YouSaid · the spoken record

Mohsin Hamid

lines on the record: 38
first: 2022-10-07
most recent: 2022-10-07
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Perhaps I can approach that with a sense of dignity instead of trying to drag the young with me into a sense my imaginative grave.”
2022-10-07 · Intelligence Squared · The Last White Man, with Mohsin Hamid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A sense is the last man in the novel approaches the idea of his own death and approaches it as an opportunity to give something to his son. And I think that that idea, the idea that the things that we cling to are beings ourselves, that these things die, and that there are better and worse ways for that to happen is important. And so as we imagine the futures of our societies, there's one which is, well, if it's not going to be the way I like, I'm going to tear it down and take it with me, which I think is a kind of rant that we hear in a lot of politics today. If I can hurt that person, I don't care if I better to meet or hurt that person, even if it harms myself, as opposed to a different thing, which is that, you know, perhaps my way of thinking about my country, my place, perhaps that's passing. Perhaps every generation's way of thinking about it passes.”
2022-10-07 · Intelligence Squared · The Last White Man, with Mohsin Hamid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All of us go. And in the past, we had all sorts of cultural, religious, clan, tribal folk modes of dealing with the passage to the stages of life, of, you know, when I moved from London to Lahore, one of the biggest differences was in London, I never went to a funeral. And in Lahore, rarely a month went by where I didn't go to a funeral. Being in a society with extended family and, you know, you're suddenly thrust into the rituals of death in a different way. But so for me, I think our terror of loss and our terror in the face of loss is part of what is crippling us, you know, politically and imaginatively at this moment. And so it's worth, in a sense, thinking about other modes of approaching that. And so one of the, I guess, themes in the novel is really the way in which Anders' father, who is...”
2022-10-07 · Intelligence Squared · The Last White Man, with Mohsin Hamid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Novel is very much about grief, and I think that what's happened in contemporary culture is that we have, in a sense, turned away from reckoning with grief. In recent days, there's been the funeral of the queen, of Queen Elizabeth. And so, of course, we've seen so much about the death of this person. But generally speaking, We avert our gaze from death and we avert our gaze from loss and we are living in a hypercapitalist world where we are encouraged to consume that our self is what's most important and our self-expresses itself through consuming things. And this of course leaves us completely vulnerable to the human predicament which is that the self is temporary and that it ends.”
2022-10-07 · Intelligence Squared · The Last White Man, with Mohsin Hamid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And in India, similarly, violence against Muslims in India, which is taking on increasingly horrific proportions. And in really countries around the world, in the sense that on the one hand, there was a chance to, I suppose, to say that this is another example of white oppression, which all post-colonial societies will have experienced, almost all. But the other part of it was to what extent are those of us who belong to what we imagine to be majorities in our countries guilty of perpetrating similar kinds of violence or violence with similar echoes in different contexts? And that, I thought, was an incredibly, I guess, eye-opening moment, not just for looking at the United States, but for looking at Pakistan, for example.”
2022-10-07 · Intelligence Squared · The Last White Man, with Mohsin Hamid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That stance. It had an incredible effect, I think, on people. One of the very few sports figures that my children knew about who was no longer alive was Mohammed Ali. I mean, they heard about him starting out in life. And so in a sense, I think the impact of, now the book, my book was, I think, already well along by 2020. I was already working on this particular book. But I thought that in a sense, I thought that highlighting the incredible injustice and horrific violence that is happening on racialized lines in the United States was important. But it was also important to view that not just as an opportunity to say, oh, well, you know, we are the good guys, but to say, for example, in Pakistan, to what extent is violence against non-Muslim religious minorities something similar to what is being meted out to African Americans, the United States?”
