Mohsin Hamid: I think I’m somebody who spent a lot of his life uncomfortable with how the world is, and so drawn to imagination as a way of, of making the world more like what I wish it was.

Marcia Franklin: Coming up, I talk with novelist Mohsin Hamid about his book, “The Last White Man.” It’s one of our “Conversations from the Sun Valley Writers’ Conference,” next.

Stay with us.

(Music) Announcer: Major funding is provided by the Idaho Public Television Endowment and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Franklin: Hello and welcome.

I'm Marcia Franklin.

What if you woke up one day and a big part of your identity had changed?

That's the premise behind the latest book by my guest today.

In “The Last White Man” by Mohsin Hamid, a man awakens to find that his skin has changed color from white to dark.

One by one, almost all the white people in his community become darker.

Hamid explores how the change affects both the man and his family, tapping into their prejudices, fears and capacity for love.

Hamid himself has firsthand experience with shifting identities.

Born in Lahore, Pakistan, he spent part of his childhood in the United States before returning to Pakistan.

He came back to the States and received an undergraduate degree from Princeton and a law degree from Harvard.

He also lived in London for years, where he worked for a branding firm.

But his main passion was writing, which he always made time to do.

His first book, “Moth Smoke,” was published in 2000.

It was followed in 2007 by perhaps his most well-known work, “The Reluctant Fundamentalist,” which was adapted into a film.

Hamid is also the author of “Exit West,” which Barack and Michelle Obama plan to turn into a Netflix movie.

He spoke at the Sun Valley Writers’ Conference in 2023, and that's where I caught up with him.

We talked not only about “The Last White Man,” but also about how the attacks of September 11th influenced his life, and an important lesson he learned from the great writer Toni Morrison.

Franklin: Well, welcome.

Welcome to Idaho.

I understand this is your first visit here.

Hamid: Yes, it is.

I’m very excited.

Franklin: Do you get to spend a little bit of time after the conference to kind of maybe whitewater raft or something like that?

Hamid: Well, my son is a diehard fly fisherman.

Um, I think he's probably the most committed 11-year- old fly fisherman in all of Pakistan.

Um, and so he has been for the last six months asking pretty much every day when we get to Idaho, and when we go fly fishing.

And last night we were at a dinner, um, and the host very kindly said, “Well I have a pond right here, if your boy wants to do it.” So we actually got some fly fishing in within hours of landing.

So, um, so no whitewater rafting, but as much fly fishing as we can possibly manage.

And we're not experts.

We’re real beginners, but, but passionate beginners.

Franklin: And there's opportunities in Pakistan near where you live to fly fish?

Hamid: So, not so much.

Fly fishing isn't that common.

But up in the Himalayas, um, there is, you know, there are beautiful fishing areas.

Franklin: You could have had a very different life had you not moved to, back to Lahore in 2009.

Why did you choose to make that move, both you and your wife, who's Lahorian as well?

Hamid: Yeah, so we, um, we'd been living in London, uh, for several years.

And our first, uh, child, our daughter was born.

And, um, and we were thinking, you know, what school should she go to or what should we, you know, what apartment should we get and how should we live in London with our baby girl?

Um, and we started to realize that we were, without really thinking about it, committing to a kind of life.

That she was going to grow up in London, and then London would be her home.

And if we ever wanted to move back to Pakistan, in a sense, we'd be taking her away from her home to go back.

So we thought, “Why not try returning for a little bit?” Um, we always had this dream that one day we might go back.

And, and then if we didn't like it, we could, we could come out again.

And the other big part of it, I think, is if I, if I consider, you know, what is Pakistani culture for me.

Um, at the core of it is, is a, uh, multi-generational way of living.

So we really like the idea of our children growing up next to their grandparents.

There's certain things that, that happen in an extended family.

And we wanted our kids to have that experience, wanted our parents to have that experience.

So a big part of it for us was, in a sense, reuniting the family.

