Abstract

This article explores the issue of subjectivity under migration in Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West through the application of Foucauldian theorization of the construction of subject through genealogy. For Foucault, it is the insurrection of subjugated knowledge. It deals with the manifestations of power in the society through ‘strategies of domination’. Foucault Emphasizes the controlling of the private lives of the laymen. This subjectified community is “carceral culture” where social subjects face diffused punishments and discipline restricting their personal emancipation. The study finds that migrants experience the issue of subjectivity because of political reasons and the dominance of discourse—media functions as a tool of surveillance of the subjects. Exit West explores the issues of migrants’ subjectivity in the context of 9/11 and the western discursive construction of the (Muslim) subjects.

Key Words

Subjectivity, Migration, Pakistani Literature in English, Foucauldian Studies, Genealogy   

Introduction

The event of 9/11 segregated the world into two disparate Muslim and non-Muslim blocks accelerating stereotypical misrepresentations against the Muslims and Islam (Shihada, 2015, p. 452). US-led its “war on terror” in Afghanistan for materialistic projects against soviets during the 1980s. The abstractions concerning the “war on terror” reject the considering other perspectives (Cilano, 2013, p. 193). Mamdani apprehends 9/11 an “unfinished business of the cold war” (Kanwal, 2015, p. 6). The war on terror evolves from regional, political and national strife between Pakistan, America and the South Asian countries since the late 1970s for the acquisition of political power contextualizing the recent scenario between the West and Muslims/Islam. The Islamisation process, the disintegration of the USSR and America’s changed policy from “pro-Taliban to anti-Taliban” generated radical organizations that confronted the west (Kanwal, 2015, p. 8). American political discourse constructed the Islamic fundamentalists in Pakistan/Afghanistan for American interference in Muslim countries. 

The political “War on Terror” deformed the image of the Muslims/Pakistanis as terrorists by propagating Islamophobia and Islamic terrorism in the west. Suicide bombings, terrorism, and Islamic fundamentalism were attributed to Islam converting the Muslims from a “terrorized minority to a terrified majority, the Muslim world itself” (Appadurai, 2006, p, 111).  Muslimhood became a stereotype for a barbaric identity and Pakistan a hub of terrorist activities, and it transformed “orientalist epistemology to terrorist ontology” in post-9/11 ambience (Kanwal, 2015, p, 3). Hamid, Shamsie, Aslam, and Hanif counter the western transfigurations of xenophobia into Islamophobia in their post-9/11 novels (Kanwal, 2015, p, 12) and explore the construction of innocent-terrorist binaries, the disfigured clashes between Islam and the West, transfiguring of national into transnational, home into diaspora and effects of   9/11.

September 11, 2001incident changed every context in the American consciousness, even the historical concept of migration. Cross-cultural/international relations are specified through the abstractions mandatory to the war on terror (Cilano, 2013, p, 194). The migration process was also affected. The western discourse branded the Muslims as terrorists or fundamentalists making them victims of migrations. Power relationships prevail over the micro-political level, the localities they are invested in, not from the source of their emergence (May 1993, p. 3). This diasporic study of Exit West by Hamid deals with the wide-scale destructive migration, the marginalization of the migrants, subjectification through technological media under powerful authorities. This article explores the clash of forces for maintaining power through displacing the refugees, drastic change through dominance and resistance, surveillance through media over the displaced and the subjectivity of the exponents in Exit West.  

Literature Review

Aroosa Kanwal (2015) argues that post-9/11 discourse indifferent to cultural differences homogenizes the Muslims of the world. Kanwal thinks beyond 9/11 because diasporic Muslim identity is spelt by the disturbed Islam-West relationship, redefining home and identity. She associates the post-9/11 rhetoric with stereotyping of Islam and the Muslims and Pakistan as the center of terrorism. The west and the US got the Muslims as the new target in lieu of the blacks or East, a “shift from orientalist epistemology to terrorist ontology” (p. 3). Cilano (2013) discusses Pakistani fiction to see how Pakistan was dragged into the American war on terror. Migrancy in the context of 9/11 is a major issue of these works. Mohsin Hamid’s Moth Smoke (2000) has raised the issues of class disparity and global economic transformation. The West represents Muslim countries, especially Pakistan, as a laboratory of fundamentalistic terrorism. Hamid presents Pakistanis as victims of terror and despises it. M. A. Mir (2018) identifies economic and social instability as the cause of migration for suitable living. He scrutinizes Hamid’s Exit West (2017) as a modern representation of the necessitated migration of people across countries/continents from areas facing anarchy. Mir highlights how Exit West depicts the adverse condition of refugees in a city unnamed destroyed by internal war. Hamid universalizes the suffering of refugees by keeping the city without a name.