2022-10-07 · Intelligence Squared · The Last White Man, with Mohsin Hamid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I think that I was in Pakistan for most of 2020, and it was remarkable how much people in Pakistan were following events of the United States that summer and that year. The protests were on the news, people were talking about it, people were messaging each other about it. There was this wonderful truck art that got forwarded around about George Floyd on the back of a Pakistani truck written Urdu. And, you know, in many ways America does have this ability to catalyze conversations around the world. In the same way that, for example, when Muhammad Ali, the boxer I'm talking about now, decided to not fight in Vietnam. Well, first of all, he became a Muslim, which was enormously important, I think, to people in this part of the world. But also he chose not to fight in Vietnam and took this sort of principled stance and went to jail for taking”
2022-10-07 · Intelligence Squared · The Last White Man, with Mohsin Hamid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it's kind of interesting, right? In the sense that these are characters who think of themselves as white. Now, whether there is such a thing is a very interesting question. You know, we can believe in whiteness, some of us or all of us, and whether we believe in it or not, it can have enormous power, just as a religion that we don't believe in can still have enormous power over us when it's believers act upon us in certain ways. But it's not that in a sense the characters are going from one race to another in the novel, that we are saying that there was this race called white. And then there is this new race called black. Rather, the novel is what happens if our ability to sort one another by race breaks down? What if we're unable to fit? Figure out what race people”
2022-10-07 · Intelligence Squared · The Last White Man, with Mohsin Hamid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of a kind of identity in a belief system and a way of being in the world. Now, I might not approve of that identity and belief system, but I can still hopefully appreciate the strength of that feeling of loss. And so for me, that was really something I wanted to do is for the reader, I think it's not so clear. It's up to you really as a reader as to what you want to do with this book. It's a book about what do you make, I suppose, of my attempt as somebody who's not white to write these white characters. What do you make of their attempt to navigate this world? Do you find truth in it or do you find a lack of truth in it? What resonates, what doesn't resonate? Do you feel sympathetic or horrified? You know, it's less that there's, I suppose, a message and more there's an invitation.”
2022-10-07 · Intelligence Squared · The Last White Man, with Mohsin Hamid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I can't say that I could really reduce the book to sort of either of those two impulses. I think as a reader, I could see that you might read the book as an invitation into a post-racial future, or you might read the book as a way to sort of show us just how much race matters. I think my task is slightly different. My task is I want to imagine being these people. Can I do that? What does it take for me to try as a writer to be these characters, to feel what they feel? And in a sense, to give a sense of dignity to feelings, of loss, even if the thing that is being lost is not something that I might think of as good. In other words, these are characters grappling with the loss of”
2022-10-07 · Intelligence Squared · The Last White Man, with Mohsin Hamid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Imagination to me feels very worthwhile as something that one should hope that we could do because it lets us enter into this racial domain, experience it as infuriating, uplifting, upsetting, confusing, whatever that experience is, all of the above. And then reckon with it. Because in a sense, the novel doesn't tell you how to judge these characters or judge these events. It doesn't even entirely tell you how to make them, but you do make them. And then in a sense, you need to judge what you make. It's impossible to escape the idea of, you know, how do I feel about this? And how do I feel about these people? And when you get to do that by yourself, I think that we can be honest in a way that we don't get to be in the performative self that we adopt when we're dealing with other people.”
2022-10-07 · Intelligence Squared · The Last White Man, with Mohsin Hamid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, it's the thing about it, which I think is really interesting. When we read a novel, it's one of the very few times that we get to as adults really play make-believe in the way that we did as kids. You're playing house or you're playing pirate, you're playing whatever. You read a novel and that's what you're doing. It might seem to you that it's something much more banal and much more innocent. The writer is simply presenting you with a story. But that's not actually what's happening. What's happening is you are entering into this make-believe world and you're making it, in fact. You are seeing things and you are feeling things and you're having bodily sensations and you're smelling things. And so for me, when it comes to race, it's a very interesting domain because race is such an uncomfortable topic really for all of us. And so for a reader to be allowed to have an imaginative experience with the privacy of being alone with your”
2022-10-07 · Intelligence Squared · The Last White Man, with Mohsin Hamid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“than of viewing a film or a television show. And readers create the novels that they're reading. They co-create them alongside the writers who write them. And so I don't think that in a sense when a reader reads my book, they're just reading my book. I think what's happening is the reader and I are jointly imagining into existence and experience. And so I try to write books that leave a lot of space for readers to imagine their version of it. People have said, oh, this is Set in America or it's set in Britain or it's set in Norway or set in South Africa. Why did you do that? And I said, I actually didn't do that. You did that. You set the book there. The book doesn't say where it said. You know, why does Anders become such a...”
