Many shades of prejudice

In Mohsin Hamid’s Kafkaesque new novel, a white man wakes up to discover he has turned brown. This is a story of love, loss and rediscovery told with swelling remorse and poetic empathy.

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 colour is not frivolous, it gives us our identity, and it has an influence on our bodies and actions. Colour is both the medium and the message. As more people change colour, 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 previously enjoyed, he is forced to create a space for himself in the world.

It compels him to examine the otherness of others by being the other, drawing a distinction between being invisible now against being hypervisible before.

It is shocking for him to realise what colour does to one’s existence: people who knew him no longer know him. Neither on the street nor at the grocery store; nobody notices his transformation — a further confirmation of his ‘invisibility’ perhaps? No one hits him or knifes him, but Anders is not sure where the sense of threat is coming from, but it is there, and it is strong. He remains apprehensive about using the rifle his ailing (white) father gave him; because, ‘to be seen as a threat, as dark as he was, was to risk one day being obliterated’.

Who belongs and who does not

It is a discomfiting book that explores racism through speculative change but remains optimistic about 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 to, can an imaginative narrative be created to envision a world bereft of such threat impulses. Concerned about the unusual transformation are four characters, Anders and his ailing father, his girlfriend Oona and her mother, who together lend a human touch to the 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 perceptions of the transformed appearance result in violence spilling onto the streets.

Is the author’s own post-9/11 experience reflected in 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 him.

‘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 to the prevailing culture of alienation that causes us to see others as threats. Anders sums up 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.

Lyrical purpose

As mentioned before, The Last White Man is a short novel of very long sentences with over 30 commas 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 writing is poignant and pointed, speaking for a more equitable future in which widespread change can serve to erase the entrenched divisions of the old. Hamid offers swelling remorse and expansive empathy in this story of love, loss and rediscovery.

The author ends this strange, beautiful allegorical tale on a hopeful note, with Anders and Oona blessed with a daughter who is brown in colour.

And while memories of whiteness recede, memories of whiteness linger too.

The whiteness that can no longer be seen but is still a part of them in a world where the times have long changed, and the extraordinary power of transformation has stripped it of its racial prejudice.