Anum Aziz (2018) in her review of Exit West examines the depictions of Hamid about the conflicts of identity, migration and transformations of a war-ravaged city. Aziz discusses magic realism employed to reflect the predicament of the displaced people. Aziz shows the creation of microcosm of the world, which constantly suffers from transition owing to war, terrorism and continuous displacements. 

Muhammed Salahudeen (2017) in his analysis of Exit West in the light of global migration associates the narrative with the recent global migration crisis and a sensational dramatic visual running over a powerful plot represented in our popular media. The issues of religions, immigration, refugees, and the controversies between militants and government exhibit conflicting matters.

Muneeza Shamsie (2017) in her review “How the West Was One in ‘Newsweek Pakistan’” considers the novel “topical and prescient” marks the major social and political problems and individualistic strife for “fulfilment, space, and self against the odds”. Hamid’s presented world is primarily dystopian futuristic one. 

Amanda Lagji (2018) in the article “Waiting in Motion: Mapping Postcolonial Fiction, New Mobilities, and Migration through Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West” gives a new drive to mobility studies and postcolonial literature. Michael Perfect (2019) in the article “Black Holes in the Fabric of the Nation: Refugees in Hamid’s Exit West” observes that Exit West is published after the report of the United Nations High Commissioner of Refugees mentioning the number of refugees marked highest in 2014 after World War II. The novel mirrors the catastrophes of refugees and the disruptions caused in the political scenarios. The refugee displacements represent migration through times (Perfect, 2019, p.1). The refugees are referred to as a massive mob with blurred identity as individuals. The narration syntax shows subjection as refugees are delineated in the Subordinate clause always (p. 4). Their problems question the concept of nationality, as deprived of the homeland they lose individual rights and shelters (p. 6). Protagonists roaming worldwide, at last build a "new city" for themselves and get a sign of hope.

Oana-Celia Gheorghiu (2018) explores how Exit West depicts the crisis of refugees on personal and political planes using the context of civil wars in Syria and Yemen. The use of magical realism shows the catastrophe of migrated refugees (p. 80). The novel also silhouettes the current situation of the polarisation of the European Union and Brexit and redefining of borders in the last two decades (p. 85).

Exit West presents the psychological disturbances of the refugees like fearful anxiety, alienation and insecurity, says Sercan Hamza Ba?lama (2019). Hamid explores these crises from his own context but also suggests the bigger picture. He demarcates society into two parts: the local one and that of refugees, or the insiders and the outsiders (Ba?lama, 2019, pp.150-152). Iliana M. Naydan (2019) derives that the nationalistic border system serves as parting screens and modern technical procedures within the possibilities of globalization. In the story of Saeed and Nadia, Hamid suggests that connectivity is beyond the digital context. Magical doors lead the characters out of the east into the west, and finally to San Francisco bay in Marin, US, the center of digital technology. Naydan describes Hamid as a tech-philosopher, sketching how screens act like figures (Naydan, 2019, p.434). This article studies Exit West from the angle of power relationships that spell change, destruction and large-scale displacements. The text reflects subject formation through the dominance of discourse and resistance to discourse. 

Theoretical Framework

Genealogy

Michel Foucault extended the term ‘Genealogy’ borrowing from Nietzsche who proposed the development of modern genealogy through power relationships affecting the edifice of discourse (Smart 1985) neglecting the origins and linear developmental mechanism, genealogy analyses the power influencing the truth, highlighting the construction of interest-oriented truths under power/knowledge operations. Foucauldian truth seeps into its mechanical modes of production. Genealogy or the developed modern power demythologize ‘truth phenomena’ and pre-figured human knowledge under differentiated conditions (Tamboukou, 1999). It investigates the forces which encircle the discursive ideals to be institutionalized or conditioned (Dreyfus &Rabinow 1983, p. 68). Knowledge like an inventive tool justifies instinctive interests and universal dominance/submission. “Truth is our longest lie, our most intimate ally and enemy” (Rabinow 1994, p. xiii).

