ohsin Hamid’s latest novel The Last White Man, shows his enduring preoccupation with racism as humanity’s inimitable challenge. However, the novel’s beginning sounds familiar as the protagonist undergoes a transmutation; “One morning Anders, a white man, woke up to find he had turned a deep and undeniable brown”. In Kafka’s The Metamorphosis Samsa turns into a cockroach; confined, and immovable. Anders discovers himself in a world turning into dark skin people – the whiteness is withering. Hamid’s propensity for surprise and the flair for intertextual fabulism sets the tone for the novel. The protagonist’s self-revelation gives rise to the imagery of metamorphism. There are melees in an unnamed US town; the air is surreptitious, and people upload videos of sporadic violence, giving way to online conspiracy theories.

Meanwhile, Anders’s transformation reveals various levels of change ranging from social to racial and subjective to collective. As more and more people turn dark, a state of quarantine materialises unofficially: “Online the conversation had moved on to the search for a cure […] while some were trying to retreat”. The disappearance of whiteness is of pandemic proportion as Hamid implicitly contextualises the Covid-induced pandemic’s consequences. The more recent interludes of racial tensions echo peripherally: Black Lives Matter, Capitol Hill Occupied Protest, the Rwanda Refugee Plan, and post-Brexit Europe. Consequently, the novel’s narrative extracts both modernity’s helplessness and resilience in coping with natural and man-made disasters. However, what makes the narrative of this novel tantalising is the author’s brutal objectivity showing a world malleable to the violence of atavistic urges and relapsing into racial binaries.

Anders’s initial response to his altered condition is frenetic. He cannot believe the removal of his organic ‘complexion’ let alone its cognitive outcome, wondering if the event was a “trick, an optical illusion, or a mental artifact”. Psychologically stunned, he loses appetite; a ‘murderous rage’ seizes him, and the world outside becomes alien. The element of disbelief, expressed by Anders after finding his skin turning brown, is something Hamid captures with a gleeful grandeur - immediately after the discriminatory history of coloured people, from Columbus to George Floyd, comes to the forefront. Unable to quarantine and compelled by the mundane, Anders visits the grocery store. Meanwhile, the very thought that he has not met anyone after he has ‘changed’ perturbs him as the clerk at the till does not recognise him. Carrying the full ‘weight’ of this inhospitable transformation Anders looks for ‘whiteness’ around him. Here’s a ‘paranoid’ expecting the return to normalcy.

Hamid deftly uses the synecdoche of normalcy in this novel. Black is “not normal”, white is. This is evident as when Anders returns after finishing his first errand, he catches his reflection in the rear view mirror of his car – a face unfamiliar, but a part of it ‘less white’ as if this weird process of skin pigmentation would somehow abort, returning him to his genetic whiteness. Conversely, as time passes Anders’ nerves crack, and a feeling of apocalyptic eventuality overwhelms him. This is manifested in the first few pages of the novel. Writing protracted sentences Hamid steers readers’ imagination – characteristic of pulp fiction – with surreal images of le frisson: “Anders waited for an undoing, an undoing that did not come […] realised that he had been robbed, that he was the victim of crime”. Hamid’s scheme is predictable in that only the colour of skin determines consciousness – a return to the Fanonian thesis.

So the question is whether novels are about the self or about the process of laying bare a character’s psyche. In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera states, “The novel is not the author’s confession; it is an investigation of human life in the trap, the world has become”. Discussing the point, Kundera argues that “All novels, of every age, are concerned with the enigma of the self”. The Last White Man on one hand is the study of the self, tormented by modernity’s cataclysmic character. On the other hand, it is about human actions enshrined in their political and cultural legacies. The notion of action is at the heart of artistic mimesis, which the Greeks laid down as the principle of creative aesthetics. Since the modern novel is often characterised as a psychological novel, the classical notion of action, the essence of a good plot, is put on the back burner.

Given our racial and ecological choices, Hamid shows the inevitability of a dystopian menace. 

Exponentially, the self as a quandary suggested by Kundera permeates Hamid’s last two novels. In The Last White Man as Anders struggles with his ‘new version’, his perspective also blurs. He is out of sorts with his dying father, his girlfriend and future wife, Oona, Oona’s bigoted mother, and his boss; a fitness instructor in a gym, now he grapples with his mental fitness. Adding insult to Anders’s bruised self his boss, an aggressive suburbanite, insinuates him to commit suicide. These alternatives, such as self-extinction, are signs of racial malaise, a sort of contagion to which even bastions of liberal modernity capitulate. Anders hears stories of dark men killing themselves. But “the dark man and the white man were the same” – liminal victims. Taking advantage of this uncertainty, the town is taken over by militants, brawlers and shooters. Given our racial and ecological choices, Hamid shows the inevitability of a dystopian menace. Even a mere street scuffle rips the facade of global complacencies.

On the other hand, “Being stuck indoors exacted its toll” – this flat realism disallows fantasy to take control of human life because the gradual removal of whiteness brings new forms of insecurities and surveillance. The “unease’ prevails as Anders drives to his father’s place hiding his face at “intersection” – mentally white but physically dark – “like a herbivore” out for “self-preservation, ascertaining what was ahead”. Anders’s father instantly rejects a “darkened son” but as time passes reconciles with the death of his son’s whiteness and his biological death. He is The Last White Man facing the genetic permutation of his progeny. Saeed’s father in Exit West, and Anders share a singular thread of tribal integrity – father figures around sons – however, the novel catechizes esprit de corps based on race. What redeems Anders is the paternal love and the pride he has felt for his father who encourages him to carry a gun as militates comb the town. Anders nurses his father till the latter is taken to the graveyard. The spectacle of burial is given an intensely visceral treatment. Hamid shows the spontaneity of human passion taking an upper hand against a buildup of a society communicating now mostly online.

Oona’s response to Anders’ transformation is checked by her mother’s obsession with race, a signifier of Whiteman’s superiority. To Oona’s mother’s utter shock, the former applies dark makeup and watches her older self, lurching at her in the mirror. But her mother desists; she personifies Kipling’s Whiteman’s burden – hates the very possibility of the “eradication” of her “tribe” and hopes there is a cure. She is also a remote version of Shakespeare’s Prospero in The Tempest, a white owner of an island of black slaves. In one of the most revelatory moments in the novel, Oona’s mother becomes petrified imagining the possibility of having dark grandchildren. Every character in the novel is in some dismal valley of mourning. Against this grim backdrop Oona, a yoga teacher takes care of her mother. Additionally, Hamid shows love by taking the better part of racial hatred. Hamid’s novels do have love plots and love triangles; pairings of perfidious and disillusioned lovers- Erica-Changez, Daru-Mumtaz and Saeed-Nadia. However, in The Last White Man, the love interest underpins an additional agenda. The lovers, initially, are pathological - peering at their skins. To redress this, Hamid shows lovemaking, in all his novels, as a way of counter viewing crude realities of global politics; a respite to which the narrative clings off and on.

To that end, Hamid’s plots are also imbued with a modernist fondness for fragmentation of self, exemplified in literary feats such as Eliot’s The Wasteland, and Joyce’s Ulysses. Resultantly, literary post-modernism, a response to some of the artifice of modernism, constructed the discursive rupturing of the human condition. One can say that the self cannot be independent of external forces – a paradox Hamid also entertains with a conviction. From Daru (Moth Smoke) to Changez (The Reluctant Fundamentalist), to Saeed and Nadia, (Exit West) to Anders – a line of characters struggling against the ferocity of times in a world becoming unlivable by the day. The novel’s penultimate episode - of the graveyard - is followed by a time-lapse of many years as Anders’s teenage daughter is shown slipping into her parents’ bed, an intimate gesture of humanity springing from a collective gene pool. Nonetheless, to this trajectory of the human condition, political upman-ship is the only answer. Writing in The Guardian in an essay (2017), Hamid mimicked Sartrean tone to show his faith in a “radically politically engaged fiction” obviously hoping that readers, if only fractionally, might become the vicarious bearers of change the societies and cultures desperately need.

The Last White Man

By Mohsin Hamid

Publisher: Hamish Hamilton, UK

Pages: 180

Price: Rs 1,795

The writer is a poet based in Lahore. His first collection of poems Lahore, I Am Coming (2017) was published by Punjab University Press