“I wanted to rise above the pettiness of my white self. I wanted the freedom of mind to embrace other people’s superiority over me. I wanted the grace to lend my support to those who outperformed me.” This is one of many cloying and faux self-flagellating moments that readers are privy to with Chinelo Okparanta’s white American protagonist, Harry. Similar hand-wringing takes place in Mohsin Hamid’s universe when another white American, Anders, wakes up changed into a man of a darker skin color: “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…” It is quite peculiar that these grumbling, self-indulgent white guys have captured the imagination of two writers of color with immigrant backgrounds. With Harry Sylvester Bird and The Last White Man, Nigerian-American Okparanta and Pakistani-American Hamid, respectively, have undertaken a fascinating experiment: writing white interiority.
Okparanta tells the story of a decade in the life of Harry from small-town Pennsylvania. The first half is marked by Harry’s trauma from having blatantly racist parents, which leads him to believe that he’s not only a misfit but might be a Black man trapped inside a white body. The second half of Harry’s story takes place in New York where an interracial relationship with a Nigerian woman tests Harry’s sense of self and place in the world. Hamid’s fable-like novel follows a man and woman, Anders and Oona, coming to terms with a rapidly changing world where, slowly, white people are turning darker.
Writing a white consciousness and crafting white interiority is not necessarily new nor should it be a big deal, and in the ideal world, creative writers should be allowed to write from any perspective (white, brown, Black, male, female, queer, trans). But sadly, the stakes for representation today are terribly fraught. The debates about who gets to represent whom in fiction or film are charged, cacophonous, and angry; the wound arising from centuries of misrepresentation, extraction, exploitation and appropriation has not healed. And the little bits and pieces of diversity handed out these days often feel like too little, too late. Harry Sylvester Bird and The Last White Man seem to be testing what might happen if the representation question is turned on its head. Perhaps this is motivated by a playful, vengeful desire to “appropriate” the voice and culture of white, Western people in the same way that white and Western literature has, for long, done to other cultures. Perhaps, the writers are earnestly asking why can’t we all just get along, and that these are saintly missions to carve a path so our gargantuan identity quarrels can fall away.
By diving headlong into this “unsafe” American space, Okparanta and Hamid reveal their desire to engage with the so-called “other” within a novelistic universe that feels decidedly Trumpian. As we hurtle into a continually complicating and belligerent era of debates on race, slavery and colonialism, the two writers who have thus far written from Black, brown, Muslim and migrant perspectives are launching an inquiry into a specifically liberal white consciousness. Okparanta and Hamid’s protagonists are not like the white supremacists from James Baldwin’s story, “Going to Meet the Man,” or the heiress in Kaitlyn Greenidge, We Love You, Charlie Freeman. Nor are they characters in a romance or thriller, who tend to get evaluated very differently. Rather, these characters belong to a generation of white Americans whose parents are behind the times with crude and backward views on race and migration, whereas Harry, Anders and Oona are the new generation of tolerant, broad-minded, liberal types who do not wish to be implicated in the right-wing politics sweeping their towns.
Both novels are set in ubiquitous small towns where winds of change seem to be blowing backwards. Predominantly white and working class, these are places where racist and xenophobic social interactions fester. In Okparanta’s Pennsylvania, young Harry observes in horror as the Purists (thinly veiled MAGA types) slowly ascend to power. Hamid’s unnamed town is edging towards dereliction and apocalypse as race riots worsen daily, businesses remain shuttered and pale-skinned militants roam the streets in search of dark people. The reader encounters these places through the eyes, bodies, minds, and psyches of Harry, Anders and Oona who come off as even-keeled, unthreatening, and sober in a world gone awry. They could even be seen as allies on the side of anti-racism and social justice.
The two novels are quite different from one another in terms of the genres and writing styles. Okparanta’s novel, set in Edward and Centralia in Pennsylvania, and later in New York City, is billed as satire and is realistic except when it subtly tips towards speculative fiction. For example, there is the Dignity App which ensures that phone users exercise restraint when the urge to incessantly call or text someone takes over, leading to shame, indignity, and regret. There is also the ten-year span of the book starting in 2016 and ending up in 2026 without drawing attention to the fact that we are in the future.
