West Exists in Exit West: Portrayal of Orientalism and the Concept of Other in Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West

Abstract

Mohsin Hamid (1971), a renown Pakistani novelist, is one of the emerging talents in the field of fiction writing. He has authored the famous Pen/ Hemingway award nominated novel Moth Smoke (2000) and another remarkable metafictional novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007), along with some other works of worth reading. The current study aims at exploring the postcolonial concept ‘Othering’ in Hamid’s novel Exit West (2017). The paper explores how ‘Othering’ is inseparable for the postcolonial people and how they suffer physically, culturally, and psychologically for just being others, orients, or Asians. It also examines that how these people in authority ‘West’ use ‘Othering’ as a tool to fulfill their own vested interests by degrading the other people on various grounds like race, culture, ethnicity, geography, and so on. The theoretical framework for this research paper is based on ‘Orientalism’ and the concept of ‘Other” coined by Edward Said ‘Orientalism’ which has a lot of aspects encapsulated in it that help compare and show the contrasting elements between the oppressor, ‘West’ and the oppressed “East’. It also explores how the West uses the self-legitimated authority to exploit the other people whom they differentiate from them using the terms ‘Us’ and ‘Them’.