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 26 Explanation and Analysis In this passage, Hamid describes the state of Saeed and Nadia’s city on the night they first goon a date, after which they move through the streets on their way to Nadia’s apartment. In doing so, they must navigate tents and “lean-tos” as well as avast array of bodies splayed out sleeping (or dying) on the ground. By cataloguing what the young couple witnesses in this moment, Hamid brings readers into the experience of living in a city that is—as he has previously stated—“swollen by refugees Migrant life is on display here, meaning that Nadia and Saeed can’t simply ignore the fact that the regions surrounding their city are undergoing even worse bouts of violence, since the people they see sleeping on the sidewalks have fled their own homes and flocked to the city for safety. Of course, it isn’t long before Saeed and Nadia find themselves living intents in refugee communities established in foreign countries, so this harrowing look at the fear and desperation of migrant life is both informative and foreboding. Indeed, like many of the people they pass on the street, they too will soon try to “re-create the rhythms of their lives in strange new environments. At the same time, this passage allows the book to comment on the way that the West often thinks about migrants. In this passage, there are forced migrants on the streets of Saeed and Nadia’s city, but Saeed and Nadia themselves are not at all migrants. And they seethe migrants more as “bodies” than as people. The West does the same thing, and when Saeed and Nadia are forced to become refugees they get viewed by Westerners as being bodies rather than Get hundreds more LitCharts at www.litcharts.com ©2018 LitCharts LLC v.006 www.LitCharts.com Page 11 people. The book then both universalizes and complicates the concept of migrancy: it reinforces that anyone can end up becoming a refugee, but that non-refugees always have the tendency to view refugees as being less than or even somehow deserving of their refugee status. And in revealing this tendency of people, the book criticizes such a narrow and selfish worldview. In times of violence, there is always that first acquaintance or intimate of ours, who, when they are touched, makes what had seemed like a bad dream suddenly, evisceratingly real. For Nadia this person washer cousin, a man of considerable determination and intellect, who even when he was young had never cared much for play, who seemed to laugh only rarely, who had won medals in school and decided to become a doctor, who had successfully emigrated abroad, who returned once a year to visit his parents, and who, along with eighty-five others, was blown by a truck bomb to bits, literally to bits, the largest of which, in Nadia’s cousin’s case, were ahead and two-thirds of an arm. Download 0.56 Mb. Share with your friends:
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