2022-10-07 · Intelligence Squared · The Last White Man, with Mohsin Hamid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, the novel is intentionally not specific about lots of things. So only Anders and Una have names, what they look like when they become dark isn't clear what country this is, what city this is, what's really happening in the background. We don't know all of that stuff. And the reason for that is I really do believe that one of the important distinguishing features of Britain fiction, of our main mass-produced storytelling modes, we have television and cinema, which are modes that look like the world. So people look like people and cars look like cars, and Lahore looks like the whore and New York looks like New York. And we are viewers of a world that looks like our world. But when we read a book, we look at something that looks nothing like the world. It's letters, spaces, and punctuation marks against a white field. And we readers create a world out of that. The creative act of reading is enormously more”
2022-10-07 · Intelligence Squared · The Last White Man, with Mohsin Hamid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of fiction is we get to be people who aren't us as readers, but also potentially as writers. And so I thought, let me, with as much sympathy as I can manage and empathy as I can manage, be these characters, write them from the inside. And then in terms of the sentences, I guess the last thing I'll say is that the novel took on these very long sentences that you really use only commas as punctuation marks and sort of repeat things and build up a kind of rhythm as you're reading, hopefully, a kind of oral rhythm. And the reason for that is that in a sense, you encounter these ideas as a reader. You may not be comfortable with or necessarily like those ideas. But because there's no full stop, you just keep moving forward and you, in a sense, have passed the idea by the time you get to pause and reflect. And so the novel keeps bearing you forward.”
2022-10-07 · Intelligence Squared · The Last White Man, with Mohsin Hamid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In a sense, it took on a form that was very much informed by that. And when I got to the last white man, I thought, how is this going to work? And so I thought, you know, one thing I want to do is I want to have all of the characters in a sense think of themselves as white. I want to engage in this imaginative act where if we consider that, you know, fiction can have, in a sense, of representative impulse, where I'm telling my story or the story of people that I think of as like myself. And that's a very important impulse, you know, particularly when certain kinds of stories have been sort of systematically erased or not been allowed to be told. But it's another kind of impulse, which is, in a sense, a transgressive impulse, the impulse of being something else. You know, a little boy being a T-Rex, a little girl being a boy, or being somebody who isn't you. And I think that's a hugely important part of...”
2022-10-07 · Intelligence Squared · The Last White Man, with Mohsin Hamid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No Pakistan. The characters had no names. And I thought, you know, it's important for me to see things for myself and to describe them without using the sort of brands because Pakistan is a brand. It means certain things. When you write about Muslims or you write about a character with this name, those mean certain things. I thought, let me write a novel that doesn't do that. And then exit West, in a sense, it was rooted in a way in children's literature. And I thought, you know, I want to write a novel where the decoder ring for the novel is built into the book. In other words, unlike my previous novels that were fundamentally untrustworthy, they said one thing and meant something else. And in that gap, the reader had to, I guess, interpret their own version of the book. I thought in Exit West, let me just say what I mean. And I thought, you know, how do you do that and who does that well? And I thought, oh, well, you know, children's books actually do that really well. And so.”
2022-10-07 · Intelligence Squared · The Last White Man, with Mohsin Hamid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I would write another novel on the exact same topic with the exact same characters. And I would call it a draft, but it would be profoundly different. And I was basically teaching myself how to write that novel. And then when it came to Autonomists, the same thing happened seven years, seven drafts, numerous approaches that didn't work until I figured out that it could be this dramatic monologue that was being told in Lahore about events in New York. And so we were simultaneously in Pakistan and America at the same time with this American interlocutor who never gets to speak. So we have this one-sided narrative that the reader has to sort of balance. And then how to get filtration rising Asia, I was trying in a way, having moved back to Pakistan to de-exoticize my own perspective and to deny myself the impulse of representation by writing a novel with no names. It's not set in a place with names. There was no”
2022-10-07 · Intelligence Squared · The Last White Man, with Mohsin Hamid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Pacing around, reading out loud what I've written, and one third is actually typing into my computer. And she taught various other lessons. But I think the idea that she opened up permission to imagine that one was a writer, because I didn't know any writers growing up. I didn't have friends who were novelists or family friends who were novelists. I read lots of books, but I didn't know anybody who wrote them. And so for me, that was quite an incredible experience. Out of that, I guess came six or seven years of revising that first novel, which became malt smoke, which I wrote one way and another way. It became a trial. I went to law school and I kept working on it. Basically, not a single sentence was in common with that first draft. And it became my law school thesis. And then I got a job in New York and I was still working on my first novel. And it was a very strange, I guess, thing that each year...”
