A Narrative House of Mirrors Reading Language and the City in Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Exit West

Abstract

The paper reads The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007) and Exit West (2017) as texts of displacement: texts that are about displaced people, but that also showcase narrative displacement, a refusal on the part of the narrative to congeal into a fixed, unitary set of meanings. It traces the ways in which these novels stage, in and through their linguistic and narrative choices, the constitutive incompleteness of the process of displacement, willed or not, and its unavailability as a coherent or fixed referent. There is constant disarticulation and slippage between words and their accepted meanings, between places and their supposed distinctiveness, and between relationships and their expected outcomes. I examine these narrative aporias to posit these novels as texts that make for a radically unsettling reading experience, at the same time as they are texts about the radical unsettlement undergone by migrants and refugees as they leave a home in search of a new one. I offer, further, that it is through an elaboration of the city— or cities— in these novels that they are able to create a highly productive effect of the uncanny. Both The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Exit West deploy a range of cities from all over the globe to set up a conversation between them as in a narrative house of mirrors, asking the reader to acknowledge the placing of borders between places, between people and between their stories, as an imperfect and ineffectual attempt to deny the great deal that links them together.