Sunday, September 18, 2022

Many shades of prejudice

It holds a mirror on the prevailing culture of alienation that cause us to see others as threats.

The Last White Man, Mohsin Hamid’s fifth novel, opens with a distinctly Kafkaesque imagination: ‘One morning Anders, a white man, woke up to find he had turned a deep and undeniable brown’. No reason is assigned to this dramatic transformation, but the short novel of long-sentences explores its impact on Anders, his girlfriend, and the people who live in the unnamed town. Trapped indoors because he dreads stepping outside, Anders soon learns that skin color is not frivolous, it gives us our identity that has influence on our bodies and actions. Color is both medium, and the message. As more people change color, the transformation begins to spread across the town such that there is just one white man left, and then there are none. 

Poetic and strangely musical, The Last White Man is a perspective-altering allegory of being the other person within the same body. Anders surreal transformation upends his world, robbed of the white privileges he is forced to create space for himself in the world. It compels him to examine the otherness of others by being the other, drawing distinction on being invisible now as was hypervisible before. It was shocking for him to realize what color does to one’s existence: people who knew him no longer knew him. Neither on the street and nor at the grocery store, nobody noticed his transformation – reflecting a flicker of disliking from the White people. No one hit him or knifed him, but Anders was not sure where the sense of threat was coming from, but it was there, and it was strong. He remains apprehensive about using the rifle his ailing (white) father gave him ‘to be seen as a threat, as dark as he was, was to risk one day being obliterated’. 

It is a discomforting book that explores racism through speculative change, but remains optimistic towards anticipated societal transformation. Can such a future be deferred for long? It is a question The Last White Man seeks to address by drawing attention to racism paranoia. It is through a feeling of ‘belonging’ or ‘not belonging’, and the imminent danger from those who belong to the category one doesn’t belong can an imaginative narrative be created to envision a world bereft of such threat impulse. Concerned about the unusual transformation are four characters, Anders and his ailing father, his girlfriend Oona and her mother, who lend human face to probe a deep-seated and deeply problematic obsession with whiteness. While Anders father is worried about his son’s safety, Oona’s mother resents her daughter’s relationship. Social perception to the transformed appearance lets loose a can of dreadful worms, as violence spills on the streets. 

Did post-9/11 experience by the author reflect upon the story? Hamid has been reported saying that as a Pakistani Muslim living in the US, the post-9/11 experience of being stopped at the airport and seeing people nervous in his presence had real effects on the story. ‘I hadn’t changed, but, almost overnight, the new racial and ethnic category had been imagined on to me.’ The Last White Man holds a mirror on the prevailing culture of alienation that cause us to see others as threats. Anders sums this up: ‘he wasn’t sure he was the same person, he had begun by feeling that under the surface it was still him, who else could it be, but it was not that simple, and the way people act around you, it changes what you are, who you are.’ Talking sense into someone in these troubled times isn’t easy, but fiction holds the power to disarm dominant narratives.  

The Last White Man is a short novel of very long sentences, over 30 coma at times in a sentence. Although not counted, the book may have no more than 180 sentences. And, there seems a lyrical purpose to it as the inimitable style allows the idea to grow with all its related and unrelated inferences and references. It gives the story a nuanced impact. The story is poignant and pointed, speaking for a more equitable future in which widespread change can serve to erase the entrenched divisions of the old fade away. Hamid offers swelling remorse and expansive empathy, a story of love, loss and rediscovery.

Hamid ends this strange, beautiful allegorical tale on a hopeful note, with Anders and Oona blessed with a daughter who is brown in color. And while memories of whiteness receded, memories of whiteness lingered too. The whiteness could no longer be seen but was still a part of them. The times had long changed, and the extraordinary power of transformation had stripped the world of its racial prejudice.

The Last White Man 
by Mohsin Hamid
Penguin, New Delhi 
Extent: 180, Price: Rs. 599.

First published in Deccan Herald dated Sept 18, 2022.

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