White anxiety

The characters start becoming aware of the psychology of skin colour only towards the end.

IN Mohsin Hamid’s The Last White Man, Anders, a white man, wakes up one morning to find “he had turned a deep and undeniable brown”. Anders is far from pleased. In fact, at first he is shocked and then steps through denial, fear, and anger. In fact, the author has Anders smash his fist into the bathroom mirror. But why? Lawrence Raab’s poem “Why It Often Rains in the Movies” offered an explanation for such melodramatic gestures:

It’s true that the way we look doesn’t always

reveal our feelings. Which is a problem

for the movies. And why somebody has to smash

a mirror, for example, to show he’s angry

and full of self-hate, whereas actual people

rarely do this.

The Last White Man

By Mohsin Hamid

Penguin Random House

Pages: 192

Price: Rs.599

Though Anders is actual enough, he is caught in a movie situation. But what does he suddenly hate about his self-image? What is the origin of his anger? Hamid’s novel is about the internal transformation that Anders undergoes as he comes to terms with his unwelcome inheritance. The inheritance may only be skin-thin, but it is as thick as all of human history. As a brown fellow, it should have been difficult for me to empathise with a white character who hates becoming brown. But it was not. I got Anders’ pain. This is partly because of the postcolonial situation. Learning to read in English is about imbibing the emotions of white characters as one’s own. But also because Mohsin Hamid has written a bloody good novel.

Inevitably, Hamid’s novel will evoke Kafka’s Metamorphosis. There are some similarities, yes. Both Hamid’s Anders and Kafka’s Gregor Samsa have parental issues. Both are changed irrevocably. Stylistically, too, Hamid’s sentences evoke Kafka’s digressive style. However, these similarities are superficial. Kafka wrote about private apocalypses and his concerns were existential. It is not much of an exaggeration to claim there is no “society” in Kafka’s novels; his characters are alienated from themselves, not the society at large.

A study of race and how it relates to skin colour. The four skin swatches illustrate skin colour based on race. Each ‘swatch’ is actually a macro photograph of a person in each designated race. When all books are open we find that many colours overlap. | Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons 

In contrast, Hamid’s concerns are resolutely social. Andres is more than a white man. He is an American. His problems are existential to the extent social conflicts can lead to existential crises. The psychological effects of the transformation are explored more in Oona, Anders’ kind-of girlfriend, who slowly grows in importance both to the novel and to Anders.

When it becomes clear that the colour transformation is not confined to Anders but is beginning to affect white society as a whole, she is remarkably sanguine. Oona is not conflicted like Anders about the possibility of turning permanently brown. Hamid describes her reaction in a long and marvellous sentence: “Oona did not know where it came from, but a feeling of melancholy touched her then, a sadness at the losing of something, and perhaps it was her attachment to the old Oona she was mourning, to the face she had known and the person she had been, the person she had lived within and appeared as, or if it was not that, then perhaps it was an attachment to certain memories that she had evoked in herself….”

But as she dwells on the memories she was attached to, she concludes that “she had changed before she had changed, she had changed every decade and every year and every day, and so she thought there was no reason that she must lose her memories, the ones she wished to keep”. When her relationship with Anders becomes engaged and meaningful, Anders’ existential issues disappear. It made me wonder, were Anders and Oona to wake up white again, would they still be in love?

Plot theatrics

Though the novel wisely avoids this question, it dips into other plot theatrics, getting into the predictable territory of how American society breaks down as other people begin to turn brown. Such theatrics—rise of militant orgs, lynchings, food hoarding, race riots, etc.—mar an otherwise finely written novel. This kind of Big Canvas stuff is best left to genre fiction, which has evolved numerous techniques to deal with Questions of Large Scope. They should have remained outside the scope of this novel.

On the other hand, the characters start to become aware of the psychology of skin colour only towards the end. But the insights are, well, skin-deep. As more and more people start to turn brown, even Oona, who is more self-aware than Anders, is only conscious that she is “better able to tell one dark person from another, for seeing finer gradations in the texture of someone’s skin....” In other words, Chinamen are not all alike! What a surprise.

The colour problem is not just that brown is not white. It is also that brown is not brown. What does it mean for something to be “brown”? Is Priyanka Chopra brown? In the US, she is certainly brown, even noisily brown, but in India she used to hawk “Fair & Lovely” cream.

And what do we do with “wheatish complexion”, the colour of all Indian would-be brides in marriage advertisements? The “colour of wheat”, according to the ISCC–NBS colour classification system, is a “light yellow”. The point is, as a racial marker, the colour “brown” is not so much a colour as it is a catch-all term. Skin colour is an allocation of melanin. The “coloured” are an entirely different matter. The novel’s white characters have lived too few days as coloured people to realise this truth. It is the difference between a novel about enduring the first week after a beloved’s death and a novel that is set six years later.

No tomorrow

Physicists use Gedankenexperiment—thought experiments—to explore the limits of the possible. What Hamid’s literary experiment reveals is that we build our identities around the things we cannot change rather than those we can. Skin colour is “merely” one such invariant. What the characters learn is the experience of living with a situation one cannot change.

But this triggering event could just as well have been a cancer diagnosis, the loss of a child or a limb. Consider, for example, the neurologist David Servan-Schreiber’s description of his situation after learning of his brain cancer diagnosis:

“I entered a colourless world. It was a world where people were afforded no recognised qualifications, no profession.... Suddenly I had the feeling that there was a club of the living and I was getting the message that I wasn’t a member. I began to feel frightened that I was in a category apart, a category of people defined primarily by their disease. I was afraid of becoming invisible….”

Hamid’s novel may be classified as dealing with racism and colour, but it does not really need skin colour to create the emotions it does. The proper concern of a literary novel is the change, not the cause of the change. Psychology, not physics. By introducing a magic realist cause, the author has undermined the seriousness of his question.

The effect of magic realist transformations is to turn events into spectacles. These tricks make us pay attention, but they also simultaneously leech necessity from the fictional world. And it is necessity that gives our lives its tragic dimension. We invest our tomorrow with meaning because we endure the necessities of today. Anders’ world has no real tomorrow. Anything can happen. The Last White Man could very easily be adapted into a farce. These philosophical, that is, speculative, considerations aside, The Last White Man is an interesting and welcome addition to the literature of estrangement.

Anil Menon is the author, most recently, of the short story collection The Inconceivable Idea of the Sun.

The Crux

• Hamid’s novel will evoke Kafka’s Metamorphosis.
• But Kafka wrote about private apocalypses and his concerns were existential. In contrast, Hamid’s concerns are resolutely social.
• The psychological effects of the transformation are explored more in Oona, Anders’ girlfriend, than in Anders.
• The dips into other plot theatrics, which mar an otherwise finely written novel.
• Skin colour is an allocation of melanin. The “coloured” are an entirely different matter.
• The novel’s white characters have lived too few days as coloured people to realise this truth.