A World Without White People
A man wakes to find himself transformed. He looks around, seeking his bearings as he tries to come to terms with what has happened to him overnight, perhaps after uneasy dreams. He looks at his hand, which he knows like … well, like the back of his hand. It is unfamiliar, the hand of another. He seeks out his reflection. The man who looks back at him is a stranger.
These are the opening beats of Mohsin Hamid’s latest novel, The Last White Man: “One morning Anders, a white man, woke up to find he had turned a deep and undeniable brown.” These are also the opening beats—albeit about a black man who wakes up white—of A. Igoni Barrett’s Blackass (2015), the epigraph of which cites Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis” to make the debt explicit. It’s also the premise of a chapter of Matt Ruff’s Lovecraft Country (2016) about a black woman who wakes up white, which, per its title, “Jekyll in Hyde Park,” alludes to Robert Louis Stevenson’s scene from 1886: “The hand of Henry Jekyll … large, firm, white, and comely” appears “in the yellow light of a mid-London morning, lying half shut on the bed-clothes … lean, corded, knuckly, of a dusky pallor and thickly shaded with a swart growth of hair.” Perhaps Hamid is hoping to make good on a saying from his first novel, Moth Smoke (2000): “Tales with unoriginal beginnings are those most likely later to surprise.”
Like the hero of Herman Raucher’s novelization of (1970), Anders’s first impulse is to mistake himself for a dark-skinned home intruder. Like the hero of Harry Stephen Keeler’s (1959), Anders soon realizes this isn’t just a tan, either: “He looked like another person, not just another person, but a different kind of person, utterly different.” Like the hero of Mortimer Weisinger’s pulp story, “Pigments Is Pigments” (1935), Anders reacts with shock at his darkening, then falls into a “murderous rage.” As with the more scientifically minded versions of this plot, like Jess Row’s (2014) and Maurice Carlos Ruffin’s (2019), we’ll soon find out whether the transformation is explicable or reversible. We’ll discover whether it (1931), or like a plague, as in Junot Díaz’s story “” (2012).