Genealogy or “insurrection of subjugated knowledge” oppose universalism and judgment of the masses under universal discursive criteria by rejecting totalities, essences, origins and finalities (During 2005, pp.123-124). Foucault’s genealogy affects the ancient ontological existence of people on three levels: on their relative truth or subjection of knowledge; on the field of power like acting subjects for others; in relation to the ethics or their being moral agents (During 2005, p. 127).  It attributes itself to ‘the constitution of knowledge, discourses, or domains of objects’ (Foucault 2003) and is ‘grey, meticulous, and the documentary’ (Foucault 1977; Prado 1995) explaining the traditional free knowledge to be rooted in power (McPhail, 2001). Genealogy deals with the manifestations of power regarding ‘strategies of domination’ (MacPhail, 2001). Power relations are interconnected to the social connections, and the escape from this amalgam of power and social nexus is imaginary. One action either related to power or social is outcome or cause of the other, remaining chained together (During, 2005, p.129).

Power never subjugates all types of social opinions/oppositions rather allows the social resistance against the dominant operations. “Power or power relationships enable both the domination of individuals or classes and the values and ideas employed in justifying that domination as well as in resisting it” (Prado 1995, p.33). Power relations can never be immune to resistance and adjustments in the local forms of power. Power, for Genealogy, becomes the inventive structure of relations that disseminates knowledge to exploit the influences of the knowledge produced (Lon?arevi?, 2013, p.73). Smart (1985) interprets genealogy as a local discursive struggle. Society never depends on understanding the world or transforming it, and revolution doesn’t change the whole of society immediately but by specific local struggles (Hoy, 1994). Genealogy turns out to be social critique operating on the local events.

The power/knowledge relation is complex, can’t be understood through subordination or imposition of one to the other. Knowledge can’t be constructed without any form of power like communication systems, and power can’t be implemented effectively without the assimilation or constraint of the knowledge. “There is not knowledge [connaissance] on one side and society on the other, but the basic forms of "power-knowledge" ["pouvoir-savoir"]” (Rabinow, 1997, p 17). Foucault begins his work analyzing the forms of knowledge but culminates with the theory of power: “I was working on a ‘genealogical’ history of knowledge. But . . . in the end, I had produced only a history of power” (Foucault as cited in Kelly, 1993, p.32).




Foucault’s Subjectivity or Subject-Formation




Foucault’s stance of subjectivity or subject formation refers to the generation of the subjects through a disciplinary procedure of observational constancy to control the masses psychologically.  Technological panoptic mediums like mobile phones, internet and electronic media, governed by the political powers, limit the practices of the discursive members. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1977a) relates modern society to that of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four emphasizing the subjectivity and controlling the private lives of the laymen. He terms the subjectified community as “carceral culture” where social subjects undergo through an internalized procedure of diffused punishments and discipline restricting their personal emancipation (Felluga, 2015, p. 204). Foucault scrutinizes the disciplinary modes in Jeremy Bentham’s circular prison model ‘panopticon’ where “the inmates are under constant surveillance by unseen guards and without communication they are unaware of when they are being watched” (Berggren, 2016, p. 3). Panopticon implements power through a conscious state of being visible to constant surveillance only in its effect; the persons envisage themselves to be suppressed (Foucault in Berggren 2016, p. 6). 

Modern power unlike “centralized” sovereign power “evaporates at the margins” (During, 2005, p.147) yet it cannot be an alternative to the primitive sovereign power. Modern power is demarcated into inter-linked subdivisions like disciplinary power, bio-power and pastoral power. Disciplinary power permeates through the social structure affecting the individuals of any social place privately. It objectifies the individual through surveillance, scrutinies and administrative drills at the locations like factories, schools, hospitals and prisons, compacting the margin lines between “discursive practices and techniques of production and between formal regulations and social practices” (During, 2005, p.147).  

Surveillance cameras, disciplinary apparatuses and mobile phones, internet, social media and internet search engines etc. assist the course of subject formation. The disciplinary reforming process subjectifies the individuals/communities as yielding subjects who offer docile submission to the organizing institutions. Perpetual monitoring system based on reward/punishment enticements sweeps the masses to be attuned to the laws. Power and truth are establishing channels effectively probe and subjectify people enduringly (May 1993, pp. 42-43).