But in the last, I'd say three or four years, the big shift that's come into our lives has been, in a sense, the return of, of an American life.

Um, and spending more and more time in the U.S. Um, and seriously thinking about, you know, uh, uh, uh, having two homes in the sense.

And I think as somebody who's sort of grown up in two different cultures, I've always had this feeling that, um, that they're both my home in a way.

Franklin: Well, let's, uh, have you read the entree into this book, because it draws you right in.

Hamid: “One morning, Anders, a white man, woke up to find he had turned a deep and undeniable brown.

This dawned upon him gradually, and then suddenly, first as a sense as he reached for his phone, that the early light was doing something strange to the color of his forearm.

Subsequently, and with a start, as a momentary conviction that there was somebody else in bed with him -- male, darker.

But this, terrifying though it was, was surely impossible.

And he was reassured that the other moved as he moved.

Was in fact not a person, not a separate person, but was just him, Anders, causing a wave of relief.

For if the idea that someone else was there was only imagined, then of course, the notion that he had changed color was a trick, too, an optical illusion or a mental artifact, born in the slippery halfway place between dreams and wakefulness.

Except that, by now he had his phone in his hands, and he had reversed the camera, and he saw that the face looking back at him was not his at all.” Franklin: Definitely would be a nightmare for some people.

Hamid: Well, I think that, uh, you know, we are all changing all the time.

So, I've never been a 51-year- old man before, almost 52.

Um .

.

.

nobody has been the age they are now before.

You know, just getting older is a transformation.

Migration is a transformation.

Changing your job, moving your house.

So we go through these changes all the time.

And, um, and I thought, you know, I want to write a novel about somebody who's in a sense experiencing a loss of, of belonging, a loss of, um, in a sense status, a loss of, um, self.

Like, “Who am I?” Because I feel that in the world right now, as technology accelerates and people change and things change more and more rapidly, it's a very widespread feeling.

So many people are feeling it.

It may not be that somebody is changing their skin color, but what it means to be white or Muslim or Russian or Turkish is changing.

Um, you know, if you were, uh, uh, a Russian, um, sportsperson before the Ukraine invasion and you're a Russian sportsperson today traveling around Europe, suddenly things have changed.

You're the same person, but people looking at you differently.

That feeling of loss, of losing something, is something that we can all, I think, identify with.

Franklin: Absolutely.

Some people wake up and they have a disability.

Hamid: Yep.

Franklin: You know, and their whole identity shifts and they're looked at differently.

And that's how I perceive this book, that it wasn't just about race, but about change.

It's not just an external change, though.

Anders, your character, goes through internal changes as he realizes -- first of all, there's fear.

He has genuine fear.

Um, he's now in the body of a “darker” person.

You never say “black.” Hamid: Yeah.

Franklin: “Brown” or “dark.” And now he's genuinely afraid, because not everyone else has turned dark yet, that he might be attacked.

So he's facing what other people face who are minorities.

But also, he learns about his own inner prejudices as well, which I thought was really interesting.

Because he's still looking at the darker people suspiciously, like, “They might do something to me because they know I'm not a real... Hamid: Yeah.

Franklin: dark person.” So that is very interesting how you played on the internal as well.

Hamid: You know, that, um, that feeling of, of people looking at you and do you fit in, and how do you manage to do it, is something that's been very central to my life.

So when I was three, I came from Pakistan to America.

My father was doing his Ph.D. in California.

I didn't speak a word of English.

And one morning my mother found me sort of crying, uh, at the neighbor, in front of the neighbor's door.

And, um, and I was surrounded by kids from all over the world who are the children of, you know, uh, the professors and students at these university, graduate students.

And, um, and they were like, you know, “What's wrong with him?

And why can't he talk properly?” And my mother said, “He can speak properly; he just doesn't speak English yet.” And my parents said that, you know, I was a very talkative kid, but for a month I didn't say a word.

I was completely silent.

I just watched TV, and incessantly.

And when I next spoke, it was a month later, I spoke in English, in complete sentences with an American accent.

