Exit West: Chapter 10 Summary & Analysis

Saeed and Nadia settle high in the hills of Marin, above the encampments of other refugees who came to California before them. With a view of the Golden Gate Bridge and San Francisco, they fashion a shanty out of corrugated metal and packing crates. Nadia finds work by hiking down the hills—through the ever-present fog—to a food cooperative nearby. And although there are many poor refugees living in Marin, the settlement is markedly less violent than the places most of these refugees fled in the first place. Still, Saeed becomes even “more melancholic” than he was before, a temperament that leads him into an even more intense state of quiet devotion and prayer.

One night, Nadia obtains weed from a coworker. Hiking home, she realizes she doesn’t know how Saeed will react—of course, they’ve smoked joints before, but so much has changed since then, and Saeed has become incredibly devout. “She sometimes felt that his praying was not neutral towards her,” Hamid writes, “in fact she suspected it carried a hint of reproach, though why she felt this she could not say.” When she’s about to show Saeed the marijuana, then, she recognizes that how he responds is “a matter of portentous significance to her.” Sitting on a car seat they use as a couch, she touches his leg; he offers her a small, fatigued smile. This, she thinks, is “encouraging.” She then opens her hand to reveal the weed and waits for his reaction. After a brief pause, he begins laughing “almost soundlessly,” saying, “Fantastic.”

Saeed rolls a joint as Nadia inwardly rejoices, giddy at his positive reaction. Smoking the joint, she realizes that American weed is much more potent than what she’s used to. In accordance with this, she finds herself almost unable to speak. “And then, not looking at each other, they started to laugh, and Nadia laughed until she cried,” Hamid writes.

Hamid notes that most of the natives in Marin have died out or were “exterminated long ago.” At the same time, though, he suggests that it’s not “quite true to say there [are] almost no natives, nativeness being a relative matter.” Indeed, many people consider themselves natives of Marin, meaning that “they or their parents or their grandparents or the grandparents of their grandparents [were] born” here. Still, the concept of “nativeness” in America is further complicated by the fact that there exists a “third layer […] composed of” people who descend from those “brought from Africa to this continent centuries ago as slaves.” Saeed gets to know one such person who leads a communal prayer at a local place of worship. Apparently, this priest’s deceased wife originally came from Saeed’s country, meaning that the preacher can somewhat speak Saeed’s language and knows “his approach to religion.” 

The preacher runs a shelter staffed by volunteers that feeds people and teaches English. Before long, Saeed joins the organization and works with the preacher’s daughter, to whom he avoids speaking because his breath seizes when he looks upon her beauty, a reaction that makes him feel guilty. “Nadia perceived the presence of this woman not in the form of a distancing by Saeed, as might have been expected, but rather as a warming up and reaching out,” Hamid writes. Together, they happily smoke joints in the evenings, and Nadia feels “bits of the old Saeed returning.” However, she can’t summon the “old Nadia,” finding her physical attraction to him lacking. This is not because her erotic sensibilities have died away—in fact, they’re quite alive, as evidenced by the fact that sometimes, when Saeed’s asleep, she masturbates while thinking about the volunteer from Mykonos.

Saeed prays often throughout the day. For him, prayer is a way to “touch” his parents, “who [cannot] otherwise be touched.” When he was a child, he used to watch his parents pray and wonder what it was like. When he asked his mother, she taught him how to pray, and so “until the end of his days, prayer sometimes remind[s him] of [her].” It also reminds him of his father and his father’s friends, since when he was a teenager he started accompanying his father to communal prayers. As such, “prayer for him became about being a man, being one of the men, a ritual that connected him to adulthood and to the notion of being a particular sort of man, a gentleman, a gentle man, a man who stood for community and faith and kindness and decency, a man, in other words, like his father.”

Part of why Saeed prays is because it feels like a way of restoring to humanity a sense of unity. As such, he prays as “a lament, as a consolation, and as a hope.” However, he feels incapable of expressing this to Nadia, despite how important it is to communicate “this mystery that prayer link[s] him to,” which he finds himself able to articulate to the preacher’s daughter when she asks him—during a “remembrance for her [dead] mother”—to describe her mother’s country to her. This question leads to a long, meaningful conversation that lasts late into the night.

Neither Saeed nor Nadia talk about the fact that they’re “drifting apart,” since they don’t want to “inflict a fear of abandonment,” though they both feel “the fear of the severing of their tie, the end of the world they [have] built together, a world of shared experiences in which no one else [can] share.” At the same time, what keeps them together is also a desire to make sure that the other first establishes him- or herself as an individual in Marin. And although they continue to argue and become jealous now and again, they mostly give each other space.

As Saeed and Nadia grow apart, Hamid describes an old woman living in Palo Alto in the same house she grew up in. This house has witnessed her two marriages and the formative years of her children’s lives. “She had known the names of almost everyone on her street,” Hamid writes, “and most had been there a long time, they were old California, from families that were California families, but over the years they had changed more and more rapidly, and now she knew none of them.” When she steps into the yard, she feels as if she herself has migrated, thinking that “everyone migrates, even if we stay in the same houses our whole lives.” After all, Hamid suggests, “we are all migrants through time.”