Exit West

A man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognize him and carry an image of him in their mind.

Having just read Exit West and, prompted to think about personal identity and how we develop it, I was struck by the following quote by Julian Baggini, a contemporary British philosopher:

The topic of personal identity is strictly speaking nonexistent. It’s important to recognize that we are not the kind of things that simply popped into existence at birth, continue to exist, the same thing, then die off the cliff edge or go into another realm. We are these very remarkably ordered collections of things. It is because we’re so ordered that we are able to think of ourselves as being singular persons. But there is no singular person there, that means we’re forever changing.

Exit West and this passage from Baggini made me wonder about the formation of identity and how we can helpfully think about it as child psychotherapists. In particular, these authors prompted me to consider how we usually conceptualise the formation and transformation(s) of identity of young people who have had to move from one location to another, as refugees, asylum-seekers, or immigrants of any kind. Exit West is relevant to the current historical moment, as it grapples with the thorny phenomenon of large waves of refugees migrating towards the West. Hamid explores some of the possible consequences of these mass movements of people, by focusing on the personal story of one couple, a young man and a woman who move across the globe and through Western countries together, fleeing an unnamed war-torn Middle-Eastern country.

Mohsin Hamid is a Pakistani novelist who initially came to prominence in 2007 for his novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist. He is a true ‘citizen of the world’, having lived for lengthy periods of time in the United States, the UK, Italy and Greece, before moving to Lahore in Pakistan in 2009; he continues to divide his time between Lahore, Lon