It's a seduction if you're white. Whiteness is a lie. The Last White Man is a novel by Mohsin Hamid that is about race and morals. Hamid's trademark style is anchored in the bare and elegiac prose. One morning, a white man wakes up and discovers that his skin has turned a deep and undeniable brown.
The transformation is the first, but not the only, and definitely not the last. Whiteness could be suddenly gone. The social order of life could be in danger. What would happen if anything changed? Hamid lands in a place that doesn't convince him.
The fear of The Other is caused by the sequence of events that follow. One's need to estrange is "a desperate attempt to confirm one's own self as normal" There are confusion bubbles for the man. There's a lot of panic. After realizing the transformation is irreversible, he begins to flirt with violence. Hamid wrote that he wanted to kill the colored man who confronted him in his home to leave nothing but himself.
It makes sense that people who benefit from a particular standing would want to preserve it. The need for control is a part of the conscious seduction of power. I would be sad if I lost all of that.
There isn't a time when he can come back to. Residents transform from white to varying shades of brown at first causing uproar, but only one person is left with the whiteness of the land.
The novel's questions start to stack. What is left after a life-changing event? What is still important? Hamid said "love."
He is one of the foremost diviners of partnership. Everything love can hold, what it can and can't do is crystalized. He understands and makes us understand that we can't make it alone.
Hamid uses his relationship with his girlfriend Oona to create a tapestry of joy, loss, grief, anger, joy, birth, and rebirth. They went back into the world after making peace with the tide of change. She wondered if everyone looked the same. She realized that the difference was gone after the whiskey settled into her stomach.
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