codes of conduct to which fundamentalists adhere.

Most Muslims do not believe that religious doctrine should be the basis for society or government. For most fundamentalist Muslims, however, religion and politics are inseparable. Between the 1980s and the early decades of the 2000s, many Muslim countries experienced a rise in Islamic fundamentalism, also known as Islamist movements. Islamist groups vary widely in both ideology and strategy, but some are militant, such as the Taliban, al-Qaeda and the Islamic State (ISIS).

Exit West differentiates between degrees of fundamentalism, revealing in the process that tensions between religious piety and the desire for individual freedom have always existed and still do. However, the novel illustrates the violence that ensues when fundamentalism becomes militant. Exit West argues that no single group should be branded the sole extremists in society. In London, the “nativist extremists” mirror the militants from the unnamed city, and though the nativists are from the West, they are just as violent.