Brief biography of mohsin hamid was born in Pakistan, but he spent much of his
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| Related Characters Saeed, Nadia Related Themes: Page Number 165 Explanation and Analysis In this passage, Hamid spotlights Saeed’s strong commitment to his relationship with Nadia. In response to the uncertainty of living in London under the threat of nativist British mobs who want to harm the refugee community, Saeed considers his love for Nadia, wanting to “protect” her but also realizing that there’s only so much he can do to keep her safe in such hostile and unpredictable circumstances. To make things worse, the couple has “decided not to run meaning that—for the first time in their experience as refugees—escape is not an option. Of course, this only increases Saeed’s feeling of vulnerability regarding his inability to protect Nadia, but the decision also denotes a recognition of the fact that running away is in fact a gamble in and of itself, a game of roulette that might result in even worse circumstances. By establishing this notion, Hamid does two things. First, he prepares readers to better understand just how discontent Nadia and Saeed are when they later reverse their decision and opt to go through yet another door. Second, he makes clear just how contingent and vulnerable the lives of refugees areas they have little control over whether they can improve their situations. Perhaps they had decided they did not have it in them to do what would have needed to be done, to corral and bloody and where necessary slaughter the migrants, and had determined that some other way would have to be found. Perhaps they had grasped that the doors could not be closed, and new doors would continue to open, and they had understood that the denial of coexistence would have required one party to cease to exist, and the extinguishing party too would have been transformed in the process, and too many native parents would not after have been able to look their children in the eye, to speak with head held high of what their generation had done. Or perhaps the sheer number of places where there were now doors had made it useless to fight in any one. Download 0.56 Mb. Share with your friends:
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