Brief biography of mohsin hamid was born in Pakistan, but he spent much of his
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| Related Themes: Page Number 166 Explanation and Analysis This passage occurs after the angry nativist mobs in London stop attacking the refugee community. Hamid postulates in this paragraph that these xenophobic Britons finally realized either that enforcing national borders is impossible in a world full of portals, or that defending these borders is such an obviously ignoble thing to do that nobody can commit him- or herself to the task for very long before realizing the error of his or her ways. After all, to enforce such divisions eventually requires extreme violence, and would require Londoners to corral and bloody and where necessary slaughter the migrants who, it should be noted, merely seek safety. Of course, doing this would be a shameful, deeply hostile and immoral act, something no parent could possibly brag about to his or her children. By clarifying the various considerations that must have gone into the nativists’ decision to leave the migrant population alone, Hamid suggests that advocating for the division of humans based on cultural or national groupings is an intrinsically uphill battle. Unity, love, and connection, he seems to say in this moment, always wins out over bigotry and xenophobia. Get hundreds more LitCharts at www.litcharts.com ©2018 LitCharts LLC v.006 www.LitCharts.com Page 17 Chapter 9 Quotes Saeed did not ask Nadia to pray with him for his father, and she did not offer, but when he was gathering a circle of acquaintances to pray in the long evening shadow cast by their dormitory, she said she would like to join the circle, to sit with Saeed and the others, even if not engaged in supplication herself, and he smiled and said there was no need. And she had no answer to this. But she stayed anyway, next to Saeed on the naked earth that had been stripped of plants by hundreds of thousands of footsteps and rutted by the tires of ponderously heavy vehicles, feeling for the first time unwelcome. Or perhaps unengaged. Or perhaps both. Download 0.56 Mb. Share with your friends:
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