Discussion and Analysis

Political Causes of Migration

Mohsin Hamid in Exit West focuses on personal identification, relocation, civil war and destruction caused by power affairs. The narrative plays upon the interplay of power relations as “the endlessly repeated play of dominations” (Foucault, 1971, p. 83), i.e., dominance of the individuals over others or one sect over the other, even if one political region over another. Conflicts between political parties for acquiring dominating power ruin the societies. The couple, Nadia and Saeed, is compelled to migrate from “a city swollen by refugees” (p.1) where contradictory forces struggle for hegemonic and sovereign power and roam city to city. Militants pressurize the ruling party to gain a monopoly, creating chaos “drone-crossed sky” “startled by the gunshot”, by the “whirr of the rotors” of helicopters “chopping, chopping through heavens” (p. 32). Refugees are outstretched on the roads, “sleeping rough on pavements and margins of streets” (p. 23).

Seizure of stock exchange by the militants and resistive measures of the government cause destructive consequences shattering the peaceful activities. The place gets hellish by the frequent massacre, heavy bombings, agonized scene of the masses being “blown […] to bits, literally to bits” (p. 29) and the couple decides to flee from the place “at the edge of the abyss” (p. 2). “A conglomeration of blind forces” (Foucault as cited in Prado, 1995) compels Nadia and Saeed to explore the magical doors; doors that could take you elsewhere…..well removed from the deathtrap of this country. They continue travelling from their native city to Mykonos, London and then to Marin, California. Everywhere they confront challenges, and power is exerted over them to remodel their identities and viewpoints about life.

The “darkness and opacity” “extinguishing and blackness” of the “doors” push the couple to a transit place Mykonos then to London. They are in thousands imploring for water, comforters and electricity for their cell phones and securing themselves from dacoits. They are the most detestable creepers on this Earth wandering in search of power-guarded exit doors. Authorities treat them as subjects not allowing them to settle anywhere in the city, the dystopian London (Gheorghiu, 2018, p.90). The “unoccupied mansions in the borough of Kensington and Chelsea” and empty places between Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens are occupied by them. Londoners look down upon them as a “strange and violent tribe, intent on their destruction” (p. 131) and “around this zone were soldiers and armoured vehicles, and above it was drones and helicopters” (p. 135), and Nadia and Saeed are confused “were next to run” (p. 135). London is demarcated into “light London” and “dark London” and the rapes, murders and harassment assaults become frequent in the former. The refugees manage their infiltration into California, the oceanic hills of Marin.

In California, the refugees yield to silent subjection, non-interfering, enjoying the panorama of the sea. The couple relishes the company infrequently and at last, gets apart completely. After fifty years, in their home city, they plan to meet again but can’t be sure “if that evening would ever come” (p. 229). Metamorphosis of ordinary life into a tumultuous territory facing disastrous bombings and constant surveillance characterizes Hamid’s depiction. Laborious migration transformed into migration through magical doors flings a psychological sense of loss, insecurity and worthlessness. Powers for the sake of political authority make them mere victims. Every sect, governmental powers and regional powers seem to overpower the other for political gains, and political power is an official form of antagonizing the other group of people.   

Dominance of the Discourse

Discourse structures human affairs, behaviors, individualities and mental make-up (Bielskis, 2009, p. 81). Discursive institutions like family, religion and academic institutions, driven by political perk, influence the masses. In Exit West (2017), Saeed’s family is highly dominated by the discourse. Stars-looking telescope of the forefathers, the “time-travel” (p. 14) is the symbol of overwhelming discourse and orthodox norms of the prevailing narratives. Nadia uses the discourse as a preventive veil by describing her “conservative and virtually all-concealing black robe” (p.15) wearing reasonably “so men don’t fuck with me” (p. 16). She is always ready to intimate sexually without wed-lock, but Saeed always stays her away. Saeed is always ready to come back home. Nadia thwarts the constructed norms but is compelled to accept situations like living alone is preferred by her, yet she is forced to combine with Saeed’s family listening “no time for anyone to be alone” admitting “unsafe for a woman to be alone” (p. 71). Saeed with his father is a man of tradition. His father stays home because the “past offered more to him” (91). The migrants, largely overwhelmed by the discursive influences, suffer from the nostalgia of being present. Saeed under nostalgic past is drawn apart Nadia for instance, in Greece they experience being together yet alone. 




Defiance to the Dominant Discourse

Resistance goes parallel to the power relations (Foucault as cited in Bielskis, 1980, p. 142) (Bielskis 2009, p.82). Immediate resistance generates from the implementation of power (Lon?arevi?, 2013, p.72-73) and “power comes from below” (Foucault, 1978, 94). This narrative expose resistive behaviors from militants and individuals against the discourse. The resistive power of the militants is put down by the government, and civil war emphasizes the clash of thoughts between class, sects and the state. Nadia, living “single”, resists discursive institutions like family, religion and social traditions. She questions the religious festivity in which she has been brought up. Steering of a motorbike, working in the insurance company and meeting with Saeed in cafes and at her apartment, smoking and enjoying marijuana, all is resistance against Islamic religious society. Nadia deconstructs the Islamic traditions and change is “exciting to her”. “Feverishly keen to depart” she mixes up with foreign people. Nadia and Saeed show resistance differently. Nadia resists her native Islamic discourse, but Saeed resists the practices of foreign impacts.







