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Nadia
A man who has the “slightly lost bearing of a university professor” because he is, in fact, a university professor. Although Saeed’s father taught for many years at a respectable institution, though, he has been unable for financial reasons to fully retire, instead working for “reduced wages” as a visiting faculty member at lesser schools. Married to a former grade-school teacher, he sometimes wonders if he made the right decision regarding his career path; though he originally thought teaching was a noble profession, he wonders as his city plunges into violent turmoil if it wouldn’t have been better to work as a high-powered, money-minded businessman who’d be able to use his money to help his family survive in such times of duress. Still, he leads a happy life with Saeed’s mother. When Saeed’s mother is killed by a stray bullet, though, Saeed’s father finds himself distraught and rudderless. However, when Saeed and Nadia tell him that they’ve secured a passage out of the country, he refuses to leave, telling Saeed that he can’t bring himself to leave behind his wife’s grave and his many friends and relatives. Saeed comes to feel intensely his connection to his country and his family after he has left them behind. Saeed’s father feels that connection so powerfully that he can’t even bring himself to leave them behind in the first place, even if staying is likely to be dangerous. Later, when Saeed and Nadia are living in London, they learn Saeed’s father has died of pneumonia.
Saeed’s Father Quotes in Exit West
The Exit West quotes below are all either spoken by Saeed’s Father or refer to Saeed’s Father. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Chapter 1
Quotes
It was the sort of view that might command a slight premium during gentler, more prosperous times, but would be most undesirable in times of conflict, when it would be squarely in the path of heavy machine-gun and rocket fire as fighters advanced into this part of town: a view like staring down the barrel of a rifle. Location, location, location, the realtors say. Geography is destiny, respond the historians.
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Chapter 5
Quotes
Saeed’s father encountered each day objects that had belonged to his wife and so would sweep his consciousness out of the current others referred to as the present, a photograph or an earring or a particular shawl worn on a particular occasion, and Nadia encountered each day objects that took her into Saeed’s past, a book or a music collection or a sticker on the inside of a drawer, and evoked emotions from her own childhood, and jagged musings on the fate of her parents and her sister, and Saeed, for his part, was inhabiting a chamber that had been his only briefly, years ago, when relatives from afar or abroad used to come to visit, and being billeted here again conjured up for him echoes of a better era, and so in these several ways these three people sharing this one apartment splashed and intersected with each other across varied and multiple streams of time.
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[I]t was an easy promise to make because she had at that time no thoughts of leaving Saeed, but it was also a difficult one because in making it she felt she was abandoning the old man, and even if he did have his siblings and his cousins, and might now go live with them or have them come live with him, they could not protect him as Saeed and Nadia could, and so by making the promise he demanded she make she was in a sense killing him, but that is the way of things, for when we migrate, we murder from our lives those we leave behind.
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Saeed’s Father Quotes in Exit West
The Exit West quotes below are all either spoken by Saeed’s Father or refer to Saeed’s Father. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Chapter 1
Quotes
It was the sort of view that might command a slight premium during gentler, more prosperous times, but would be most undesirable in times of conflict, when it would be squarely in the path of heavy machine-gun and rocket fire as fighters advanced into this part of town: a view like staring down the barrel of a rifle. Location, location, location, the realtors say. Geography is destiny, respond the historians.
Related Characters:
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Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 5
Quotes
Saeed’s father encountered each day objects that had belonged to his wife and so would sweep his consciousness out of the current others referred to as the present, a photograph or an earring or a particular shawl worn on a particular occasion, and Nadia encountered each day objects that took her into Saeed’s past, a book or a music collection or a sticker on the inside of a drawer, and evoked emotions from her own childhood, and jagged musings on the fate of her parents and her sister, and Saeed, for his part, was inhabiting a chamber that had been his only briefly, years ago, when relatives from afar or abroad used to come to visit, and being billeted here again conjured up for him echoes of a better era, and so in these several ways these three people sharing this one apartment splashed and intersected with each other across varied and multiple streams of time.
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[I]t was an easy promise to make because she had at that time no thoughts of leaving Saeed, but it was also a difficult one because in making it she felt she was abandoning the old man, and even if he did have his siblings and his cousins, and might now go live with them or have them come live with him, they could not protect him as Saeed and Nadia could, and so by making the promise he demanded she make she was in a sense killing him, but that is the way of things, for when we migrate, we murder from our lives those we leave behind.
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