Hamid has never shied from connecting his characters identity crises to his own. This is the novels cure for white despair over the loss of whiteness: Keep calm and carry on. It is taken for granted that darkness is not just half of a simplistic racial binary, but rather a pluriform, diasporic, and syncretic cultural phenomenon. What I would like, the man adds, is a raise. Both of these fleeting scenes are genuinely funny. Its also the premise of a chapter of Matt Ruffs Lovecraft Country (2016) about a black woman who wakes up white, which, per its title, Jekyll in Hyde Park, alludes to Robert Louis Stevensons scene from 1886: The hand of Henry Jekyll large, firm, white, and comely appears in the yellow light of a mid-London morning, lying half shut on the bed-clothes lean, corded, knuckly, of a dusky pallor and thickly shaded with a swart growth of hair. Perhaps Hamid is hoping to make good on a saying from his first novel, Moth Smoke (2000): Tales with unoriginal beginnings are those most likely later to surprise.. Whiteness isnt monolithic any more than darkness isremember the Irish, the Jews? If Hamids novel were a self-aware satire of this ideology of whiteness and its violent effects, it would be pitch-perfect. Despite the horrors it has conjured, the end of whiteness is just another mantra of our current discourse; whether you are troubled by it or merely curious, Hamid is here to talk you through it. Its weight lifting in an old-school gym, men testing themselves against gravity. This article appears in the September 2022 print edition with the headline A World Without White People. The absurdity of these equivalences becomes clear in the closing lines of How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia: Beyond the creepiness, this pablum presumes reversibility. Hamids work is starting to look a lot like high-flown self-help, Paulo Coelho or Robin DiAngelo for the jet-setting smart set. The novel evinces the worst of Hamids style, intensifying his turn in Exit West (2017) toward folksy transitions (and so it was), diction that manages to be both officious and purple (the performance was strong for them, visceral), and run-ons that feel less breathless than halting, laden as they are with comma-capped redundancies (maybe both doing both, in a way) and reversals (unexpectedly, or not so unexpectedly). Anders feels guilty for his darkness; just by being here, Anders was taking something from his father, taking his dignity. But his father makes it his dying task to accept Anders, even though. Those who were already dark have little presence and no internal life in the novel. Like the hero of Harry Stephen Keelers The Man Who Changed His Skin (1959), Anders soon realizes this isnt just a tan, either: He looked like another person, not just another person, but a different kind of person, utterly different. Like the hero of Mortimer Weisingers pulp story, Pigments Is Pigments (1935), Anders reacts with shock at his darkening, then falls into a murderous rage. As with the more scientifically minded versions of this plot, like Jess Rows Your Face in Mine (2014) and Maurice Carlos Ruffins We Cast a Shadow (2019), well soon find out whether the transformation is explicable or reversible. He seeks out his reflection. In the end, skin color will be shown to be meaningless for identity, a mere construct. Never one to let us get away with missing an analogy, Hamid tells us of our baleful lovers: What exactly is being mourned? This drift toward the general is also a drift toward the didactic, one that is only nominally secular insofar as it amounts to a righteous liberalism that promises us a peek, as Oona says, into a mystical truth, a terrible mystical truth about humanity. Why dont we follow these dark men home? Darkness awakens the ancient horrors the almost forgotten savagery upon which [the] town was founded. Anders wonders if maybe that was the point, the point of it was to break him, to break all of them, all of us, yes us, how strange to be forced into such an us., Despite its conciliatory tone, this echoes the narratives that Oonas mother reads online about. We are not, and have never been, mere symbols or surfaces for melancholy reflection. Apparently, the solutions to the problemto the violenceof the color line were with us all along: Fiction! Dark-washing characters wont disappear race, nor will believing that brown kids are our future. Nor is it a dream for everyone. Its the neighborhood watch and home security. I was not certain where I belonged, the narrator of The Reluctant Fundamentalist says, in New York, in Lahore, in both, in neither. In a recent New Yorker interview, Hamid explains the origin and intent of The Last White Man: This way of putting it hums with the soothing privilege of the elite. Anderss father dies; the last white man is buried; you might think the newly darkened (the darkies?) Even if youre unfamiliar with this tradition of stories about race transformation, youll suspect whats coming. Family blood and racial blood are pitted against each other. The titular last white man is in fact Anderss widowed father, who responds to his sons new condition by weeping like a shudder, like an endless cough, without a sound, then giving him a gun. To accede to the idea that whiteness can be lost, albeit in the name of open-endedness and open-mindedness, is to exculpate the capitalist imperialism that invented race in the first place. The French author Renaud Camus gave it new life when he named it the Great Replacement in a short book he published on the subject in 2011. They smoke some weed and give it a spin: The sex improves; the prose does not. Our people. Hooked up to an IV of online fearmongering and cable news, she has become a fantasist; her belief that life was fair and would turn out for the best and good people like them got what they deserved has warped upon the death of her husband into an embittered crouch, a deep, abiding panic that springs into a brittle joy once the violence begins. The characters are mostly presented as your basic good white people, trying their best to deal with the coming