Exit West: Chapter 8 Summary & Analysis

With the lights out in Saeed and Nadia’s portion of the city, “murders and rapes and assaults” take place. Although some blame the “nativist provocateurs,” others blame the migrants. In this shifting climate, a group of elder Nigerians in Saeed and Nadia’s mansion form a council that meets in the courtyard. Nadia is the only person in attendance who is visibly non-Nigerian. Some are surprised to see her and don’t know whether or not to accept her into the group, but then an older woman—whom Nadia often helps climb the stairs—invites her to stand with her, thereby putting everybody at ease and welcoming Nadia into the council.

At first, Nadia has trouble following what takes place during the council meetings, but eventually she’s able to track the conversations because most people speak some form of English. She learns that not everybody in the courtyard is actually Nigerian, but rather from “places that border Nigeria,” meaning that each person speaks a slightly different kind of English. “Together in this group they conversed in a language that was built in large part from English,” Hamid notes, “but not solely from English, and some of them were in any case more familiar with English than were others. Also, they spoke different variations of English, different Englishes, and so when Nadia gave voice to an idea or opinion among them, she did not need to fear that her views could not be comprehended, for her English was like theirs, one among many.”

Nadia begins to look forward to council meetings because they represent “something new in her mind, the birth of something new.” These people, she discovers, are both “familiar and unfamiliar,” and their acceptance of her feels like an “achievement” of sorts. She even gains respect among the younger Nigerians because of her involvement with the elders. The only person who doesn’t spare her is a young Nigerian woman “with a leather jacket and a chipped tooth” who stands like a “gunslinger” and verbally harasses everybody in the house.

Unlike Nadia, Saeed is uncomfortable in the mansion, disliking the fact that he’s the sole male representative of his country. “Those sizing him up were from another country,” Hamid writes, “and there were far more of them, and he was alone. This touched upon something basic, something tribal, and evoked tension and a sort of suppressed fear.” Feeling this way, Saeed doesn’t know when he can “relax” or if he even can relax.

One evening, while Nadia is in the courtyard with the council, Saeed is stopped in the hallway by the woman in the leather jacket, her foot planted on the wall, barring him from passing. “Excuse me,” he says, to which she replies, “Why should I excuse you?” She also utters something else, but he can’t understand what she says. Behind him, he notices a “tough-looking Nigerian man,” a man he’s heard has a gun. Just as Saeed starts to truly fret, the woman in the leather jacket takes her foot from the wall and allows him to pass, though in order to do so he must brush against her body—a movement that makes him feel “emasculated.” Once in the bedroom, he wants to “shout” and “huddle in a corner,” though he doesn’t do either of these things.

Saeed discovers that a neighboring mansion is full of people from his country, so he begins visiting the house on a regular basis, finding comfort in hearing “familiar languages and accents and the familiar smell of the cooking.” One afternoon he prays with a group of older men in the courtyard of this mansion and feels that prayer is “different here, somehow.” It makes him feel like he’s “part of something, not just spiritual, but something human, part of this group.” For a painful moment, he thinks of his father, but a bearded man next to him distracts him by putting his arm around him and saying, “Brother would you like some tea?” As such, Saeed feels “accepted by this house” and asks the bearded man if he and Nadia can come live with them. The bearded man says yes, though they’ll have to stay in separate rooms.

That night, Saeed tells Nadia what the bearded man said, framing it as “good news.” Nadia, though, is perplexed. “Why would we want to move?” she asks. “To be among our own kind,” says Saeed. When Nadia asks why these men are their own “kind,” Saeed points out that they’re all from the same country. “From the country we used to be from,” Nadia says, reminding Saeed that they “left that place.” “That doesn’t mean we have no connection,” Saeed protests. “They’re not like me,” Nadia asserts, and proceeds to convince Saeed that it would be foolish to give up their own bedroom to go live in communal spaces with their countrymen. Later, Saeed realizes it’s “odd that he would want to give up their bedroom for a pair of separated spaces, with a barrier between them, as when they lived in his parent’s home.” 

Still awaiting the nativist attack, the council discusses whether or not refugees should fight back when the confrontation takes place. The group decides to handle the situation nonviolently, but Nadia remains unsure if this is the best idea, suspicious about surrendering completely. Saeed feels similarly, though he listens to the bearded man deliver a much different message to his countrymen. Indeed, the bearded man advocates “a banding together of migrants along religious principles, cutting across divisions of race or language or nation, for what [do] those divisions matter now in a world full of doors.” He upholds that religious men have a duty to protect the people who seek “passage” through the doors, no matter what. This message resonates with Saeed, but it also vaguely reminds him of the kinds of things the militants in his country used to say, and this makes him feel like he’s “rotting from within.”

The bearded man gives Saeed a pistol from the house, which is full of guns. “In his heart he would not have been able to say if he took the pistol because it would make him safer from the nativists or from the Nigerians, his own neighbors,” Hamid notes. Undressing that night, Saeed doesn’t conceal the pistol from Nadia, who sees it and says nothing. When he gets into bed, they reach for each other while also moving “slightly away,” and in “their coupling” they sense a “mutual violence,” a “kind of shocked, almost painful surprise” at one another. Afterward, as he’s trying to fall asleep, Saeed realizes he doesn’t even know how to use a pistol and resolves to give it back the following day. 

Certain migrants find ways to siphon energy to charge phones, enabling Saeed and Nadia to read the news. For Nadia, this is an unsettling experience because there’s so much talk in the media about migration and nativism. “The fury of those nativists advocating wholesale slaughter was what struck Nadia most,” Hamid writes, “and it struck her because it seemed so familiar, so much like the fury of the militants in her own city.” Because of this, she wonders if she and Saeed have even accomplished anything by moving. When she feels like this, though, she looks around and sees the many different kinds of people surrounding her, all the different races and cultures congregating in one place, and she realizes that she was “stifled in the place of her birth for virtually her entire life” and that “a new time” is here, one she welcomes with an open mind.

As Saeed and Nadia wait fretfully for the nativist attack, a woman emerges through a door in a cantina in Tijuana. Once she’s completely through the portal, she walks up a hill to a small orphanage called the House of the Children, where she locates her daughter, who is now nearly a grown woman and who only recognizes her because she has “seen her on electronic displays, on the screens of phones and computers.” The next day, the mother and daughter bid goodbye to the others in the orphanage and hike back down the hill, where together they enter the cantina and pass through the door.

When the raid on the “migrant ghetto in which Saeed and Nadia [find] themselves” begins, an officer is immediately shot in the leg, exacerbating tensions so that the authorities begin firing their weapons. Outside when the fighting begins, Saeed rushes to the door, which Nadia quickly opens and pulls him through. They then retreat to their room, push the mattress against the window, and wait. They hear gunshots and helicopters overhead and see, when they peek through the gap between the mattress and the window, “thousands of leaflets dropping from the sky.” Later, they smell smoke, but the noises eventually subside.  Finally, they hear that at least two hundred migrants have been burned alive in a cinema that the authorities torched. They also hear about other places where large numbers of migrants have been killed, but there is—at least—no more shooting that night.

Time passes after the attack, and the nativists don’t continue their violence. “Perhaps they had decided they did not have it in them to do what would have needed to be done,” Hamid suggests. It’s possible, he notes, that the nativists have come to understand that the doors can’t be sealed, that their efforts are futile. “And so,” he writes, “irrespective of the reason, decency on this occasion won out, and bravery, for courage is demanded not to attack when afraid.” Electricity and water is restored to all areas of London, and Saeed and Nadia—along with their housemates and neighbors—celebrate this good fortune.