Shocking, humorous and cringe-inducing all at once, Okparanta shows her forte as a biting satirist when she takes aim at white guilt. Oddball protagonist Harry has thus far grown up with racist parents whom he despises. With his move to New York City comes the clear recognition that he isn’t merely indignant about racism: perhaps he’s a Black man trapped inside a white body. Harry ends up with a group called Transracial-Anon who organize DBT (dialectical behavior therapy) workshops for “self-acceptance” and where a sign reads, “No more guilt.” “My body,” Harry confesses, “…doesn’t match who I see in my mind.” Participants at these meetings stand in front of a mirror and learn to express shame, repulsion, guilt, fear, and self-hatred about being white and, of course, to rebuild themselves anew as non-white.
The actual mirror is soon replaced by a symbolic mirror with the entry of Harry’s love interest Maryam, a Nigerian student who is attending university in New York. Flesh and blood Black to Harry’s low hum of anxiety about whiteness, Maryam’s lived realities of racism are soon unmanageable for Harry’s righteous allyship and self-perceived Blackness. Their romantic relationship starts to slowly tear at the seams but entirely unravels on a study abroad trip to Ghana. Alas, it is not because Harry turns out to be a racist but because he is a half-baked anti-racist and a semi-woke liberal who narcissistically privileges his own agonizing about race over that of his lover’s actual struggles.
By contrast, The Last White Man’s universe is dystopian; there is no humor or satire here, and the genre is decidedly speculative fiction, with stylistic plot and fantastical elements carried over from Hamid’s previous work, Exit West. Yet again, everything is in disarray as civil war erupts. We encounter Anders and Oona whose universe is melancholic, absurdist, and hermetically sealed. Hamid’s fondness for symbolic names continues and the biblical evocation is on the nose as he draws from various North European languages to name his protagonists Anders which can simply mean “man” and Oona which can be “one” or “una.”
The Last White Man is also a story of race transformation: one day, white gym trainer Anders wakes up dark-skinned, his body and facial features altered. Distressed and disoriented at his transformation, he confides in his on-and-off romantic interest, yoga teacher Oona. With Anders now darker, Oona’s interest in him is heightened. Hamid beckons the reader to indulge in voyeuristic pleasure as their fit and youthful inter-racial bodies come together: “pale-skinned Oona watching herself performing her grind with a dark-skinned stranger, Anders the stranger watching the same, and the performance was strong for them, visceral …” This early scene in the novel plays out the exoticism associated with darkness, but over the course of the story, Hamid emphasizes the point that Anders (and later Oona) might change their skin color but their transformation will only remain epidermal. Their dark skin will never imbue them with the consciousness of a person of color nor will their experience as dark-skinned people fundamentally alter their understanding of race in society. The Last White Man is not written in first person like Harry Sylvester Bird but with both novels, we learn quickly that we will always remain inside a strategically crafted white consciousness.
Hamid’s Anders and Oona and Okparanta’s Harry appear to be a ruse, albeit a hyperbolic one, to expose white liberalism through these characters’ feelings, internal struggles, political leanings, and social interactions. Harry’s hypocrisy and fragility makes him hard to like: as a teenager, he cuts a sympathetic figure, but adult Harry is unable to provide Maryam, the woman he claims to love, with the kind of protection from a cruel outside world and the thoughtful, considerate intimacy that inter-racial relationships demand. Instead, Harry whines about racism, right-wingers and social justice, and appears to observe race dynamics keenly. Yet there is no reckoning; his relationship with a compassionate, patient and generous Black Nigerian woman does not attune him to race and racism, nor does he ever learn basic empathy.
Anders and Oona are likewise intellectually and politically stunted. They are bland and middle-of-the-road, lacking any spark or exceptional traits. Anders wrangling with his new skin color reveals how little he knows about the larger social world and he processes his…
