Nifty thought experiment on race and prejudice
• Mohsin Hamid’s new book addresses skin colour and suggests that things that fall apart can be put back together
The new book by Mohsin Hamid, The Last White Man, starts with a mindblowing concept. The protagonist, Anders, wakes up one morning with the shocking realisation that he has changed from white to black.
There are immediate practicalities: faking illness to avoid going to work, steering clear of his more-off-than-on girlfriend, putting off visiting his father, staying at home with the curtains closed. These measures, Anders knows, can only be temporary. For the first few days his identity is out of whack. After a week or so, how will he cope? Will he go mad?
There is an extraordinary pull in this thought experiment. I found myself reading rapidly, impatient to learn how Anders adjusts, where he goes for sanctuary, how he manages his feelings. How does he feel about the new state he is in?
These impressions and questions, which accumulate as Anders’s interior dialogue worms its way into the reader’s own, reveal much about ourselves: how we perceive skin colour as tied to identity, whether this is the root of unacknowledged prejudices, and, if so, how embedded they are.
Two of Pakistan-born Hamid’s previous novels have been shortlisted for the Booker prize. He brings an observant eye to the nature of personal disaffection, social discord and the shape of human relations in conflict situations.
And conflict is brewing. After a few days, Anders settles.
Though he realises he will need time to fully process what has happened, his sense of self resurfaces. To his surprise, he is relatively composed about how to re-engage with the world. Taking courage, he contacts his girlfriend, Oona. She is stunned, but accepting. Unsurprisingly, however, when he returns to work things do not go nearly as well. The workplace is more representative of society’s disparate views, and feelings about race cut deep.
Bizarrely, more people in the town also experience an overnight change in their skin colour. The author executes this progression brilliantly, juxtaposing Andres’s acceptance with others’ denial, slowly unravelling the psychology of transformation. Gradually, too, exasperation builds among some whites. “What’s the cure?” is a new demand as, apartheid-like, us-versus-them attitudes take hold.
Then, suddenly, when a critical mass of white people have mutated, Hamid elevates the pace of change and the shock of its impact. Things truly start to fall apart.
If the notion of changing skin colour is surreal, the crescendo of the eventual resultant societal outrage is all too real. Readers’ nerves may start to shred as suburban gentility turns into anarchy. Hamid keeps the plotline straightforward, the range of characters small, the language simple and the tone calm, but the undercurrent is of extreme threat and violence. He doesn’t describe specific incidents, nor does he give details, but allusions to what is unfolding creates the sense of watching The Purge horror films through half-covered eyes.
The author shapes an intimate understanding of characters’ emotions and perspectives by using long paragraphs of stream-ofconsciousness prose. At the peak of the mayhem, when Anders needs to go into hiding, his thoughts represent a form of psychoanalysis of the oppressed. Oona’s mother — sickly, obese, angry at her lot — is firmly in the diehard white camp, and her inner dialogue is the opposite; a deconstruction of the culture and design of the oppressor’s belief of their superiority.
Broadly, a distressing community-wide performance unfolds, mirroring aspects of
THESE IMPRESSIONS AND QUESTIONS, WHICH ACCUMULATE AS ANDERS’S INTERIOR DIALOGUE ... REVEAL MUCH ABOUT OURSELVES
French-West Indian philosopher Frantz Fanon’s seminal 1952 book, Black Skin, White Masks, which first addressed the psychological traumas inherent in intransigent racial categorisations. Formerly white people must cope with the loss of identity; people who have always been black must now try to identify either through kinship with other black people, or by risking the anger-fuelled, reactionary danger from a white-now-black person; people who remain white navigate the altered world in confusion or with hatred.
Hamid challenges readers, too, about feelings of smugness or complacency: “So you’re not like these people are you, these racists, these populists?”’ Except, the evidence that indeed we are is all around: SA’s brand of xenophobia, Europe’s rising tide of anti-immigration sentiment, January 6 2021 in Washington, the US.
Indeed, another clever aspect of The Last White Man is that we don’t know the precise setting for this social upheaval.
Characters’ names and other allusions are to Scandinavia, but the unnamed town, as the focal point for the disruption, could be in the northern parts of the US, or Canada, or even the UK. Otherness, superiority, stereotyping: the author’s point is that these happen all over the world.
In yet another shift, something remarkable occurs towards the end of the book. Small reconciliations start happening. People grow tired of conflict; they want to mourn the dead, and then move forward. Everyone looks different on the outside now, but this too may be a sign that they are better people inside. Anders’s and Oona’s relationship blossoms into true love. Out of the chaos “it felt like something new was being born”, Oona thinks.
The Last White Man is an understated book that makes a major point. Overnight, the world can change drastically — remember, this happened just recently — but if we focus on our shared humanity, together we can work through the flux. People can change and reconcile. Things fall apart, Hamid says, but this may catalyse something better.
The novella can be read in a few hours. Its power will remain for a long time.