Exit West

Saeed is Nadia’s boyfriend. Of the two of them, it is perhaps his personality that alters the most over the course of the novel. The farther Saeed and Nadia venture from their homeland, the more traditional and tribal he becomes. (However, there is an early hint of his later piety when he tells Nadia, at the beginning of their romance, that he does not believe in sex before marriage.) He is always drawn toward his own people in their different migrant camps, even if their beliefs are more radical than his own. He also discovers in himself an increasing need to pray, a ritual which makes him feel attached to the past and to his own vanished family. Praying is a consolation for his mortality and the fleetingness of all things: “When he prayed he touched his parents, who could not otherwise be touched, and he touched a feeling that we are all children who lose our parents […] and we too will all be lost by those who come after us and love us, and this loss unites humanity” (202).

Nadia is more of a creature of the moment than is Saeed, having cut herself off from her traditional family even before the two of them meet. In all of her restlessness and adventurousness, she remains relatively unchanged over the course of the novel, although her innate characteristics are brought into sharper relief. Saeed’s increasing piety is a source of tension between them, for she sees only the oppressiveness of the rituals around his piety, and none of the consolations that his praying brings him. Saeed, in turn, is increasingly irritated by Nadia’s continuing to wear a full-length veil, while shunning all of the rituals that are attached to it. This same veil intrigues and intimidates him at the beginning of the novel; he sees it as a barrier to intimacy and to knowing Nadia, yet it is also probable—in light of the metamorphosis that his character later undergoes—that the veil plays a strong part in his initial attraction to her.    

Saeed’s mother and father are not given their own names but are referred to throughout the novel as simply his parents. At the same time, the history of their own courtship, marriage, and intimate life is briefly explored in the first chapter of the book. It is not a conventional history, and their marriage is not a simple or completely traditional one. The differences between the two of them in some ways echo the differences between Saeed and Nadia. Saeed’s father is mild-mannered and retiring, while his mother is outgoing and independent. Both characters have teaching jobs—the mother is a schoolteacher, the father a professor—and do not conceive Saeed until they are in their forties, although we are told that they have an active sex life.

As characters and as a couple, Saeed’s parents serve to complicate our view of what tradition is. Their namelessness suggests that their main identity in the book is as parents, yet they are also very much individuals; they preserve some traditional Middle Eastern rituals, such as regular praying, while also leading equally independent lives. It is possible that it is their very individuality and lack of extremism that allows Saeed, later on in the novel, to evolve into a pious and traditional character. Prayer for him does not imply oppression but is rather a way for him to remember and remain connected to his family. Nadia’s family, by contrast—who are mostly offstage in this novel—are more extreme and rigid in their religiousness and traditions, to a point where it pushes Nadia away and makes her resolutely unreligious.  

The girl in Mykonos is a minor character in the novel, but also a significant foreshadowing one. She plays a key role in the plot, in that she finds Nadia and Saeed a new escape door, landing them in a squatter’s building in London. More centrally, however, she causes Nadia to discover something about herself that she had not previously suspected. Nadia, unlike Saeed, is generally not a backwards-looking character; over the course of their journey, she rarely seems to think of the people whom they have left behind, including her own family. She does, however, think of the girl in Mykonos, and the farther west that she and Saeed move, the clearer her feelings for this girl become to her.