Surveillance through Media and Institutions

Foucault considers it a misconception about people to be free agents. (Mahon, 1995). Media and institutions produce the knowledges. People are subjects who apprehend proposed things normal (Gutting 2005). The people are under constant surveillance through mobile phones, media, the internet, monitoring cameras, and even social media like Google, Facebook, Twitter etc. In Exit West media and modern technology overpower their thinking. Their cells “sniffed out an invisible world” transferring them to the “places distant and near” (p. 35). The men detected through modern technological gadgets can be traced “blinking in the sterile artificial light”. A specific family is “captured on three exterior surveillance feeds” in CCTVs, drones connected to a “central monitoring feed” and “tourists’ selfie-taking mobile phones” (86-88). People are tracked by the powerful authorities making “visibility a trap” (Foucault as cited in Berggren, 2016, p. 9).

Under the government’s surveillance, the news is transmitted through agents and camera-carrying drones which act as watching robots that record ruthlessly highlighting the degradation of refugees in Dark London. In Marin, Nadia and Saeed develop a relationship with these drones as if collapsed they are buried with a funeral. Hamid highlights the role of the media to inseminate xenophobia for refugees. Words like “withdraw, destruction, and surrender” on electronic media foretell about a military attack. The television announces the probability of a major operation “starting in London, to reclaim Britain for Britain” (Hamid 2017, p. 132). Media confirms something doubtful as authentic as the rumored doors are confirmed by announcing “the most reputable international broadcasters had acknowledged the doors existed” and the world leaders mentioned the doors “a major global crisis” (pp. 82–83).

  The author emphasizes novel as magical realism, inspired by the magical facet of technology and relates the exits to the west to the rectangular devices which transport the people just like an electronic message or email is transferred i-e a dark man “materializes in a closet in Sydney” (pp. 6–7) like an email appears on the computer. Chambers connects the doors with present digitalized technology. The doors remind the space-hour compressions that signify technological screens (Claire, 2019, p. 237). London media marginalizes the refugees and typifies refugee areas as “the worst of the black holes in the fabric of the nation” (p. 126).

New technology acts as a tool for subjecting people, emphasized in tech-savvy novel Exit West (Claire, 2019, p. 213). Modern digital-age technology empowers people for making people subjects through technological surveillance, and media facilitates their power preserving policies. The modern world is digital dystopia inhabitants are “present without presence” (p. 40) in the obsession with technological devices.




Formation of Subjects for Political Supremacy

Individuals are regularised as “docile bodies” through political organizations and institutions like educational hubs, ailment centers, prisons and family institutions administer all activities of the masses. The institutional discipline ensures the masses’ compliance with the social/economic transformations through revamping their capabilities, intensifying their docility to the political requirement (Pylypa, 1998, p.22). A subject is an enslaved person embodying “the locus of dissociated self” (Foucault, 1971, p. 83). Nadia and Saeed encounter the hardships:  alienated and drifting through unpredictable areas (Naydan, 2019, p.438). They feel incarcerated in the east as well, internalizing the captivity, transforming them into subjects in Marin, California. A mob in London invades for executing the refugees (p. 134). They face terrific situations from “soldiers and armored vehicles” danger from “drones and helicopters” in London as they escaped in the east (p. 137). Discipline maintains the individual’s presence and absence, their communications, conducts, capabilities and abilities through establishing an analytical space (Foucault, 1978, p. 143). Evacuating their city, Nadia and Saeed follow the disciplinary rules, their dressing, haircut, the beard of Saeed; all is set by transporting agents (p. 83). They are made, confined to the rules, supreme subjects under a disciplined exodus.

Bearing the hatred of the London natives, they migrate to the United States, the so-called champion of liberty, where natives were “exterminated long ago” (p. 197) refugees are expelled out of common localities. Ideological and digital surveillance over refugees is the same. Drones, steered by the authoritative top, pierce into the lives of the refugees. Everywhere they are marginalized, displaced, homeless mob, in “London Halo” (p. 167), in California’s new city, overwhelmingly poor (p. 191). 

