A World Without White People

Mohsin Hamid's empty parable of race transformation

- By Namwali Serpell

A man wakes to find himself transformed. He looks around, seeking his bearings as he tries to come to terms with what has happened to him overnight, perhaps after uneasy dreams. He looks at his hand, which he knows like. well, like the back of his hand. It is .... unfamiliar, the hand of another. He seeks out his reflection. The man who looks back at him is a stranger.

These are the opening beats of Mohsin Hamid's latest novel, The Last White Man: "One morning Anders, a white man, woke up to find he had turned a deep and undeniable brown." These are also the opening beats-albeit about a black man who wakes up white-of A. Igoni Barrett's Blackass (2015), the epigraph of which cites Kafka's "The Metamorphosis" to make the debt explicit. It's also the premise of a chapter of Matt Ruff's Lovecraft Country (2016) about a black woman who wakes up white, which, per its title, "Jekyll in Hyde Park," alludes to Robert Louis Stevenson's scene from 1886: "The hand of Henry Jekyll ... large, firm, white, and comely" appears the yellow light of a mid-London morning, lying half shut on the bed-clothes ... lean, corded, knuckly, of a dusky pallor and thickly shaded with a swart growth of hair." Perhaps Hamid is hoping to make good on a saying from his first novel, Moth Smoke (2000): "Tales with unoriginal beginnings are those most likely later to surprise." "in Like the hero of Herman Raucher's novelization of Watermelon Man (1970), Anders's first impulse is to mistake himself for a dark-skinned home intruder.