Book Review - Exit West by Mohsin Hamid

Exit West is a book published in 2017 by Mohsin Hamid, the author of a number of other pivotal books including The Reluctant Fundamentalist. In the 2025/26 academic year, a small group of SolidariTee volunteers have set up an 'asynchronous book club' where instead of everyone being asked to read a book in the same time period ahead of a group discussion, the group voted for a list of titles for everyone to read at their own pace. Once a member has finished a book, they can volunteer to write a review with their reflections, and share their thoughts with the group.

This review has been written by Rebecca (Bex) Kerr, SolidariTee's Networks Coordinator in the current academic year. Bex holds a Masters in International Security and Terrorism, and has written this review as an academic-style piece. In it, she explores concepts connected to the theory of necropolitics, which is a framework describing the political and social power that governs who lives and who dies in today's global landscape.

Introduction

I’m going to be exploring what responsibility the reader has when reading a book like Exit West. I’ll argue that the literary aesthetics of the book position the reader as the guard in Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon (a prison design), later socially theorised by Michel Foucault. 

Hamid’s Exit West is set in an unnamed world. The omnipresent narrator calmly tells readers from the start that war will break out soon. From the blurb and front page, we knowingly watch war creep up on the protagonists Saeed and Nadia, who are humanised in the way Hamid tells the tender and restrained story of his only named characters’ love. The way the novel’s aesthetics convey and control temporal violence in Exit West (pace, vignette, forewarned violence) folds the reader into a structure that mirrors the uncertainty of displacement and slow violence. From almost the very beginning, readers also stumble across the black doors, an ostensibly utopian representation of safe refugee passages that magically start opening all over the world. Readers wait for an ending of safety via the magical doors which doesn’t come, hindered by its own design and reminiscent of Berlant’s notion of ‘cruel optimism’. 

What privilege lies in the reader’s participation with this temporal violence? The novel’s narration, fantasy element, and anonymity affect the distance between reader and the characters. Like the Panopticon’s guard, the reader is a privileged spectator who watches violence (which I frame with reference to Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics) unfold over time and space, while remaining unseen and free to leave. The reception of Exit West, whether it is recognised as art or not, still reflects a judgement of taste (how Ellison (2001) defines ‘aesthetics’). This is important because, one way or another, the reader contributes to the production of ‘the refugee’ as a distinct aesthetic and cultural category. The spectator’s passive consumption risks reproducing the very violence depicted in the novel. 

Necropolitics, Literature, and Exit West

Achille Mbembe’s necropolitics (2003; 2019) reframes sovereignty as the power and capacity to dictate who is allowed to live, die, and be more exposed to death. A critical extension of Foucault’s (2009) biopolitics, it posits that the internalisation of control in the self as a mode of governance, and luxuries of rising liberalism and capitalism, [biopolitics], were only possible because of the racialised violent shadow of liberal democracies: the slave trade, apartheid state, colonialism, and imperialism. States of exception, like the plantation or Gaza’s open-air prison, constitute ‘death worlds’ ruled by lawless hostility and enmity (threat from a fictional enemy). Like Judith Butler’s notion of ‘grievability’ (2009), it questions who can be considered more disposable than others.

Necropolitics marks a return to critical theory focused on the body, framing death not as an endpoint, but as a constructed process that begins before biological death and continues beyond it, encompassing slow violence, memory, and mourning. The existence of borders, the rise in refugees, and the evolution of weaponry illustrate that life and death are not equally prioritized (Pasha, 2024; Talbayev, 2024). While Mbembe writes from a post-apartheid West Africa, its application is nonetheless relevant in European and British contexts. The colonial-grammar of death is reproduced in the slow violence and living death of waiting, detention centres, racialised police stop-and-searches, and rhetoric surrounding which lives are worth granting safety.

Exit West presents us with a world of merciless conflict, the racialised human, state surveillance, brutal killings, slow violence, deferrals, states of exception, and states of enmity (fictional enemy) - all of which the readers can physically hold in their hands. A necropolitical lens in Exit West has looked on the killing and remote violence (Liaqat, 2021), and the black doors as exposing the global border regime (Bellin, 2022). Bellin (2022) argues that readers are indirectly implicated in global justice and that Exit West produces a form of ‘disorienting empathy’ which can sensitise us to our ethical implication through de-centring the reader’s identity. Instead, I’ll centre the reader, exploring the reader’s privilege and surveillance by framing reading itself as a panoptical and necropolitical practice. 

Temporal Violence

The novel’s aesthetics (sentence pace, early introduction to violence, black doors, and vignettes) assign the reader a power position of privilege. Aesthetics are conceived by Ellison (2001) as a territory within which judgments of taste are elicited. The novel invites readers to participate in the production of meaning, whether they recognise it as art or not, as a judgment of taste has still been made. The aesthetics therefore implicate the reader in the violence of the novel, allowing the reader to participate in the novel’s violence while out of harm’s way.

