Isl a nd Ne w s
“We all descended from people who migrated. It’s the story of civilization.” and other locations around the world. He now lives in Lahore, Pakistan, with his wife and children in the house where he was raised, and he travels extensively. Mr. Hamid said he used to be a “chameleon,” adapting himself to wherever he was. Over time, however, he came to understand that “every human feels foreign to a certain extent in different ways,” and he embraced what he described as his “mongrel” individuality. This shared experience of being different — whether as a lone girl in a family of boys or as a poet in an undergraduate engineering class — served as the backdrop for Exit West, according to Mr. Hamid. “To be a human being is to be a transient creature. We are only here for a little while, and everything in that little while, we lose,” he said. Exit West is also about the shared human experience of breakups and loss, including getting old and dying. But there is optimism in this theme, the author explained. Rather than becoming depressed by the reality of inevitable loss, he said, we can acknowledge that we will lose everything yet still embrace the possibility of finding beauty and hope and of living one’s life in a way that is decent and true to one’s beliefs. Globalization is not new, Mr. Hamid noted. “We all descended from people who migrated. It’s the story of civilization,” he said, adding that the larger question centers on how we deal with the reality of migration.
Mr. Hamid concluded his talk as he concluded his novel — with hopefulness. “It’s very important that we remain optimistic,” he stressed. Otherwise, “you begin to think things should be as they were in the past.” But we can never go back to the past, and people who are driven by nostalgia, who try to go back to the “good old days” or who try to stop change from happening, fail, resulting in unhappiness. The antidote, whatever your politics, he said, is optimism. “If we are not optimistic, we abandon the future to the pessimists,” Mr. Hamid cautioned. And pessimists will exploit our fear and make us turn away from decency toward each other and from belief in truth, he said. While on campus, Mr. Hamid also met with English Department faculty and signed books for students, faculty, and other school community members. His visit to Loomis was made possible by a gift from the Ralph M. Shulansky ’45 Lecture Fund and by the Robert P. Hubbard ’47 Speakers Series.
LEFT: Mohsin Hamid speaks during a convocation in the Olcott Center. RIGHT: Exit West, on display in the Katharine Brush Library. Photos: Jessica Hutchinson
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