I guess I'd been so frightened by that experience that I thought, “Look, what I have to do is I have to make sure that I can speak to people and not stand out.” But when I went back to Pakistan at the age of nine, my parents were surprised to discover I no longer spoke any Urdu.

So again, I went back to Pakistan with no memories of Pakistan, not speaking Urdu, having not been there since I was a child, a very small child.

And, um, and then I was in a sense an American kid who had to learn to be a Pakistani kid.

And for a long time, I used to think, “Oh, I was a sort of a strange person with this weird, you know, cultural mix.” But I began to realize as I got older that everybody is strange.

Like, everybody is a little bit misplaced.

The only daughter, you know, in a family of boys is a bit strange.

Uh, the kid who wants to be a poet in a family of engineers is a bit strange.

You know, the kid who likes to fly fish in a dry, fairly, um remote-from-the-river city is a bit misplaced.

And I began to realize that there's something that connects me, in fact, that this feeling of, of not fitting in or of not, or of standing out or not being accepted connects me to everybody else.

And Anders begins to feel that, too.

He begins to, in a sense, empathize with other people in a different way, and also with himself.

All over the world, um, people are experiencing, uh, a loss of, of aspects of their identity.

So whether that's people in Pakistan who, um, uh, in the cities who might imagine that there was a sort of more traditional way of living, or more traditional Islam, um, or it’s people, you know, in Turkey who are drawn to Turkishness or Russia to Russianness, or in Britain, you know, to which we saw in Brexit to the, the desire to separate in a way from Europeanness.

Um, I felt that, you know, in the very charged kind of racial conversation and dynamic that we see all over the world, this feeling of loss of identity was, was a big part of it.

And so I wanted to write a novel about, um, about characters who are, in a sense, experiencing a loss of what they imagined to be their race.

That they think of themselves as white.

And then in a sense, they start, um, ceasing to be.

And, and I felt, um, in a way that I could write a book like that, because in 9-11 happened in, in 2001, I was living in New York.

And, you know, I was a brown guy with a Muslim name.

But in New York City, if you'd been to elite universities and you had a well-paying job, I can't say that I felt, you know, racism was a major part of my life.

Um, it was a mild annoyance.

I could see it in the world around me, but I felt relatively free to sort of, you know, traipse about my life.

And after 9-11 happened, suddenly at every airport, I would be stopped, and I would be questioned for hours.

And I was, I missed a flight on one occasion because they, they didn't do enough of a security check before I boarded.

So they took me off the plane to do a second.

Anyway, um, well, I didn't miss that flight.

I, I got back on.

The, the person who did the second security check said, “Look, I'm going to try to get you back on this plane.” And so I made it.

But you can imagine how unhappy my fellow passengers were to see me escorted off by these armed guards, and then coming back on.

Um, and I start thinking, you know, “What happened to me?

What was that?” And I realized that in a sense I had not been white, but I lived in a life that had partaken of, you know, some aspects of what you might call “whiteness,” in the sense that I was just a human being.

And if you think of, of whiteness in a country like America or Britain being you're just a person, um, some aspect of losing that personness happened to me.

And so I, I guess that had stayed with me for all these years.

And I thought, “What if I wrote about somebody who also experienced that?

Uh, but wasn't a brown Muslim guy, was instead somebody who thought of himself as white?

Um, could I do that?” And I began to think, you know, “Actually, I can do that.

I want to do that.” Franklin: If people pick this book up and hope that it's a story about the “last white man,” they might be disappointed.

We do learn, you know, by the end who that individual is, but it's not a book following the “last white man.” Maybe I'm, this is, uh, too attenuated here, but are you, were you headed towards that, that the book is taking a look at the fact that he's not really white to begin with.

Hamid: The book, I guess, plays with the idea of what it is to have a race.

Race is a, you know, is a enormously powerful construct, and, and, um, something we've imagined into existence.

And now that we've imagined it into existence, it does, you know, terrible things.

