But what does all this have to do with a novel about refugees? Exit West tracks the journey of Nadia and Saeed as they flee their unnamed, war-torn homeland, traveling through mystical black doors to the Greek island of Mykonos, a tenement in London, and finally, to the San Francisco Bay. Throughout the novel, Hamid elides the details of the journey in favor of a focus on what happens after the journey, as Nadia and Saeed struggle to connect with others, and with each other, in these new lands.
Ultimately, they separate and find new ways of living apart, rather than together. Certainly, the plot of Exit West offers an intimate portrait of the experience of dislocation and migration, an experience that few medical students and trainees will have faced. Despite efforts by medical schools to reduce implicit bias in admissions, the proportion of applicants from underrepresented minorities URMs who matriculate into a medical school has declined over the last several years.
Exit West demands empathy for Nadia and Saeed, presenting them not as passive victims of circumstanceβthe dominant narrative of refugees in Western mediaβbut as active agents making specific choices in response to both external pressures e. Such erasure is indeed a form of violence, as Roanne Kantor very rightly points out in her post this week.
But the complex style of the novel, with the main narrative broken by short, seemingly unrelated interludes, offers another way for medical educators to think about relocation and dislocation. The interludes come out of nowhere, disrupting the throughline of the Nadia-Saeed plot and jarring the reader out of literary complacency.
Stylistically, the interludes draw me back to my first encounters with clinical care and the complex self-interruptions of taking a patient history. That lesson in itselfβthat a story, including the story of an illness, holds more than a succinct clinical vignette on the board examination or a pre-templated note from the electronic medical recordβis important for students and trainees to remember.