Long passages in Exit West have a longer claim over the attention of the reader, thus their patience. There is a particular passage which aptly conveys the temporal control in delivering violence, necropolitical logics of disposability, and Butler’s grievability. Saeed sees some boys playing football:

‘but then he realised that they were not boys, but teenagers, young men, and they were not playing with a ball but with the severed head of a goat, and he thought, barbarians, but then it dawned upon him that this was the head not of a goat but of a human being, with hair and a beard, and he wanted to believe he was mistaken, that the light was failing and his eyes were playing tricks on him, and that is what he told himself, as he tried not to look again, but something about their expressions left him in little doubt of the truth’ (p. 82). 

The football being kicked around is a human head. Butler (2015) says ‘we can see the division of the globe into grievable and ungrievable lives from the perspectives of those who wage war in order to defend the lives of others – even if it means taking those latter lives.’ The sentence length is a crucial aesthetic in pushing the reader’s patience, making them wait, and in doing so, tentatively exposing the reader to ‘barbaric’ violence. The juxtaposition between the truth ‘dawning’ and Saeed wanting ‘to believe he was mistaken, that the light was failing’ illuminates this violence in a way Saeed can’t look away from but we as the reader can, as we close the book. In any case, neither Saeed nor the reader can honestly pretend it’s not there, given this truth is written on the unnamed footballers faces, becoming ingrained in the novel’s landscape.

War as an ‘intimate experience’ (Exit West, p. 65) is explored by Zapata (2021) through the crumbling of the quotidian façade (an unremarkable exterior), the gruesome and sudden deaths of Saeed and Nadia’s family, and the blood of Saeed’s neighbour leaking through their ceiling. Yet, there is an asymmetry in the awareness of violence between the reader and the characters. The reader is forewarned of the violence that faces refugees right from the blurb ‘in a city far away, bombs and assassinations shatter lives every day’, and then again on the front page ‘in a city swollen by refugees but still mostly at peace, or at least not yet openly at war’ (1). The verb ‘swollen’ is sickly and unwell. At the heart of something swollen is hot intense pain which the reader is told is there, but which has evidently not yet been seen by the characters themselves. 

Violence can’t be ignored. Bullets rip through the membrane of each page as the rhythm of the book is often disrupted by angry noises that remind the reader of the creeping violence in the background. In the distance came the ‘sound of automatic gunfire, flat cracks that were not loud and yet carried to them cleanly’ (15).  The tone is set from the start: violence is imminent. The paced long sentences involve the reader whose interest and patience are held longer, and the consistent onomatopoeic interruptions of words like ‘flat crack’ split the descriptive narrative elsewhere with its sound. This effect brings war as an intimate experience to the reader. As this structure is sustained throughout Exit West, emerging as an increasingly recognisable feature, readers can expect long passages for violence as when Nadia is assaulted by the man in the crowd (59-60). Such fixed aesthetics attest to the durability of violence, and in turn, the never-ending wait for peace that characterises a refugee’s journey seeking safety. If only there was a way out… 

The Cruel Optimism of Magical Doorways

The swollen city opens its pores. Rumours eventually reach Nadia and Saeed which ‘had begun to circulate of doors that could take you elsewhere, often to places far away, well removed from the death trap of a country’ (p. 69). When Saeed and Nadia become refugees, they use the doors to go to Greece, London, then to California. In interspersed vignettes, the narrator shows different anonymous migrant and refugee experiences of seeking safety through the doors. 

On the one hand, the black doors allow Exit West to ‘avoid the extreme violence usually associated with the journey refugees undertake’ (Zapata, 2021: 768). Existing literature has framed the doors through utopian and dystopian lenses (Westmooreland, 2025); and, a ‘thought experiment about open-border policies, which may undermine or dissolve the nation state’ (Schetrumpf & Wansbrough, 2022: 89-90). On the other hand, as Rojtinnakorn (2021) highlights, there is a contradiction between the space as a platform for movement and freedom, while at the same time a form of confinement that allows violence to operate. This contradiction can be extended by applying Berlant’s (2011) relation of ‘cruel optimism’, when something you desire is an obstacle to your flourishing. The attachment to an unobtainable fantasy or object provides the hope to keep it going; but the pursuit itself causes harm, as does a failure to accept reality. 

The reader learns about the black doors before Nadia and Saeed, lending to an optimism that the doors could solve their problems. The reader learns quickly that the doors not only can’t guarantee safety, but that they make the journey harder. The first vignette depicts a man emerging through a black door that has magically opened in a sleeping woman’s bedroom. The scene is disturbingly intimate in its portrayal of minute, mundane details about the sleeping woman. This is a private and thus hostile environment. Physically arduous to climb through, the man ‘wriggled with great effort, his hands gripping either side of the doorway as though pulling himself up against gravity’ (6) and eventually, ‘tendons straining’ (7), ‘with a final push he was through, trembling and sliding to the floor like a newborn foal. He lay still, spent. Tried not to pant. His eyes rolled terribly’ (7). By negotiating borders, the refugee is defined as a legal category rather than a human one. Likewise, compared to a newborn foal, the man is de-humanised, a whole human no more. 

