When those strange columns of people who travel through inhospitable spaces appear on television, between fictitious borders that rise up like physical walls, in our homes we do some kind of abstraction exercise that should prevent us from thinking about the atrociousness of the matter, in the little that we are far from any previous era that we thought had been surpassed and vastly improved. Or perhaps it is a matter of assuming that the welfare state of some must be compensated with the discomfort of others. Interesting task of alienation that someone manages to insert onto our consciences.
Books like this Welcome to the west they should be labeled as necessary. If reality does not impress us, perhaps fiction will catch up with us. That must have been the idea of the Pakistani writer Mohsin Hamid when he began to imagine the story of his characters Nadia and Said.
They are a couple in love whose idyllic picture of nascent love is distorted by the circumstances in which they live. And yet that infatuation serves them, and serves the reader, to give an allegorical touch to cruel reality. Love in adverse circumstances goes from being a tragic matter, a literary argument to becoming an excuse to try to draw in our imaginary that cruel reality that the objectivity of the newscasts does not quite reach.
And yes, it can be said that the story ends well, moderately well. Nadia and Said reach San Francisco, another side of the world without bomb echoes or a curfew. But the important thing is the journey, the odyssey, whatever you want to call what it means to travel without knowing how far, to move around the world without a place where you can think about living decently, moving forward leaving your homeland behind, and surely forever because you they have stolen it.
Migration rights as legal justification and last moral protection with which to cover our eyes ...
You can now buy the novel Welcome to the west, Mohsin Hamid's new book, here:
1 comment on "Welcome to the West, by Mohsin Hamid"