2022-10-07 · Intelligence Squared · The Last White Man, with Mohsin Hamid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And, you know, I think that my handwriting is atrocious and I sort of block print in capital letters. And so I think the gap between our handwritings was probably about the same as the gap between our understanding of what writing was. But she would, she spent the time to read this manuscript, to mark it up, do that twice. And every year she would pick a student to read from the class. And that year she picked me to read from the class. But I think the most important thing was that she made it possible for her students to imagine that they could be writers. And that is, in a sense, perhaps the biggest gift any writer can give to another. That, you know, if a writer of her stature is reading your work, taking it seriously, you begin to think, you know, maybe I can actually do this. And she taught many things. I mean, she read our stuff out loud and she encouraged us to do that to this day. My writing days are spent typically about two-thirds of the days.”
2022-10-07 · Intelligence Squared · The Last White Man, with Mohsin Hamid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“She was very kind and very generous. And so she would read our work, all of us, and she took it very seriously. And, you know, my most prized literary possession is that first manuscript of my first novel with her sort of notes handwritten in this gorgeous fountain pen handwriting. She both wrote beautifully, not as a writer. Of course she wrote beautifully as a writer, but she wrote Lawnhand. And she wrote with a fountain pen.”
2022-10-07 · Intelligence Squared · The Last White Man, with Mohsin Hamid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, so when I went to college in the States, I had no idea that I wanted to be a writer. I didn't know that you could study creative writing. I actually didn't wind up really studying creative writing, but I took four creative writing courses among the 30-odd courses I took as an undergraduate. And two of those were with Joyce Curlots, who was a fantastic teacher. And the final of the four was a long fiction workshop with Tony Morrison. And she would pick, I think, half a dozen students every year to do this workshop. And instead of handing in a few stories, you would hand in one longer story, and then you'd revise it. So I wrote the entire first draft of my novel for this class. And I feel bad for her now. It was probably a huge imposition. So you're expecting 40 pages in this kid hands in sort of 200. And then he revises it and hands it in again. But, you know, she was.”
2022-10-07 · Intelligence Squared · The Last White Man, with Mohsin Hamid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Into that kind of strife. Now, that doesn't mean that we should all just sort of roll over and say we accept racism and discrimination and whatnot. But it does mean that we will need to find narratives that allow us to get to more inclusive, less racist futures that don't depend on a battle of all against all. And for me, the novel really is, in a sense, about that. How do you imagine your way through this?”
2022-10-07 · Intelligence Squared · The Last White Man, with Mohsin Hamid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“With relatively little violence. So, if you think of the Roman Empire or the Soviet Union or Ottoman Empire or even India pre-partition, you had all types of people living together, not I would say in peace, but certainly in incredibly less conflict than after those entities broke apart into sort of feuding ethnocentric visions. And so one of the dangers I think for me about any cosmopolitan diverse society is if we get into a situation where it is simply about power, where groups are competing for control and status on the basis of raw power, then you descend into a sort of civil strife situation very, very quickly. And, you know, having lived next to Afghanistan for half of my life, no one should wish for their society to descend.”
2022-10-07 · Intelligence Squared · The Last White Man, with Mohsin Hamid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Futures that are actually inclusive and desirable. We are going to be left without any prospect of an optimistic future and therefore inevitably peddlers of nostalgia are going to sort of win this political contest. Now, in terms of the anger and heat of identity politics, I think that racism and violence against minorities is profound and widespread and almost every society but to different degrees. I don't mean to suggest that, oh, if we suddenly all just say, look, there's no such thing as race, that racism goes away. But I think that it's worth seeing if we can build different kinds of stories to include ourselves. An example of that is, you know, if you have a story that can encompass diverse peoples, very often you find that people can live together.”