Jessica Smartt Gullion defines the vignette as a ‘literary device whose purpose is to place a question in the reader’s mind and to set an emotional tone over the material that is to come’ (2016: 90). A framing of cruel optimism implicates the reader in Exit West. If readers are shown that doors are not adequately safe routes to asylum, will the wait be worth it anyway?

The Panoptic Reader’s Unequal Gaze 

Imagining the reader as the guard; the scenes and vignettes as the cells, some parallels can be drawn with the architectural design of Jeremey Bentham’s 18th Century Panopticon - a prison. The conceptual prison has a central tower encircled by individual cells which face the guard’s surveillance room. Inmates never know if the guard is watching them or not. The possibility of being watched internalises discipline. In Discipline and Punish (1975), Foucault expands this unequal gaze and internalisation of discipline as a model for how modern states control citizens. Surveillance generates norms, as if people believe they are being watched, Foucault argues they internalise the authoritative gaze and self-regulate in line with expected standards. This a core element of biopolitical control. Birds-eye narration, city and character anonymity, and objective relation to the book are all ways in which the reader becomes a spectator to the novel’s violence.

Many readers of Exit West are connected to the abstractness and anonymity of war by the narrator; the reader occupies the same position of privilege as the narrator. The readers witness death and disposable lives ‘far away’ without sharing in it: ‘it was said in those days that the passage was both like dying and being born’ (98). The fact that the city is unnamed also creates an interesting tension. Tahir Hamut Izgil’s memoir Waiting to Be Arrested at Night (2023) names the geographical location, perhaps making it easier for readers to recognise the slow death. In contrast, the anonymity within Exit West could potentially universalise the conflict and make it easier to relate to. Bellin (2022) suggests that the ‘namelessness of Nadia and Saeed’s city and the transnational ordinariness of their lifestyles’ prompts the reader to consider that war could happen to them at some point also. As a result, ‘this disorienting, emphatic experience is emphasised by the novel’s ‘delicate balancing of sameness and difference’ (Felski, 2020, p. 107)’ (Bellin, 2022). Equally, anonymity might free the reader from any relational responsibility. Responsibility can be externalised and freed due to its distant and unreal belonging to the fantasy genre. 

From the guard tower, 'the cells of the periphery' as described by Foucault on Bentham's architectural figure, 'are like so many cages, so many small theatres, in which each actor is alone, perfectly individualised and constantly visible.' Traditionally, reading the vignettes and scenes in Exit West position the reader as moving through them, witnessing the temporal violence, as perhaps the previous section suggests. Alternatively, rather than approaching the journey as one the reader progresses through one by one; we could imagine the scenes and vignettes as the Panopticon’s cells which exist as stationary and immovable before the reader (guard). Just because we read one scene, this doesn’t mean the existence of others has been erased. It exists as a totality. The book and its temporal depictions of violence do not stop-and-start just because the reader turns their gaze from it. The asymmetrical movement is therefore that the reader can put the book down and exit the story.

Readers of Exit West must confront the uncomfortable truth that because necropolitics is represented on the page, and the aesthetics involve the reader, they are spectators of necropolitics. Spectatorship is not innocent and is itself a technology of necropolitical governance. From the outset, the aesthetics of necropolitics in Exi’s text and para-texts are visible to readers. That the reader does not always recognise necropolitics is a part of its design, nor is it expected that the term necropolitics is familiar. Necropolitics is deliberately sly. Its survival depends on hiding in plain sight and is something that we, collectively in the West, have been conditioned not to notice. Death is still considered taboo in Western countries. Our desensitisation to necropolitical violence is a core feature of today’s biopolitical control.  

Conclusion: Producing ‘The Refugee’ and Policing your own Witness

To accept the book as a sociological object, we must accept that it is received by people who both recognise it as art and by those who do not (Bourdieu, 1993). Nonetheless, the extent to which readers resonate with the necropolitics or anonymity surrounding the city, the refugees, and militants, speaks to their wider awareness of whose lives are considered of more value today, and turns our attention to those wider forces seemingly with the power to assign this value. 

Ironically, when reflecting on the privilege of the reader, it is crucial to avoid over-centering the reader. Within the panoptical metaphor, the agency of refugees is not defined by entrapment in the panopticon’s cell. Framing refugees as being trapped under surveillance is only productive if we linguistically destabilise the power asymmetry too. A way in which the reader can start reflecting on their own surveillance is to look outside of their existing knowledge structures and listen to stories about the refugee from people with lived experience. Humans are sociogenic creatures, we exist by biology and narrative (Fanon, 1952; Wynter, 2015), since it is simply how we speak that we can tell people who we are. 

Language used to talk about refugees is merely one method of producing ‘the refugee’ as a distinct cultural and aesthetic category. As this post has asserted, the actual act of reading itself is not an innocent practice. The reader experiences slow violence due to the aesthetics of Exit West, reading on hopeful for a happy ending which is cruelly unresolved. Readers who do not reflect on their asymmetrical power and spectatorship of the necropolitical arena, mirror Western countries who speak with dismay about refugees and victims of war yet also take little responsibility for them, evidenced by the closing and externalisation of borders. So, I ask you readers, how do you police your own witness?