The splitting of “Light London” and “Dark London” on account of the availability of electricity for the natives and the refugees emphasizes the constructed west/east binary. The refugees are impressed by the glitter, delicious dinners, shining cars, moving of the people (p. 142).  They are guarded by drones, helicopters and surveillance balloons. They are the cards shuffled by the powerful authorities, “all the hearts together, all the clubs together, all the Sudanese, all the Hondurans” (p. 143). Electricity becomes a tool for regulating surveillance. During the disturbance, it is switched off in the native city and in London showing authoritative power leaving the dominated group powerless. The refugees are forced to live without electric power or modern basics like cell phones, internet. The dark doors are powered by men, and passing refugees feel powerless. The entry from west to east is without any restraint.

Disciplinary rules are the politics imposed upon the people. They have become the weapons of a political despot. Discipline empowers the people when economic matters are concerned and decreases their power in political cases. They are empowered when needed and contrarily converted into “strict subjection” (Foucault 1978, p. 138). Refugees are separated from power, and London Natives are made strong to antagonize them. Subject formation through discipline and political power reaches the climax, and they are framed by “technologies of the self” (Foucault, 1988).




Western Misconstruction of Islamic Terrorism: A Tool of Political Domination

The destructive attacks of 9/11have changed the definition of identifications of the people in diaspora and in homelands. The stereotypical propagations of Islamic followers by the west as well as American streams of thought are directly connected to the ‘war on terror’ rhetoric. The marginalization of the Muslims and antagonism towards Islam has been proliferated through xenophobic ideas carried by the western ideologies. Chambers expostulates the war on terror a dramatic stage-play of the 9/11 narrative. The tragedy of terrorist attacks was horrific, but the after-effects of the war on terror were more disastrous than the tower attacks. The Muslims were labeled from the monikers as black people to the Asians and to terrorist Muslims at last. The war on terror caused disturbances in Pakistan directly (Chambers, 2011, p. 128-129). ‘Us and Them’ binary works behind the post 9/11 scenario and achieves transnational political importance shattering the national boundaries. It alludes to Bush’s policies for considering the “other” (Gorman, 2014, p. 9).

After 9/11, Islam is treated as the refuge of the terrorists. Any assault is converted into Islamic terrorism. Western xenophobia has been transformed into Islamophobia Prejudiced media indoctrination has flared up in the Muslim world, especially Pakistan, as the locus of terrorism.

Hamid’s Exit West is based on the post 9/11 scenario. An unknown city with its scenario and characters’ personalities proves to be of a third world or south Asian Muslim countries like Pakistan or Bangladesh. In the novel militants and state’s clashes, religious norms, Islamic traditions run with the plotline. The exponents are compelled to migrate unwillingly. American policy targeted the Muslims, particularly to crush their belief structure. Exit West represents Muslims suffering due to western misconstructions. Barbaric attacks against the government, curfews, patrolling of the armed men, hovering of the drones, dropping of bombs and missiles and strife for power are the atmospheric allusions that correlate the unknown city to the cities of Pakistan after the invasion in Afghanistan. Chambers declares the monastic play of the initials of “N” and “S” in Nadia and Saeed provide the absent point in the novel’s title Exit [East] West and also northern/southern poles (Chambers, 2019, p. 216). Peter Moreys (2011) assesses the narration as “deterritorializing, beyond the totalizing categories of East and West” (p. 138). 

Conclusion

This article explores the subjectivity, power affairs and their impact on the migrancy and its destructive consequences. The human world has been converted into a dystopian society where everyone is steered by powerful authorities, of which Nadia and Saeed are exponents. The peaceful place becomes destructed, camera drones, robots and the presence of helicopters signify the prevailing surveillance over the people leading to the subject formation. The Muslims are misrepresented as a terrorist through technological media. 9/11 was an opportunity for American political leadership, and they started the ‘war on the Muslims’ in the guise of ‘war on terrorism’. The masses were formed as subjects, monopolized through discursive formations, through media aid and military attacks. Refugees are subjects formed through violent atrocities, conflicts of forces for power and surveillance of media technology and they are not allowed to settle anywhere in the world. In the end, they internalize optimistic feelings in moving farther and further. Anyone can’t image their nostalgia of dejected feelings, patience and humanistic endurance. The geopolitical crisis following the post-9/11 scenario contains numerous problems faced by refugees. Hamid in this magical romance unearths the global conflicts and political manoeuvres buried under smooth world surface.

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