A New Lightness
Mohsin Hamid, The Last White Man: A Novel
Hamish Hamilton, 192pp, £12.99, ISBN 978-0241566572
reviewed by Michael Duffy
In his 1952 disquisition on the experience of blackness, Black Skin, White Masks, the French-Martinique philosopher Frantz Fanon asserts the equality of all men before recounting his experience of an encounter with a white family. Fanon writes that, among black friends and family, his blackness was unremarkable, but this changes under the racialising gaze of empire: ‘the occasion arose when I had to meet the white man's eyes. An unfamiliar weight burdened me.’ It is this unfamiliar weight that is explored in Mohsin Hamid’s latest novel. Stripping skin colour from its long history of exploitation, resistance, family and violence, The Last White Man imagines a post-racial world and its transition point.
The novel follows Anders and Oona, a loosely connected couple whose lives are untangling and stagnating in an unnamed — possibly Scandinavian — town. As time passes in the novel, the white people of this town are waking to find that their skin has turned dark. The sudden disassociation of these darkened characters from their experience of whiteness is further compounded by the fact that their physiology changes completely — they become unrecogniseable, erasing not only the lines between black and white, but between black and formerly-white. The first character to experience this transformation is Anders, a personal trainer at a ‘black iron gym, a rough gym, where men, and it was usually only men, tested themselves with barbells against gravity.’ The gym is the first introduction of the spatialisation of race within the novel and society; always focalised through the previously white Anders, the almost exclusively male space is also an almost exclusively white space, although the latter is only recognised after his change.
The novel is structured three parts that chart the shift in the body politic of Anders and Oona’s town. It opens with Anders grappling with feelings of paranoia and discomfort: his understanding of race, and the entrenched views of his town, means his experience of blackness cannot be fully untethered from the racialising gaze. At each moment that he reveals himself to those around him it is difficult to parse whether Anders is experiencing racist treatment or simply embodying his own shame: working out, he ‘suspected it was only in his imagination that he saw the flickers of hostility or distaste’; the first time he meets his previously disinterested girlfriend, Oona they find themselves quickly engaging in exploratory and introspective sex. As he meets with his previous friends, Anders tries hard to re-assimilate, and the performative elements of racial identity are brought to the fore, ‘he began [. . .] to mirror the others around him, to echo the way they spoke and walked and moved and the way they held their mouths, like they were performing something, and he was trying to perform it too, but whatever it was it was not enough.’ However, this ambiguity is rapidly quashed when Anders’s manager responds to his blackness by saying simply: ‘I would have killed myself.’
The second part of the novel accompanies the spreading of blackness throughout Anders’s community. It is greeted by violence, riots, and conspiracy theory. It is hard not to draw comparisons to the COVID-19 pandemic as cures, resistance, and tribalism spread rapidly online along with images and videos of the erupting violence: the first man to follow Anders’s manager’s advice; eviction of now-black families from white neighbourhoods; and the increasing divide between the liberal Anders and Oona and their remaining parents. Anders’ father — the eponymous Last White Man — offers an intricate and sympathetic narrative of physical pain and illness, but it is Oona’s mother who settles comfortably within Hamid’s ruminations on race and identity in 2022.
Introduced through her reliance on a favourite TV channel and her engagement with online communities, Hamid utilises an appropriate euphemism of ‘the online’ to imply Oona’s mother’s investment in narratives of white power, false flag protests, , and scientific denial that situate the novel imaginatively within the context of COVID-19 and the end of Donald Trump’s presidency. As Anders’s change places her daughter in a dreaded interracial relationship, Oona’s mother retreats further into the online world that reinforces her superiority — even in a world where the end of her white privilege is presented as inevitable. Scouring the internet for cures, preventions, and a version of hope, the post-racial future of Hamid’s novel reaches her home, her daughter, and eventually, ‘as though she had held out as long as she could’ it reaches Oona’s mother, leaving her with no option but to join the world in accepting the ‘unfamiliar weight’ of Fanon’s anecdote.
The weight on Oona’s mother comes in contrast to Oona herself, who experiences her transformation as a new lightness, the removal of a burden: ‘she could shed her skin as a snake sheds its skin . . . abandon the confinement of the past, and, unfettered, again, to grow.’ As with Hamid’s previous novel, Exit West (2017), The Last White Man ends on a note of hope, on a collapsing of time that imagines a future in which racial difference and borders become irrelevant. Hamid’s prose is measured and thoughtful; each paragraph is made up of a single long, multi-clause sentence. They offer an apt formal counterpart to Hamid’s narrative project — inquisitive, questioning, determined to think ideas and social problems through to their very end.
In his first three novels — Moth Smoke (2000), The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2000) and How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia (2013) — Hamid followed Pakistani characters coming to terms with prejudice and class division in Pakistan and the US. However, since the publication of his essays Discontent and it’s Civilisations (2013), Hamid’s narrative project has relinquished its conflicted and embattled Pakistani protagonists and shifted towards imagined locations in which global crises are played out within turbulent familial spaces. The unnamed towns of Hamid’s past two novels have offered him a petri dish in which to investigate political and philosophical questions about the contemporary structures of power that occupy his journalism. What is more, the magical realist conceits — of changing skin colour in The Last White Man and portals in Exit West — create a space in which these structures inevitably break down. While Hamid’s novels interrogate the persistent subjects of his non-fiction, his artful experimentation with character and narrative voice supplement and enliven these explorations of identity and inequality.
