The Last White Man

by Mohsin Hamid

One morning Anders, a white man, woke up to find he had turned a deep and undeniable brown.

He wanted to kill the colored man who confronted him here in his home, to extinguish the life animating this other’s body, to leave nothing standing but himself, as he was before,

he confronted his gaze in the rearview mirror, looked for the whiteness there, for it must be somewhere, maybe in his expression, but he could not see it, and the more he looked the less white he seemed, as though looking for his whiteness was the opposite of whiteness, was driving it further away, making him seem desperate, or uncertain, or like he did not belong, he who had been born here, damn it,

“People are changing,” her mother said. “What people?” Oona asked. “All over,” she replied, and added with meaning, “our people.”

the fantasy she inhabited was a common one, the belief that life was fair and would turn out for the best and good people like them got what they deserved for the most part, exceptions being just that, exceptions, tragedies,

Oona was her mother’s mother now, Oona sometimes felt, or maybe mother was not the right word for it, maybe daughter was fine, both words meaning more than she once thought they did, each having two sides to itself, a side of carrying and a side of being carried, each word in the end the same as the other, like a coin, differing only in the order of what face came up first on a toss.

Oona heard her mother out, knowing that to argue was to prolong, to engage was to lose, and when her mother could see she would not get the satisfaction of a disagreement,

“You’re so beautiful,” her mother said as she was leaving. “You should get a gun.”

Anders was not sure where his sense of threat was coming from, but it was there, it was strong, and once it was obvious to him that he was a stranger to those he could call by name, he did not try to look in their faces, to let his gaze linger in ways that could be misconstrued.

so he began instead to mirror the others around him, to echo the way they spoke and walked and moved and the way they held their mouths, like they were performing something, and he was trying to perform it too, and what it was he did not know, but whatever it was it was not enough, or his performance of it was off, because his sense of being observed, of being on the outside, looked at by those who were in, of messing things up for himself, deeply frustrating, did not go away all day.

a white man had indeed shot a dark man, but also that the dark man and the white man were the same.

Anders had become quieter than he used to be, less sure of how any action of his would be perceived, and it was like he had been recast as a supporting character on the set of the television show where his life was being enacted, but even so he had not yet lost all hope that a return to his old role was possible, to his old centrality, or if not centrality, then at least to a role better than this peripheral one,

Anders said that he was not sure he was the same person, he had begun by feeling that under the surface it was still him, who else could it be, but it was not that simple, and the way people act around you, it changes what you are, who you are,

Anders wondered whether the rifle actually made him safer, for he felt he was all alone, and it was better to be non-confrontational than to stand up to trouble, and he imagined that somehow people were more likely to come for him if they found out he was armed, even though they would not find out, even though so many folks were armed, he just had this sense that it was essential not to be seen as a threat, for to be seen as a threat, as dark as he was, was to risk one day being obliterated.

of course children know they will lose their parents, they know it from early on, but most are able to believe that that particular present will not come, that it is years away, and between every year there are months, and between every month there are days, and between every day there are hours, and between every hour there are seconds, and so on, the instants that are left stretching out into infinity,

and it had made her think there was a trapdoor under each of us, a trapdoor that could open at any second, like we were walking on a bridge of ropes and planks, swaying high above a canyon, and some of the planks were rotten, and you could take a normal step but find that you had stepped into nothingness,

The rifle, though it was meant to make Anders feel secure, also murmured to Anders a quiet but insistent question, which was how much did he want to live, and he could not deny in the interminable afternoons and in the late tree-swaying nights hearing the rifle’s question, and he knew that it would be straightforward to end himself, and maybe that was the point, the point of it was to break him, to break all of them, all of us, yes us, how strange to be forced into such an us, and Anders wondered what was happening to other dark people, and how they were coping, and whether they were killing themselves, fast with guns and slow with drinks and pipes and pills, or hanging on,

Oona’s mother resisted the notion that violence was happening, or that substantial violence was happening, and said that if there was violence it was because there were paid aggressors on the other side, saboteurs, and that they were trying to kill both our defenders and our people in general, and they were sometimes killing their own kind, to make us look bad, and also because some of their own kind supported us, and they killed them for that, and that the main point was separation, it was not that we were better than them, although we were better than them, how could you deny it, but that we needed our own places, where we could take care of our own, because our people were in trouble, so many of us in trouble, and the dark people could have their own places, and there they could do their own dark things, or whatever, and we would not stop them, but we would not participate in our own eradication, that had to end, and now there was no time to wait, now they were converting us, and lowering us, and that was a sign, a sign that if we did not act in this moment there would be no more moments left and we would be gone.

and Anders could perceive how self-righteous they were, how certain that he, Anders, was in the wrong, that he was the bandit here, trying to rob them, they who had been robbed already and had nothing left, just their whiteness, the worth of it, and they would not let him take that, not him nor anyone else.

though she did feel lighter in a way, darker, yes, but also lighter, less weighty, and not thinner, the weight departing not from her flesh but from something else, somewhere else, a weight from outside her, from above her maybe, that she had borne for so long, without being aware of the bearing of it, and now it was gone, as though the mass of the planet had changed subtly, and there was less gravity for people to contend with.

And in any case the melancholy was fleeting, at least it was fleeting that morning, for the lightness was stronger than the melancholy, the sense that she was escaping a prison she desired to escape, for her life had become fraught, and for so long there had been no way out, there had been that feeling, the feeling that there was no way out, but now it seemed that there might be a way out, that she could shed her skin as a snake sheds its skin, not violently, not even coldly, but rather to abandon the confinement of the past, and, unfettered, again, to grow.

possibly they felt the dead as not everyone felt the dead, that some people hid from the dead, and tried not to think of them, but Anders and Oona did not do this, they felt the dead daily, hourly, as they lived their lives, and their feeling of the dead was important to them, an important part of what made up their particular way of living, and not to be hidden from, for it could not be hidden from, it could not be hidden from at all.