Whiteness is one seduction. Whiteness is also an illusion. These are the double motifs that Pakistani writer Mohsin Hamid set up The last white man, his new novel about racial metamorphosis and human morality. Anchored in the dignified and noble prose Hamid has made his trademark style, the springboard for the book comes from an unexplained incident. Anders, a Caucasian man, wakes up one morning to a new reality: his skin has “turned an undeniably dark brown”.
The transformation, of which Anders’ was the first – but not the only, and certainly not the last – elicits worthwhile discovery. What if the whiteness suddenly disappears? Will the social order of life be destroyed? Is there anything that changed? Where Hamid landed is not exactly convincing.
The sequence of events that followed became an ancient fear of The Other. (Toni Morrison has said that one’s need for estrangement is “a desperate attempt to validate one’s self as normal.”) For Anders, confusion bubbled up. Panic surged. Initially, he has violent thoughts after realizing transformation is irreversible. “He wanted to kill the black man who confronted him here in his home,” Hamid wrote, “to extinguish the life on this man’s body, leaving nothing but himself, like you.” me before.”
It is understandable why those who benefit from a particular position would do anything to protect it. The power-conscious seduction, understanding the privileges from which one benefits and the life it provides, is, in part, about the necessity of control. I would probably be very sad and a little sad if I lost all of that.
But not before Anders can return. More and more, the inhabitants mutate from white to various shades of brown, causing an uproar at first, until there is only one person — from which the novel takes its seemingly doomsday title — is the remaining reservoir of white.
At this point, the novel’s questions begin to pile up. What is left to hold on to after such a life-changing event? What remains is paramount? Hamid replies: Love.
The great combination of Hamid’s work is proximity; grooves of man’s attachment to his sole preoccupation. He is one of the most important gods of a partnership: friendship, lifelong love, and broken marriages. How love is crystallized, about everything love can hold, what it can and will last over time. He understands — and in return makes us understand — our cave’s need for something else, somewhere deep down we can’t do it alone.
Hamid cycles in and out of threads – joy, loss, grief, anger, joy, birth and rebirth – animating the fabric of his narrative, using Anders and his girlfriend Oona It’s to put everything together. After making peace with the wave of change, and all that happened, the pair ventured back into the world. “No one at the bar looked completely comfortable, not the bartender, and not the men gathered in the only occupied booth… none of these dark people showered in colored lights of the bar, trying to find their footsteps in an all too familiar situation. and it’s weird,” Oona commented. Or “perhaps people look like they’ve always done,” she thought. Only after “the whiskey settled into her stomach” did she realize that “the difference was gone.”