The novel follows Anders and Oona, a loosely connected couple whose lives are untangling and stagnating in an unnamed — possibly Scandinavian — town. As time passes in the novel, the white people of this town are waking to find that their skin has turned dark. The sudden disassociation of these darkened characters from their experience of whiteness is further compounded by the fact that their physiology changes completely — they become unrecogniseable, erasing not only the lines between black and white, but between black and formerly-white. The first character to experience this transformation is Anders, a personal trainer at a ‘black iron gym, a rough gym, where men, and it was usually only men, tested themselves with barbells against gravity.’ The gym is the first introduction of the spatialisation of race within the novel and society; always focalised through the previously white Anders, the almost exclusively male space is also an almost exclusively white space, although the latter is only recognised after his change.
The novel is structured three parts that chart the shift in the body politic of Anders and Oona’s town. It opens with Anders grappling with feelings of paranoia and discomfort: his understanding of race, and the entrenched views of his town, means his experience of blackness cannot be fully untethered from the racialising gaze. At each moment that he reveals himself to those around him it is difficult to parse whether Anders is experiencing racist treatment or simply embodying his own shame: working out, he ‘suspected it was only in his imagination that he saw the flickers of hostility or distaste’; the first time he meets his previously disinterested girlfriend, Oona they find themselves quickly engaging in exploratory and introspective sex. As he meets with his previous friends, Anders tries hard to re-assimilate, and the performative elements of racial identity are brought to the fore, ‘he began [. . .] to mirror the others around him, to echo the way they spoke and walked and moved and the way they held their mouths, like they were performing something, and he was trying to perform it too, but whatever it was it was not enough.’ However, this ambiguity is rapidly quashed when Anders’s manager responds to his blackness by saying simply: ‘I would have killed myself.’
The second part of the novel accompanies the spreading of blackness throughout Anders’s community. It is greeted by violence, riots, and conspiracy theory. It is hard not to draw comparisons to the COVID-19 pandemic as cures, resistance, and tribalism spread rapidly online along with images and videos of the erupting violence: the first man to follow Anders’s manager’s advice; eviction of now-black families from white neighbourhoods; and the increasing divide between the liberal Anders and Oona and their remaining parents. Anders’ father — the eponymous Last White Man — offers an intricate and sympathetic narrative of physical pain and illness, but it is Oona’s mother who settles comfortably within Hamid’s ruminations on race and identity in 2022.
Introduced through her reliance on a favourite TV channel and her engagement with online communities, Hamid utilises an appropriate euphemism of ‘the online’ to imply Oona’s mother’s investment in narratives of white power, false flag protests, , and scientific denial that situate the novel imaginatively within the context of COVID-19 and the end of Donald Trump’s presidency. As Anders’s change places her daughter in a dreaded interracial relationship, Oona’s mother retreats further into the online world that reinforces her superiority — even in a world where the end of her white privilege is presented as inevitable. Scouring the internet for cures, preventions, and a version of hope, the post-racial future of Hamid’s novel reaches her home, her daughter, and eventually, ‘as though she had held out as long as she could’ it reaches Oona’s mother, leaving her with no option but to join the world in accepting the ‘unfamiliar weight’ of Fanon’s anecdote.
The weight on Oona’s mother comes in contrast to Oona herself, who experiences her transformation as a new lightness, the removal of a burden: ‘she could shed her skin as a snake sheds its skin . . . abandon the confinement of the past, and, unfettered, again, to grow.’ As with Hamid’s previous novel, Exit West (2017), The Last White Man ends on a note of hope, on a collapsing of time that imagines a future in which racial difference and borders become irrelevant. Hamid’s prose is measured and thoughtful; each paragraph is made up of a single long, multi-clause sentence. They offer an apt formal counterpart to Hamid’s narrative project — inquisitive, questioning, determined to think ideas and social problems through to their very end.
In his first three novels — Moth Smoke (2000), The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2000) and How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia (2013) — Hamid followed Pakistani characters coming to terms with prejudice and class division in Pakistan and the US. However, since the publication of his essays Discontent and it’s Civilisations (2013), Hamid’s narrative project has relinquished its conflicted and embattled Pakistani protagonists and shifted towards imagined locations in which global crises are played out within turbulent familial spaces. The unnamed towns of Hamid’s past two novels have offered him a petri dish in which to investigate political and philosophical questions about the contemporary structures of power that occupy his journalism. What is more, the magical realist conceits — of changing skin colour in The Last White Man and portals in Exit West — create a space in which these structures inevitably break down. While Hamid’s novels interrogate the persistent subjects of his non-fiction, his artful experimentation with character and narrative voice supplement and enliven these explorations of identity and inequality.