Exile and the Search for Belonging in Exit West: A Postcolonial Study

الملخص

“Exit West” is a novel written by Mohsin Hamid in 2017. The novel states that compelled migration, in the sense of a genuine human need, should be accepted. The approach of postcolonialism has been taken in this novel and how Hamid uses and applies a door of magic as a theme in order to show the supernatural narrative way which is used as a metaphor in the migration of the postcolonial era. . Based on the concept of theory perspectives of H. K. Bhabha, who developed the concept of postcolonial theory, along with the Third Space. According to E. Said's concept of exile as loss and liberation, and Stuart Hall's understanding of cultural identity as a process of becoming rather than being, this research investigates the ways the protagonists of the novel ( Saeed and Nadia) negotiate their identities in different geographical regions. This research paper claims that Hamid develops a postcolonial cartography of belonging through which home is no longer a stable area of geographic space, but also a fluid, contested and always deferred status. Analysis proceeds by exploring the ways in which the novel interrogates the power dynamics of displacement as they unfold and reproduce themselves on a global scale, as well as the psychic burden, which is being shared by those who have to reconstitute the self, in hostile peripheries. By locating Exit West in a wider postcolonial fiction or contemporary migration narratives, the research paper adds to scholars writing on exile, hybridity, and issues of belonging in the first of twenty century.