2022-10-07 · Intelligence Squared · The Last White Man, with Mohsin Hamid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“70s, 60s, Britain, or of, you know, Hinduism and India before Muslims arrived a thousand years ago. The classical age of Islam. I mean, all of these things, in a sense, are domains that we don't know very well. And we imagine onto them some sort of beauty. But they were unlikely to work very well with our contemporary mixed societies. Now, what that suggests to me is that it's necessary to As a storyteller to imagine what might be non-nostalic narratives, what might be ways in which we can reclaim the future as a place of hope. And I don't think that one does that really as a kind of naive gesture, that everything is just going to work out. I think it's different. I think it's instead that unless we do this, unless we engage in trying to imagine”
2022-10-07 · Intelligence Squared · The Last White Man, with Mohsin Hamid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, for me, one of the experiences that comes from having lived in Pakistan and other places is I tend to see similar trends pretty much everywhere unfolding. That is that almost How they are threatened by those who are not the real people, and how we must adopt a kind of nostalgic politics that looks at the past as our greatest time. And we must go back to that past. And that can characterize sort of Donald Trump in the United States. It can characterize many of the Brexiteers in Britain. It characterizes Erdogan in Turkey and Modi in India and Putin and Russia. It's true of, you know. Bolsonaro and Taliban. And I mean, it seems that at this moment, we are being very much tempted by a kind of nostalgic politics. And for me, that's very dangerous. So I find it dangerous in part because obviously we can't go back. And secondly, the past was not as good as we might imagine. The golden age of sort of 1950s America or 1950s.”
2022-10-07 · Intelligence Squared · The Last White Man, with Mohsin Hamid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, who aren't white as primary characters. And to that, I think my response is that, well, all of my other novels, except for this one, are almost entirely populated by non-white characters. So it's not that it happened by accident. The reason for doing it was I thought if I created a non-white character, I would be inclined to let that character sort of step in to allow me to look at these white characters from the outside and also allow the audience to say the reader to say, okay, well, the way this non-white character is viewing things is how I should view things. I thought it would be, in a sense, much more interesting to give neither myself nor the audience a character into whom we could place our sense of judgment, that to inhabit as best as one can these other personalities and to see what happens with that. So yeah, I think the book for me is destabilizing.”
2022-10-07 · Intelligence Squared · The Last White Man, with Mohsin Hamid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Or it explores instead a story where it's impossible to tell who is or was white and who isn't. And I think that that has, of course, it has struck some people as objectionable in different ways. For some, it's objectionable because it's been argued that the book sort of advocates this anti-white or sort of white genocide kind of a position, which is completely absurd without giving too much away. There are four main characters in the book. All of them are white. None of them is killed. You know, one dies of natural causes, and the rest make it, you know, happily to the end. It's not a book about the genocide of why people at all. It's the book about the demise of an idea. And on the other hand, there's a sort of, I guess, objection that it doesn't, in a sense, judge these characters. It doesn't give voice to a person of color. It doesn't give us any character.”
2022-10-07 · Intelligence Squared · The Last White Man, with Mohsin Hamid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And if not, then we can colonize you. But this system is only a few hundred years old at the time of Andalusia as a sort of Muslim principality or kingdom. It was really a religious question and not a racial question. So even in modern history, we're talking about a few hundred years. I think it's quite likely a few hundred years from now, we will again not think of race in the terms that we think of it today. So if it's this thing we've imagined into existence, I think it can be interesting in fiction to destabilize it, to say, you know, what happens if it becomes difficult for us to sort people by race? That isn't, I think, a racist proposition. The novel doesn't suggest that there's some fundamental essence of whiteness or some fundamental characteristic of which all white people partake. It talks instead.”
2022-10-07 · Intelligence Squared · The Last White Man, with Mohsin Hamid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Very quickly, that mutated and it became a question of what about if people are secretly still Muslim and Jewish and pretending to be Christian? And so, you know, about 500 years ago in human history, in European history, we have this beginning of asking, you know, well, where did you come from? Are you descended from North Africans? Are you descended from non-Christian stock? And on the basis of that, blood comes into play and then it becomes, well, there's something different about being descended from North Africa and from descended from Europe. And then that comes to affects the colonial enterprise that launches forth from the Iberian Peninsula, Columbus, et cetera, as the Spanish and the Portuguese and then subsequently the British and French and others sail around the world and say, well, are you of European stock or not?”
2022-10-07 · Intelligence Squared · The Last White Man, with Mohsin Hamid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, well, I think that race is something that we have imagined into existence. So race is not like a physical phenomenon like rain or like the sunrise. Race is something that is relatively new in human history, at least the way we think of it today. The ancient Greeks would not have thought of race in the way that we think of race. And even as recently as what's called the reconquest of the Evyan Peninsula, when the Muslim rulers of Spain were eventually defeated and pushed out after many centuries of rule by Catholic Christian monarchs, the primary question that was being asked wasn't your racial identity. The question being asked was, are you a Muslim or a Jew or are you a Christian? If you were Muslim or a Jew, you needed to convert or leave or be punished in some way. And if you were a Christian, you needed to stay.”
