MOHSIN HAMID: THE STYLISH HYBRID
Today, he is probably best known for The Reluctant Fundamentalist, an incisive statement on the post-September 11 world that was both an international bestseller and shortlisted for the Booker Prize—as well as made into a movie by Mira Nair in 2012. But nearly 20 years ago, Mohsin Hamid’s first novel, Moth Smoke, took India, Pakistan and much of the literary world by storm. It didn’t win the Booker or the Pulitzer—but its inventiveness and exuberance inspired passionate, enduring reactions. “In Pakistan, by far the book [of mine] that people say is most important to them is Moth Smoke,” says Hamid. “In India, too, I would say.” It’s an interesting observation. Since Moth Smoke, the story of a Lahore banker’s descent into hedonism, the Pakistan-born writer has emerged as one of the most thoughtful and entertaining voices in the conversation about Islam, globalisation and the phenomenon Samuel Huntington christened “the clash of civilisations”. That has made his books more important but also less South Asian. Written before the rise of Donald Trump, though it was published in March, Hamid’s lat--
“I’M A MONGRELISED HYBRID,” HE SAYS. “I DON’T FEEL REPRESENTATIVE, AND I DON’T WANT TO REPRESENT”
est novel, Exit West, does not even mention the word Pakistan—where he has lived since 2009 with his wife and daughter. The move from London to Lahore was prompted by his daughter’s birth but also an expression of a solidarity with the victims of Huntington’s clash and a commitment to a “more equitable and tolerant Pakistan”, he wrote at the time. But he remains a sort of exile—a rootless identity that informs all of his novels.
“I’m a mongrelised hybrid,” says Hamid, who spent his early childhood in California before attending the Lahore American School, and then returned to the US to attend Princeton University and Harvard Law School. “I’m somebody who’s trying to examine things and reconstitute things in new forms. I don’t feel representative and I don’t want to represent.”
That reluctance notwithstanding, his novels are all about the struggles of Muslims or South Asians or people from what is known as “the global South”. They’re also (at least partly) pitched to Western readers in a different sense than those of Jhumpa Lahiri or Salman Rushdie. As his sometimes essay-like titles suggest, Hamid’s novels are written “against” a conventional belief: the uniquely American question, “Why do they hate us?” or globalisation’s obsession with economic growth or the idea of the migrant as “other”. But that’s overly reductive.
Hamid addresses these weighty questions both directly and indirectly: setting out an explicit agenda and playfully undermining it, without turning his characters into puppets or mouthpieces. Likewise, though all his books are stylistically inventive, so far he hasn’t allowed style to overwhelm substance in the way that it does in the lesser works of Martin Amis or Salman Rushdie. From a hilarious riff on air-conditioning in Moth Smoke to the absurd self-help passages of How to Get
Filthy Rich in Rising Asia and the oddly dislocated omniscient narrator of Exit West, all his books are what Hamid unpretentiously calls “weird”. But, he points out, they’re also all love stories.
Describing Exit West—in which the sudden opening of portals that allows refugees to migrate effortlessly to London or New York from Damascus or Lagos does not end in brutal dystopia—he hits on another common thread. “I think that it’s very important for us to imagine new futures, and potentially desirable futures, particularly in this pessimistic era when our politics is so much about nostalgia,” he says. “One of the political functions of art can be to imagine the future in a way that’s not nostalgic and offers a vision of hope.”