But it has been imagined into existence.

And that idea is invented, you know, just a few centuries ago.

So, I guess what the book is exploring is: since we’ve imagined this thing into existence, um, can we imagine our way out of it?

The novel is, is a novel about intergenerational love.

It's a love story between Anders and Oona -- this young woman, this young man -- but also between Oona and her mother.

And Anders and his, Anders and his father.

Oona's mother believes in a way that white people are sort of being replaced and are being threatened.

And in a strange sense, what's happening around her is confirming what she has believed to be the case, that people are changing, something is happening; is this a plot?

Anders’ father, on the other hand, is grappling with a very serious illness.

And he's trying to figure out how to pass on to his son what he thinks are the most important things.

You know, what he thinks are his real values.

And those values in many ways are not primarily racial values.

They’re something else.

Um, how do you face mortality?

You know, what is it to be a father?

Uh, what is duty?

Um, what is respect?

What is dignity?

And so, and so, Anders and his father, and Oona and her mother are grappling with their own relationships as they change.

And I think for me, that ties into what we're seeing all over the world, where there's a break between younger generations all over the world and older ones.

Where oftentimes we're seeing, for example, in the UK, younger people disproportionately didn't vote for Brexit, but older people did.

Um, in many societies we see similar things around nationalism or religion.

And so I think what we're, what we're witnessing is a moment in human history where, um, the compact between young and old is broken down.

The old, older generation, in a sense, is passing on a world where there's significant environmental damage, where there's huge amounts of debt.

Um, they're breaking what you might think of as having been this, this duty to pass on a better world.

And younger people are, in a sense, reciprocating by, by perhaps not passing on the sense of, um, respect or the sense of dignity afforded to the older generation.

And so I wanted to get into that generational breakdown in the novel.

Franklin: The narrator, the omniscient narrator has, in my view, kind of a clinical distance.

It reads almost to me like a play... Hamid: Yeah.

Franklin: in some respects.

Why did you decide to have that narrator the way that he, she, it is?

Hamid: Well, you know, um, I think that when we look at, um, a film or TV show, we often look at something that looks like the world.

It's been created.

It's like, it's an artifice.

But it looks like the world.

But you look at a book and you're looking at a piece of wood, you know, with some squiggles on it.

And that's becoming people and characters and ideas in your imagination.

What's interesting about books is they are made very substantially by readers.

Writers make a series of prompts in these words.

Readers then make those into actual people and feelings and sights and sounds in their imagination.

And I guess what I try to do in my novels is to leave a lot of space for that to happen.

Um, to allow the reader to, um, uh, to make their novel.

Um, because in the process of making their novel, the reader learns about themselves.

You know, what are their own inclinations?

What are their own instincts?

What are their own impulses?

And that's why I thought it was very interesting you said that the novel reads almost like a play.

Because a play is also intended that way.

A play is written for people to imagine into existence what will actually happen on stage.

The play doesn't describe everything.

And so, yes, the novel is in that sense -- it's a novel that, that allows the reader to determine, you know, what country is this in?

Um, what do these people look like?

How do I feel about this?

Because, um, these issues of race, etc., are very, um, personal issues.

And oftentimes when we discuss them, even with our intimates, um, we are being performative.

We're sort of performing what we think we're supposed to say or not say or feel or not feel.

But when we're all alone reading a book, we can kind of just feel what we feel and be what we are.

And so that idea of allowing the reader to enact a kind of play, um, and to see how they, that makes them feel without anybody else watching, uh, to me was very attractive for this book.

Franklin: The sentences are very long and they are in “Exit West,” another one of your books as well.

Could you talk to, uh, our viewers about why some of your sentences are so long?

And I believe you read them out loud, too, Hamid: Yes.

don't you?

Hamid: I do.

I read them out loud over and over again.

So a typical writing day for me is probably more time pacing around my study with a print out of what I'm writing, reading it again and again and again, uh, and less time, you know, typing into my computer.