2022-10-07 · Intelligence Squared · The Last White Man, with Mohsin Hamid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“By the changes that are going on. And so in that sense, it was the idea was to right that from the inside, not to observe Una's mother and these characters from the outside, but to sort of write them from within without any non-white character standing in for my point of view or for the audience's point of view to say, okay, well, this is how I should think about the situation. Instead, we”
2022-10-07 · Intelligence Squared · The Last White Man, with Mohsin Hamid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Apocalypse and to ask whether it need be thought of as apocalyptic. Is there a way for us to imagine it somewhat differently? Because Una's mother, who imagines that white people will be replaced, in a way is right, because in the course of the novel, of course, everybody does turn dark. And so whiteness, as she thinks of it, does cease to exist. And this has happened to people again and again. I remember when I was younger seeing young Anglo Indians or even young British people who had stayed on in Pakistan after 1947, after independence, after partition, and who were sort of watching this new world come into existence and sort of baffled in a way by that world. And as I get older myself, I find that kind of bafflement hitting me as well. I sometimes look at political developments in Pakistan or Britain or America. And I do feel a bit baffled by...”
2022-10-07 · Intelligence Squared · The Last White Man, with Mohsin Hamid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was. I think that the future of a multiracial majority minority America is quite terrifying to a lot of people. And understandably so. I think that if you were to look at any community that defines itself as an ethnicity or as a group and has thought of itself as a majority and is in the process of becoming a minority, you can look at the transition of the population in Lebanon, for example, or you can look at many other places where one ethnic group was previously predominant until one religious group and suddenly its numbers have dwindled. Relative to others, it isn't an easy thing. So I think that there is a real sense of crisis in some people about this change. And so in a way, I wanted to explore, I guess, what you might call this sort of idea of a race.”
2022-10-07 · Intelligence Squared · The Last White Man, with Mohsin Hamid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That the duty of an elder generation is sort of to pass on to a younger generation a better life. That is very thoroughly being betrayed because we are seeing an elder generation pass on a despoiled environment, you know, a stuttering economy rampant indebtedness. And the withdrawal of things that the elder generation would have taken for granted, chief education, relatively cheap housing, the chance of retiring with a good pension. And so I think it struck me that it's possible that this breakdown is to do with the fact that the elder generation no longer thinks of young people as their young people, that there's been a kind of break between the generations. And so I wanted to tee up a kind of intergenerational love story as a way of exploring both the nature of this phenomenon and also whether it's possible to find antidotes to this.”
2022-10-07 · Intelligence Squared · The Last White Man, with Mohsin Hamid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Answer that I thought that racism was an ongoing and very serious concern, but the direction of travel was positive. And just before I began writing this book, we had the Brexit vote in the UK, we had the election of Trump in the United States. And it seemed that an entirely different future was sort of heaving into view, one where race was going to become much more important, where the idea of whiteness was going to become much more central to Western politics. And I think partly in response to that, I felt the urgency to write this. And then in terms of those three love stories and why it's this intergenerational love stories above all, is I think that one of the things that we see in countries like the UK and like the US is a breakdown of the generational compact, that if we had imagined that human history”
2022-10-07 · Intelligence Squared · The Last White Man, with Mohsin Hamid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, the novel, as you've just said, the novel is, in a sense, made about three love stories, a love story between Anders and Una, his girlfriend, between Anders and his father, who is old and profoundly unwell, is in fact dying over the course of the novel. And Una and her mother. And Una's mother really believes quite strongly that there's, in a sense, a plot against people like her, against white people, in a sense that they're being replaced, and a sense that they're being marginalized. And so these three characters and their relationships sort of triangle of three love stories is at the heart of the book. In terms of what was the urgent or the urgency in telling this story or why I was drawn to that, I think a few years ago, maybe six or seven years ago, before the Brexit vote and before the Trump election, if you'd asked me where I thought the West was going on race, I would probably”
2022-10-07 · Intelligence Squared · The Last White Man, with Mohsin Hamid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT