The mood of this song is by no means how I feel when I read Exit West, but the lyrics definitely speak to the plot of the novel. Saeed and Nadia live in a city being torn apart, if only bit by bit, by a bloody and aggressive war. Through all the commotion, pain, and loss, there is a connection between Saeed and Nadia. How often do we think about people finding connection in war torn areas? For me, this idea has never really crossed my mind because it feels like in such a dangerous situation, there are so many more pressing things to worry about. Saeed and Nadia find connection in a hopeless situation, and that’s why Rihanna’s song came to mind immediately.
I chose a live version of Beyonce singing Runnin’ and All Night in 2016. Although the lyrics of Runnin’ mostly speaks to personal struggles in relationships, I found it interestingly connected with the theme of migration in the novel, particularly how Saeed and Nadia run from the unnamed city together. The lyrics also echoes with Nadia’s experience of running from a religious family and how Saeed opens up Nadia’s heart. “Together we’ll win it all” relates to how the pair emigrates to a safe place. “If I lose myself, I lose it all” suggests Nadia’s independence and subjectivity. Ironically sometimes the camera chose to gaze at her body instead of focusing on her singing.
In Exit West, the narrator describes how Nadia explores the Internet: “she watched bombs falling, women exercising, men copulating, clouds gathering, waves tugging at the sand like the rasping licks of so many mortal, temporary, vanishing tongues, tongues of a planet that would one day too be no more.” (Hamid 41)
Through the usage of consonance, the repetition of -ing terms at the end of words such as “falling” and “tugging” unfolds how the globalization of the Internet gathers all subjects transparent of space and time. Video clips in the virtual space last forever; thus, they are ongoing and existing regardless of time. However, the imagery of bombs falling is no different from that of waves tugging at the sand. Because violence has become one of the mundanities in life and the Internet has overflooded views with an explosion of information, casualties are mere numbers. Building on the absurdity of the Internet experience, the narrator employs simile to draw similarities between “waves tugging at the sand” and “mortal, temporary, vanishing tongues,” in which “tongues of a planet” itself also becomes a synecdoche that represents transient (political) voices in time. The narrator suggests that since vibrations of the planet will stop in the end, all struggles for power are futile in that they are insignificant on the scale of time. Therefore, the emotion of the narrator seems relentless and nevertheless sad, reminding readers that the world exists on the impossibility of return.
Visually, the fusion of Afro-Asian intimacy is shown by a Black Samurai whose dream starts with a battle and ends up waking up and coming back to reality. The lyrics also capture the universal emotion of love followed by heartbreak, a theme that continues to show up in many of the readings, as well as repeatedly in the current novel being read, Exit West.
I chose this piece by Caroline Polachek because it relates the theme of romantic exploration through opening doors, just as Nadia and Saeed do in Exit West.
Every time I arrive at the third verse of Everything But the Girl’s song, “Missing,” I find myself asking Tracy Thorne, the group’s lead singer, Who are you? The song, with its near reverential hook, which splays Tracy open for missing someone “like the deserts miss the rain,” became a huge hit both in the club scene and on contemporary radio in the mid 90s. I’ve heard it playing in cars, clubs, parties, and even while shopping at Footlocker once. I have even asked people about that third verse, but no one has been able to bring me closer to Tracy, to answering my Who are you? of her.
“…I’m back on the train
I ask why did I come again?
Can I confess?
I’ve been hanging ‘round your address
And the years have proved
To offer nothing since you moved
You’re long gone, but I can’t move on
And I miss you
Like the deserts miss the rain…”
I have looked for that answer in many places, including, most recently, on the pages of On Such a Full. There is still no answer—at least not for me (not that this is anyone else’s question of Tracy). Still, I found affinity, and I found Fan. On Such a Full Sea does not offer us a resolution at the end of the story; we are still left suspended about where and why Reg has gone or, perhaps more precisely, been disappeared—the proffered answer that the narrator gives us is unreliable. At least to me. “Missing” does this as well. Leave us suspended as to the missing’s whereabouts and whys.
Tracy, too, is unreliable as a narrator. The only reliability that Tracy offers us is that she will be back to some place emptied of her reason for returning, as she has already done for years. This is, I think, love of sorts—that one person has so moored herself in another that she is also unmoored by them, by their absence. But this is also Fan, although her reasons for the persistence are clearer than Tracy’s. Though both are attempting a kind of reclamation. But Fan, Sea shows us, has been traumatized, and one’s proximity to trauma can lead to a certain unreliability. Tracy, when she tells us that she can “almost hear you shout/down to me/where I always used to,” is essentially telling us that she hears voices—or, at least, their echoes. And they persist, much in the same way that she does. That third verse tells us as much.
There is something slightly disturbing about the video as well.[1] In the video, a second video plays on a TV in the background (and, at some points, is set beside Tracy as she lays in bed, curled mournfully in on herself). In that video, the female in her lover’s embrace, rapt in their kiss is rendered so pale that she is almost translucent. The effect is such that, momentarily, she ceases to be; she is ephemeralized. The dark red of her shirt highlights the sense of ephemerality so that she is almost already disappeared even while in the presence of their kiss and in the hold of her lover’s embrace. The wrist band that the lover wears also heightens this effect: the colors of his wristband are the same colors that the female in his arms is wearing, and to the viewer there is an instant where she nearly fades out even as we are looking at her. The video, then, unreels her real and with this imagery in the back, Tracy’s pain, her sense of mourning is put into a tangible relief; her sense of loss is foregrounded and she, as a person, is both made clear and real, but also destabilized. The video seems to posit that this is what loss does to us; it is the condition we are rendered into.
The song “Missing”, the “Official Video,” the video-within-the-video, and On Such a Full Sea render love and loss—two of the most powerful of all conditions effecting humans—not only forcefully tangible, but ephemerally real. These texts lay bare the fragility inherent to us all. Or within us all. We can hear Fan’s voice in “Missing” just as clearly as we can hear Tracy Thorne’s. In On Such a Full Sea, we can see the depths that Tracy herself would be willing to go to. In both, we see familiars—maybe even something of ourselves.
I am still asking Tracy Who are you? And while I am no closer to that answer than when “Missing” first exploded onto the scene, at least I see her and Fan, and Fan in Tracy. I once said that I wanted my lover to be a song. One of my biggest fears today, however, is that the song she would choose to be is “Missing.”
__________________
[1] There are at least two versions of Everything But the Girl’s video for “Missing.” There is the “Official Music Video” (posted here), but there is also a video inspired by Todd Terry’s remix of the song. The latter video is slightly jarring in its dissonance. In the remix-inspired video, which appears to be a fuzzier version of the “Official” video, but also slightly out of sync, not only is the picture noticeably less clear than in the “Official” video, but Tracy’s lips move at a different pace or time than the song we hear. The effect disturbs the concretized reality, the neat-and-tidiness of the “Official” video. The remix-inspired video appears to be telling us that the loss Tracy has suffered has smudged her reality as well. While, clearly, the remix-inspired video is worth putting into dialogue both visually and verbally with the “Official” video, I have opted to post the “Official” video for this blog because of the clarity of Tracy’s words, which come through more clearly in the “Official” video. Her words deserve to be heard, her voice listened to.
