THE LAST WHITE MAN

A brilliantly realized allegory of racial transformation.

Hamid’s latest opens with a scenario worthy of Kafka: A young man named Anders awakens “to find he [has] turned a deep and undeniable brown.” Faced with the shock of this metamorphosis, he punches the mirror that reveals the stranger who is he. He then calls in sick, at which his boss growls, “You don’t work, you don’t get paid.” Meanwhile, his old girlfriend, Oona, returns to the unnamed town—perhaps somewhere in South Africa, although, this being a fairy tale of sorts, it’s in an aoristic nowhere—and takes up with the new Anders even as Oona’s mother sighs that “our people” are changing. It’s true, for the whole town is slowly turning brown. Writes Hamid in a characteristically onrushing sentence, “The mood in town was changing, more rapidly than its complexion, for Anders could not as yet per­ceive any real shift in the number of dark people on the streets...but the mood, yes, the mood was changing, and the shelves of the stores were more bare, and at night the roads were more abandoned.” Anders returns to work at a local gym, where he finds that the few remaining White people are looking at him with “quick, evasive stares,” no longer trusting the man they called “doc” for his sore-muscle healing powers. When Anders’ father—the last White man of Hamid’s title—dies, there are no more of the “pale people who wandered like ghosts” in the town, and as time passes those who are left slowly lose their “memories of whiteness.” Hamid’s story is poignant and pointed, speaking to a more equitable future in which widespread change, though confusing and dislocating in the moment, can serve to erase the divisions of old as they fade away with the passing years.

A provocative tale that raises questions of racial and social justice at every turn.