And I think that goes back to, you know, just, um, my early days as a writer.

And in particular, I always remember, um, when I was at university, I began my first novel in a long-fiction workshop that was taught by Toni Morrison.

You know, it was one of these sort of cosmic, uh, strokes of good luck.

And there you are with one of the greatest writers of the 20th century.

And she's sitting there with four or five students, um, you know, taking your work seriously.

Franklin: And you hadn't even wanted to be a writer.

This was just... Hamid: No, I mean, I was sort of, at this point, I was, I was groping in that direction.

I thought maybe, but, you know, but I hadn't come to university thinking that’s what I wanted.

Franklin: Yeah.

Hamid: But by the time this class was over, it was pretty clear.

Franklin: Sure.

Hamid: And, and one thing that she did was she would read our work out loud.

And no matter how bad what you'd written was, um, when she read it out loud, it was, it was, it was superb.

Um, you know, she, everybody I think knows, you know, what an amazing, uh, writer, uh, Toni Morrison, you know, was, and is in a sense.

Um, but not everybody knows that she read as well as she wrote.

Franklin: Well, it's like Maya Angelou, right?

Hamid: Yes.

Franklin: Whoa.

Her voice.

Hamid: I mean it’s, yeah, it was just incredible.

And, and there are writers who do this.

And, and her in particular, because, um, many writers can read their work very well, but it's very few writers who can read somebody else's work -- a novice -- and find in it so much inflection and meaning and depth.

And so from that class, I really took it that, you know, “I'm going to read my stuff out loud over and over again.

I'm going to use my ears instead of my eyes to see if it works.” And with this novel in particular, the long sentences are meant to do certain things.

If you think about how great orators work, they set up rhythms of language.

Think of Martin Luther King's, you know, “I Have a Dream” speech.

Um, what he's saying are ideas that, you know, many people will, will hold.

But the way he's saying it is to set up rhythms and cadence such that you expect the next word to fall.

And even if you don't agree with him, for listeners who aren't already persuaded, when he's speaking, each word is the correct word to fit the rhythm and musicality of the speech.

Franklin: What is it?

Is it Toni Morrison who said, be like half a second... Hamid: Yes, exactly.

Franklin: ...ahead of your... Hamid: Yes.

Be half a second ahead of your a reader.

Franklin: ..your reader, rather.

Hamid: Yeah.

So they, that, that you should always be half a second ahead of your reader, but when it happens, it should feel inevitable.

And the way that you do that is by setting up, whether it's imagery or cadence or language, such that the reader doesn't know what's going to come, but what comes is what had to come.

Franklin: The beginning of the book, there's no question, brings up Kafka's “Metamorphosis,” where, uh, Gregor wakes up and he's an insect.

And, uh, that was intentional, I'm sure, yes... Hamid: Yes.

Franklin: ...as a conceit.

What I found interesting about this book is that in “Metamorphosis,” Gregor's family abandons him.

I mean, it's quite horrific, really.

In this book, even though people, the family members have different views about everybody becoming darker, because that's what happens, starts happening, they do coalesce together as a unit, and they are supportive of each other.

And so I'm wondering if in that sense, um, you see this as a hopeful imagining of the future?

Hamid: Very much so.

I do think of it as an optimistic book.

And, um, or, or, or a book that suggests the possibility for optimism.

And for me, that's incredibly important as a writer, because we're living in a moment that technological change is accelerating.

People are feeling uncertain, people are becoming anxious.

And above all, you know, machine culture is arriving into human culture with this incessant “zero and one” binary dynamic about sorting.

You know, are you “like” or “not like?” You know, are you “zero” or “one?” “This” or “that?” And it feels to me that all over the world we’re, we're starting to sort each other into categories, um, to become allergic to each other on the basis of, of very small differences in often cases.

You know, India and Pakistan, two such similar countries, now being, you know, uh, increasingly at odds.

Uh, Russia and Ukraine, very similar countries, you know, riven.

