“We’ve had a lot of cultural imagination of the way when dark-skinned people will be treated equally,” he says. “What we haven’t had so much of is an imagining of what if whiteness itself disappeared? And we were just with people? I thought that was worth playing with.”
The opening lines of The Last White Man are written to deliberately evoke Kafka’s Metamorphosis, another novel about a man’s physical transformation. Hamid says that the nod is intended as a minor reference, but the work of modernist writers such as Kafka has informed the book.
“Of course, Kafka was not the first person to imagine somebody transformed. In fiction you go to The Arabian Nights a thousand years before Kafka, you go back to Greek myths a thousand years before that, Hindu narratives thousands of years before that. It’s something that’s been happening in literature and religious texts for millennia.
“But writers like Jorge Luis Borges, Kafka, Virginia Woolf were playing with form in a time like ours, where you had mounting hatreds, technological change, wars being fought, and I think that’s a relevant moment in literary history.”
In particular, Hamid finds similarities between the religious persecution in the early part of the 20th century and what is being experienced across the globe today.
“In Metamorphosis Gregor Samsa, wakes up, and he’s a giant bug, and he is separated from the human herd. And he experiences this sort of alienation and dehumanisation, over the course of the story. This is at a time when the industrial revolution is making people feel that way. Because of their work they’re feeling alienated. And in terms of the cultural trends in central Europe where Kafka live, we’re heading in the same direction – where Jews and Gypsies and gays and other groups were about to be, in a sense, robbed of their humanity and subjected to the Holocaust.”
Grappling with themes of race, the resurgence of the far right and the acceleratory impact of technology in terms of spreading hate and division make The Last White Man at times a confronting read but, given the reality of what the world is going through, a necessary one as well. Its ending – ambiguous but vaguely optimistic – suggests Hamid feels more positive about the way things are heading than the themes of the story suggest.
“I think there’s a difference between a kind of ‘naive optimism’ and a ‘critical optimism’,” Hamid says. “A naive optimism is the position that says ‘Look, things are just going to work out, don’t worry about it’. I think that probably is a fairly disastrous strategy. In our current moment, the environment will just sort itself out and polarisation will just sort itself out and inequality will just sort itself out. I’m not convinced that these things are going to sort themselves out.”
A scene from the film version of The Reluctant Fundamentalist, the novel in which Mohsin Hamid explored the social and political repercussions of 9/11.Credit:
In contrast, Hamid’s “critical optimism” is about recognising that we have to come up with a future that we find desirable and is “more inclusive”.
“Because if we don’t do this,” he says, “what happens is that we are left with a kind of fear of the future, that compels us towards a nostalgic politics, and that this nostalgic politics is about going back to what it was like 20 years ago, or 50 years ago, or 1000 years ago, you know, some time when there were less immigrants, or Islam was more pure, or Russia was still part of the Soviet Union.”
Like his critically acclaimed Exit West, which envisages a world without borders, Hamid is using The Last White Man to upend our assumptions and norms, and turn something that feels at first glance to be dystopian, or horror, into a vision of a more just society. The book is not a manifesto or a call to arms, but it speaks profoundly to our current moment and where we should be heading. Not just a diagnosis, but a potential blueprint for what could come next.
“It’s very important for me to not solely sound a warning about where we’re headed, but to counteract it – and begin to suggest other places to go. Because I really do fear the consequences of us not having that kind of optimism. I think that it’s a profoundly dangerous position for us to all agree that the future is terrible, and there’s nothing we can do about it.”
The Last White Man is published by Hamish Hamilton at $32.99. Mohsin Hamid appears at Melbourne Writers Festival on September 8 and 9 (mwf.com.au). He appears at Antidote Festival in Sydney on September 11 (sydneyoperahouse.com).