A work of imagination asks us to see race in a new way from a novelist
once again. Taking on magical realism. Jeffrey Brown sits down with
Pakistani writer Mohsin Hamid for our arts and Culture series canvas.
One morning, Anders.
A white man.
Woke up to find he had turned a deep and undeniable brown.
The first line of Mohsin Hamid's new novel, a play on Franz Kafka's
famous first line of the metamorphosis. A man wakes up as something
different now a direct focus on race. The novel really began with
that idea of a character waking up a different color. That was the
image that hit you. Yeah, there was a notion that I had of wanting
to write about race and identity.
And it had been sitting in the back of my mind for many years,
but I needed I guess a novelistic way into the idea would write a
kind of fable with the provocative title. The last white man in which
people in an unnamed place begin to wake up transformed one thing
that the arts and and writing gets to do.
Is to remind us that we're sort of making up things as we go along
that that reality isn't as real as we might imagine it to be.
And that something like race, which you might think of as an actual
objective. Real thing is an imagined phenomenon.
And because it's imagined it can be reimagined. The book is about
The loss of something. The 51 year old Hamid, whom I met recently
in New York, has lived between countries and cultures, but he refers
to as a hybridized life. Born into a Punjabi family in Lahore, Pakistan,
he spent part of his childhood in California, where his father studied
for a PhD at Stanford. He later returned to the US to attend Princeton
and Harvard Law School.
And then worked in New York and London before turning full time to
writing back in Lahore. The new novel, he says, dates back to 9 11
and how he saw his own privileged place change, losing what he now
describes as a kind of partial whiteness that defined him in the
world, even as a brown man, and it was really only after 9 11 that
I began to encounter in a more concerted way, this notion that I
was someone
Suspicious. I was somebody threatening, you know that I would be
stopped at the airport or stopped at immigration or people would
behave strangely if I walked onto a subway, car or bus with a backpack.
After 9 11 and I was forced to reckon with a different standing.
I was also forced to reckon with the fact that I hadn't properly
reckoned with it until now, you know, why didn't I come to this realization
without being forced upon me? You were enjoying many of the benefits
of global citizenship and the kind of elite exactly exactly so I
think that, um
Really got me thinking how easy it is to sort of be complicit in
something.
And and and then and then to be forced to grapple with it when you're
unable to easily access those benefits in different ways is novels
and other writings have grappled with this post 9 11 world.
You picked a side after 9 11. I didn't have to.
It was picked for the reluctant fundamentalist turned into a film,
directed by Mira Nair portrays a young Pakistani on his way to achieving
the American dream becoming radicalized.
The characters in exit West, where migrants who with a bit of magical
realism passed through invisible portals into new worlds. So 9 11
changed you as a person. It clearly changed you as a writer as well
began to see similarities in different places. And so it wasn't just
that in America, for example, this notion of Muslims being seen as
a threat.
There was also in Pakistan. The idea that you know Western ideas
were potentially a threat or having a particular secular outlook
was seen as a threat.
And as I traveled around the world and lived in different places,
I came to see that this kind of
Fetishization of purity.
Of the real people. Whether it was happening in Modi's India or are
the ones Turkey or Putin's Russia or in Pakistan or in America was
happening all over the place that we were increasingly sorting ourselves
into groups and that we are increasingly prone to thinking that,
you know.
Um
That these groups are real and that they are meaningful. You started
this new novel, A white man wakes up turning brown other novels taking
on issues of migration and terrorism in the past.
Do you write fiction with a purpose? I like to spend time in my imagination.
But also the world bothers me.
And, um, it isn't the way I would wish it to be.
And so the same way that my son will walk around the house pretending
to be a dinosaur, and he's a mighty and powerful, You know, T Rex
instead of a 10 year old boy.
I try to imagine the world differently. And that can be a world where
migration is easier. It can be a world where ideas of race are challenged.
All of these things in a way for me are about making the world more
hospitable to my way of being. I guess I don't want to give away
what happens in this fable of yours, but
You are trying to see something different, perhaps even better.
You're completely comfortable tackling the big stuff.
In life in fiction. Yeah, I think fiction is very important right
now. You know, we we need to find ways to talk about things
that allow everybody in that isn't dependent on you know, Are you
from Pakistan or America? Is your skin lighter or darker? Are you
Muslim or Christian background?
And throughout human history. Storytelling has been one of the primary
ways We've done that. And so I feel very much part of that tradition.
It's not something new. I think it's it's what we have storytelling
for in large part
Alright. The new novel is the last white man. Mohsin Hamid. Thank
you very much. Thank you.