darkness: Oona wondered if her mother was always going to find a way to carry on, and had simply been mourning, or not simply, there was nothing simple about it, but mainly, mainly been mourning, as a woman who had lost her husband and her son was entitled to do. Hamid lets them grieve for what is posited as a genuine loss of whiteness, with no compulsive melancholy, no unhealthy attachments, no obsessive shrines left over. What are we meant to make of Hamids giving his latest hero the name of the man who applied the logic of the last white man so horrifically? Things settle down. And a dark-from-the-start, nameless cleaning guy at the gym where Anders works declines Anderss belated offer to train him. Militants will take over, emitting fear and hate like a musk. Hamids characters sometimes offer scathing indictments of racial capitalism, like this one from a rapscallion in Moth Smoke: Hamids narrators often refer matter-of-factly, sometimes with delight, to the variety of darker complexions, to the difference between being a brown Muslim and a black Muslim, to the internal diversity within Pakistani or Nigerian culture. There are two cracks in the humanist glaze, patches of clarity in the blur. History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake. Hamids commitment to a liberal literary ethos veers close to a vague both-sides-ism: Its one thing for a character to be afflicted with blurred vision or the race blindness that grants Oona a new kind of sight; its another for the novel to suffer the same confusion of perspective. Whiteness in The Last White Man is a dream. Or any of the other people born dark, who must surely be annoyed as well as amused by these confused, deracinated, sad-sack interlopers? ), What exactly is being bornor rather, borne? The Last White Man offers no news for the nonwhite among us. The primary political dialectic of Moth Smoke is rich Lahore and poor Lahore; in The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007), its New York City and Lahore. That same year, Anders Behring Breivik set off a bomb that killed eight people, then went on to hunt down and murder 69 members of the Norwegian Workers Youth League, mostly teenagers. Primarily, its not being dark. (The word black is verboten in The Last White Man, appearing only once, to describe iron. He looks at his hand, which he knows like well, like the back of his hand. When she waxes nostalgic about the glories of the white past, her brown granddaughter stills her with a word, stop, and a kiss. An earlier novel by the same author might have pursued this tack. Its feeling cashed out, emotion-wise but flush enough in cash for provisions to survive a race riot. Like the hero of Herman Rauchers novelization of Watermelon Man (1970), Anderss first impulse is to mistake himself for a dark-skinned home intruder. Violence will erupt. It is unfamiliar, the hand of another. divided between your sense of yourself and your sense of how others perceive you, condemned in a 2022 resolution by the U.S. House of Representatives. We have our own perspectives; we have said and written and done many thingsand not just about whiteness, or race, or racism. Darkness in The Last White Man is an ordeal. But this flirtation with blackface leaves Oona ashamed, and though she appreciates her new features when she too turns dark, a feeling of melancholy yet touches her, a sadness at the losing of something.. Oona, a realist unnerved by this nativist zealotry, is inspired by Anderss transformation to paint herself with brown makeup. Its yoga in a scentless studio, women staving off aging through attempts to remain supple. Its going out drinking, going out dancing, going out to dinner. A childs notion: If everyone is the same, just dark, what is there to fight about? will get together for a block party. Instead, they take walks to process their feelings. Whereas most of these writers bend race transformation toward satire, offering us topsy-turvy and hysterical tales, Hamid is deeply earnest about his conceit. Mostly sad, as it turns out. Oonas mother, who vomits when she catches the interracial couple in flagrante, is also averse to the barbarian transformation, which she predicts: People are changing, she warns her daughter early on. Just mementos and a brown child who symbolizes a race-blind future. Hamid seems to have sacrificed this sort of specificity in favor of a polished brand of globalish allegory. Well discover whether it afflicts just Anders or spreads to others like a fad, as in George S. Schuylers Black No More (1931), or like a plague, as in Junot Dazs story Monstro (2012). Maybe Hamid wants it that way. He looks around, seeking his bearings as he tries to come to terms with what has happened to him overnight, perhaps after uneasy dreams. But The Last White Mans structure affords us no way to know if this is what Hamid intends: It includes no higher judgment, no specific history, no novelistic frame against which to measure the reliability of the narration, no backdrop across which irony can dance. Remember James Joyces line? The Last White Man in this way dramatizes the inane, paranoiac interpretation of migration known as the Great Replacement, which was just condemned in a 2022 resolution by the U.S. House of Representatives. This conspiracy theory claims that the West is being colonized in reverse by the global South, and has inspired a string of white-supremacist terrorist attacks in places such as Christchurch, New Zealand, and, most recently, Buffalo, New York. But who is you? There is no sense that they have cultures or mores; Anders still sees them, he could not help it, like a group of animals. Darkened Oona comes to notice finer gradations in the texture of someones skin and the shape of their cheekbones and the nature of their hair, but this somehow leads to a conceit comparing people to trees. What Hamids novels actually offer isnt education but recognition, a self-congratulatory reconfirmation of ideas like migration is a death and race is a construct, which are true enough but also truisms by now.
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