Nadia and Saeed, too, discussed these rumors and dismissed them. But every morning, when she woke, Nadia looked over at her front door, and at the doors to her bathroom, her closet, her terrace. Every morning, in his room, Saeed did much the same. All their doors remained simple doors, on/off switches in the flow between two adjacent places, binarily either open or closed, but each of their doors, regarded thus with a twinge of irrational possibility, became partially animate as well, an object with a subtle power to mock, to mock the desires of those who desired to go far away, whispering silently from its door frame that such dreams were the dreams of fools. – Exit West (73), Mohsin Hamid
Hamid writes this passage with no small amount of foreshadowing for what happens later in the novel, with Nadia and Saeed’s use of the teleportation doors to move from their war-torn homeland. Although the protagonists dismiss the doors’ capabilities, they are also hopeful while defeatist. Hamid creates this mood through asyndeton, sentence structure, and personification. First, the asyndeton of “her bathroom, her closet, her terrace” conveys that Nadia looks at her doors every morning in a hurried fashion — she is almost desperately hopeful. For Saeed, this feeling is similar, and when the doors remain simple doors, their hopes are dashed. The parallelism for Nadia and Saeed’s actions explain their relationship as one of “star-crossed lovers,” connected to each other by an invisible thread even when apart. The hurried and desperate mood is further developed by the length and commas used in the last sentence in the paragraph. Hamid’s point is that this process is continual and daily. Finally, the personification of the door contributes to the complex mood of the passage. The door whispers “silently,” telling Nadia and Saeed that the doors could never bring them out of the misery they currently experience. Ending the paragraph on such a somber note combines any possibility of hope that the doors can be liberating with an attitude of defeat. In the context of the book as a whole, the paragraph situates the despair of the current situation while also invoking the mechanism by which Nadia and Saeed leave the city.
“I’m that Black a-Rican bruja straight out from the Yoruba And my people come from Africa diaspora, Cuba And you mix that Arawak, that original people I’m that Black Native American, I vanquish all evil I’m that Black a-Rican bruja straight out from the Yoruba And my ancestors Nigerian, my grandmas was brujas And I come from an island and it’s called Puerto Rico And it’s one of the smallest but it got the most people”
“Bruja” means “witch” in Spanish, in which Princess Nokia states in homage to her ancestors and origins. The lyrics start with a repetition of the same phrase and as if to mystify and assert respect for the African witchcraft of her roots. The lyrics continue to layer spirituality with her own Afro-Latinx identity as well as the bonds and connection of women as a force to be reckoned with.
After Prof. Goffe mentioned that Lee was inspired by journalistic accounts in Shenzhen, China, I looked up Lee’s interviews on the novel.
There are some really interesting points in his interviews:
Originally, Lee wants to write a book on social realism inspired by Chinese factory workers in Shenzhen. He concerned about income inequality, health care and American exceptionalism in the U.S., and On Such a Full Sea is “stratified by class and wealth happening in the U.S.” (Singh) In terms of the discussion on near-future in class, Lee mentioned that he was “looking at the issues of our time.” (PBS)
The theme of Chinese ascendancy and American decline. The issues of environmental contamination. Lee’s futuristic novel is a reflection of his worries on contemporary topics. The expansion of the Chinese economy at the cost of environmental pollution also echoes with the condition in B-Mor.
Charter villages are similar to upper-middle and middle class in the U.S., where there is no “safety net.” Lee brought up the word “anxiety” many times in his interviews. Having worked on Wall Street for a year before he became a full-time writer and described it as a payback to an immigrant kid’s struggle in American education, Lee’s perspective on Asian Americans as the model minority influences his construction of the novel (Singh).
China and India (B-Mor) as the global provider of goods to countries such as the U.S. Lee saw these developing countries as the rising global energy: “the millions of people coming from the provinces into the urban centers and factory centers of China and really being the engine of growth for the world.” (Brada-Williams)
The name of the book came from the fourth act of Julius Caesar “On such a full sea are we now afloat.” Lee explained that, although the book is not about the tyranny of dictatorship (like many utopian novels), it has the tyranny of civil society.
On the role of the unnamed narrator, Lee briefly alluded that “I hope they also recognize the way the novel is written – the way an unnamed narrator is asking them to look at certain things.” It’s awesome that my peers brought up the significance of the narrator in blog posts and class discussions.
Before my laptop runs out of battery, I guess my questions would be:
Does reading interviews on the novel help with our understanding or does it inevitably kill part of the joy?
Did Lee romanticize the socio-political issues in China and the U.S. when he reduces them to symbolism?
I chose this song because of Fran’s journey after leaving B-Mor. The people and things that try pulling her apart along the way. The whole time Fran regardless of the outside pressures and people, stays true to herself. She leads with bravery and resilience and does what she needs to do to in order to save her “soul and save herself.”
