This is because the mansion they and many other refugees occupy is filled primarily by Nigerians and people from other countries, rendering them the sole representatives of their homeland. From the moment he leaves, Saeed focuses less on the journey ahead and more on what he left behind. Symbols & Motifs. Because Saeed comes from this context, leaving his country means closing the door on a place that he associates with love and belonging and a father whom he loves deeply. The migrants in Exit West must navigate vast cultural rifts, both in the foreign countries to which they flee and amongst themselves. This, it seems, is why he seeks out a group of his countrymen living in a mansion nearby. Nadia and Saeed find it harder to establish a connection with their fellow countrywomen and -men once they move to London. “Why would we want to move?” she asks, and when Saeed replies by saying, “To be among our own kind,” she points out that the only thing tying them to these people is the fact that they’re from the same country.

My students love how organized the handouts are and enjoy tracking the themes as a class.”, LitCharts uses cookies to personalize our services. Indeed, she delights in these meetings because they “represent something new in her mind, the birth of something new.” Thrilled by the prospect of connecting with these strangers, she finds the people she meets in the mansion both “familiar and unfamiliar.” “Together in this group they conversed in a language that was built in large part from English,” the narrator notes, “but not solely from English, and some of them were in any case more familiar with English than were others. Detailed explanations, analysis, and citation info for every important quote on LitCharts. But while fear was part of what kept them together for those first few months in Marin, more powerful than fear was the desire that each see the other find firmer footing before they let go, and thus in the end their relationship did in some senses come to resemble that of siblings, in that friendship was its strongest element, and unlike many passions, theirs managed to cool slowly, without curdling into its reverse, anger, except intermittently.

The migrants in Exit West must navigate vast cultural rifts, both in the foreign countries to which they flee and amongst themselves.

The narrator observes, “neither talked much of drifting apart, not wanting to inflict a fear of abandonment, while also themselves quietly feeling that fear, the fear of the severing of their tie, the end of the world they had built together, a world of shared experiences in which no one else would share.” The fact that Saeed and Nadia don’t want to “abandon” each other suggests that they think of their relationship as one of the last things connecting them to their home country and the lives they led there. Also they spoke different variations of English, different Englishes, and so when Nadia gave voice to an idea or opinion among them, she did not need to fear that her views could not be comprehended, for her English was like theirs, one among many.” The phrase “one among many” is useful to keep in mind when reading Exit West, as it ultimately highlights a crucial difference between Nadia and Saeed: Nadia enjoys becoming “one among many” in a diverse group of transplants, while Saeed feels bound to his own culture, wishing he didn’t have to suddenly join something new in order to survive. Get started.

In their phones were antennas, and these antennas sniffed out an invisible world, as if by magic, a world that was all around them, and also nowhere, transporting them to places distant and near, and to places that had never been and would never be.

Nadia and Saeed were, back then, always in possession of their phones. Over the course of the novel, Saeed grows apart from Nadia because while she reminds him of what he left behind in his country, she rejects any connection to that country herself. Teach your students to analyze literature like LitCharts does. The following version of this book was used to create this guide: Hamid, Mohsin. He feels proud because she has allowed him to see her without the black robe she wears to keep people at a distance. The original text plus a side-by-side modern translation of.

Also they spoke different variations of English, different Englishes, and so when Nadia gave voice to an idea or opinion among them, she did not need to fear that her views could not be comprehended, for her English was like theirs, one among many. Exit West .

In the London work camp, Nadia observes that Saeed doesn’t talk about the stars to her any longer, something she once loved about him. Themes.

Saeed is one of the two protagonists of Exit West, a philosophical and romantic young man who must reconcile his love of family and the familiar with his new life away from the city he grew up in.The beginning of the novel gives glimpses of Saeed’s loving and supportive family, who appear to …

So it was with Saeed and Nadia, who found themselves changed in each other’s eyes in this new place.

Nadia actively avoids people from their country and continues to wear the robe, implying that something from the country Saeed loves is inherently off-putting to her.

When he prayed he touched his parents, who could not otherwise be touched, and he touched a feeling that we are all children who lose our parents, all of us, every man and woman and boy and girl, and we too will all be lost by those who come after us and love us, and this loss unites humanity, unites every human being, the temporary nature of our being-ness, and our shared sorrow, the heartache we each carry and yet too often refuse to acknowledge in one another, and out of this Saeed felt it might be possible, in the face of death, to believe in humanity’s potential for building a better world, and so he prayed as a lament, as a consolation, and as a hope, but he felt that he could not express this to Nadia, that he did not know how to express this to Nadia, this mystery that prayer linked him to, and it was so important to express it. In the aftermath of their split, Saeed and Nadia gradually see less and less of each other, learning how to live as independent people in this foreign country, and they slowly stop checking in with one another, too, until “eventually a month went by without any contact, and then a year, and then a lifetime.” When they finally do see one another again, it is in their home city after “half a century” has passed. Saeed’s father encountered each day objects that had belonged to his wife and so would sweep his consciousness out of the current others referred to as the present, a photograph or an earring or a particular shawl worn on a particular occasion, and Nadia encountered each day objects that took her into Saeed’s past, a book or a music collection or a sticker on the inside of a drawer, and evoked emotions from her own childhood, and jagged musings on the fate of her parents and her sister, and Saeed, for his part, was inhabiting a chamber that had been his only briefly, years ago, when relatives from afar or abroad used to come to visit, and being billeted here again conjured up for him echoes of a better era, and so in these several ways these three people sharing this one apartment splashed and intersected with each other across varied and multiple streams of time. Saeed desperately wanted to leave his city, in a sense he always had, but in his imagination he had thought he would leave it only temporarily, never once and for all, and this looming potential departure was altogether different, for he doubted he would come back, and the scattering of his extended family and his circle of friends and acquaintances, forever, struck him as deeply sad, as amounting to the loss of a home, no less, of his home. This Study Guide consists of approximately 52 pages of chapter summaries, quotes, character analysis, themes, and more - everything you need to sharpen your knowledge of Exit West. Or perhaps unengaged. But this is a novel, "Exit West," that uses realism and some magic to capture life for millions today and a possible future. But she stayed anyway, next to Saeed on the naked earth that had been stripped of plants by hundreds of thousands of footsteps and rutted by the tires of ponderously heavy vehicles, feeling for the first time unwelcome.

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