And so I think what's interesting about fiction is the possibility of breaking down that sorting mechanism.

You know, when you read a book, who are you?

Are you the reader?

You know, are you the writer?

Is the writer's mind in your mind?

But it can't, I mean, fully be that.

You occupy this weirdly hybrid state as a reader.

You're kind of yourself, and you're kind of the writer and you're kind of both at the same time.

And I think that that messy hybrid is potentially a really fertile place.

Particularly a fertile place to begin to imagine our way out of these binaries and these conflicts.

And so what I wanted to do in the novel was to suggest, um, is there a way that we can get out of the traps that we find ourselves, including traps like race?

Franklin: There are some who look at it and say, you know, this is so neatly tied up, or it's, it's so optimistic.

Hamid: It certainly is not my intention to think, you know, we're going to all wake up one day and everything is going to be fine.

Um, but rather, I think that, um, my attempt is to open up a kind of transgressive space.

So if you imagine that in literature, there's, there's two different strands.

You know, one is a kind of strand of representation: “This is what it is like to be me.” And that's an incredibly strong and powerful, you know, um, aspect of literature.

But the other aspect of literature and art is this is like, “This is what it's like to be somebody else.” You know, when my son sort of used to come into my study pretending to be a T-Rex, um, and sort of roaring at me, what was he doing?

Humans have this inherent need to imagine being other people.

Um, and so what the novel is, is doing is it’s sort of tapping into that transgressive need.

Um, which is not to say that we're all going to wake up one day a different race and this will be behind us.

But that if we can imagine ourselves into different versions of who we are, if we can imagine ourselves as somebody else, um, we might open up a space where people will come up with cultural, political, um, and other gestures that start to improve things.

If we are open to the idea that we can imagine the world into a better place, we're much more likely to find things that actually do make the world better.

And in that sense, a novel isn't, you know, a how-to manual.

Um, it's part of, you know, what creates fertility in the soil of human culture for other people to come up with what the how-to manual should be.

I think I’m somebody who spent a lot of his life uncomfortable with how the world is, and so drawn to imagination as a way of, of making the world more like what I wish it was.

And I suppose, you know, this novel is is part of that same trajectory.

Franklin: Do I have this correct, that uh, Barack and Michelle Obama -- President and Mrs. Obama -- have, uh, optioned or want to make a series out of one of your other books, “Exit West?” Hamid: Yes.

So Higher Ground Productions, which is, which is Barack and Michelle Obama's, uh, company, um, alongside with, another production company, AGBO, have, are working with Netflix to make a film of this book.

And so it's, it's very exciting, and, um, uh, you know, uh, I'm hoping for the best as, as we work on that film project.

Franklin: Does this have prospects in that realm as well?

Hamid: Yeah.

I've been talking to, uh, Riz Ahmad, who’s a dear friend, um, about how to adapt this.

Franklin: And your next book will take place in Lahore?

Hamid: Well, my next book is, um, I hate to talk about books, sort of, you know, in advance, but, but it is imaginatively set there right now.

Um, let's see, you know, what he grows up to be.

Um, but it’s, it’s in my imagination, it's certainly, it's certainly being born there.

And we'll see where it goes.

Franklin: Well, I look forward to reading it and maybe even visiting Lahore someday.

Hamid: I hope so.

That'd be wonderful.

Franklin: Thank you so much.

Hamid: Thank you.

Franklin: You've been listening to writer Mohsin Hamid, whose latest book is called “The Last White Man.” Our conversation was taped at the 2023 Sun Valley Writers’ Conference.

My thanks to the conference organizers for inviting us back for our 16th season at the renowned event, and for all their help.

If you'd like to watch any of the more than 70 interviews we've taped at the conference, check out our website.

You can also find them on the “Conversations from the Sun Valley Writers’ Conference” playlist on YouTube.

I'm Marcia Franklin.

Thanks for spending time with us.

(Music) Announcer: Major funding is provided by the Idaho Public Television Endowment and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.