This study investigates the political discourse in Exit West by Mohsin Hamid, focusing on its depictions of migration, borders, nationalism, refugeehood, power, and belonging. It approaches a concern that Exit West has frequently been received as a carefully crafted story of migration, or as an example of magical realism, whose systematic political-discursive structuring has not been as meticulously examined. The study follows a qualitative descriptive design; it draws upon Critical Discourse Analysis, specifically Fairclough's three-dimensional model and van Dijk's socio- cognitive views of ideology. Through using categories such as narration, dialogue, imagery, characterization, symbolism, spatiality, inclusion/exclusion, and ideological polarization, this study engages with selected extracts of the novel. The analysis indicates that the way Hamid engages political discourse is indirect, through the use of narrative form rather than overtly political argument. It brings together war, the absence of a state, surveillance, the opposition to natives, the camp of refugees, and the door of magic and shows how power works by means of language, space, fear and social classification. The analysis also shows how the novel undermines hegemonic binaries such as native/migrant, citizen/outsider, center/periphery, and us/them by presenting migration as a common human experience rather than an extraordinary crisis. The study in conclusion demonstrates how Exit West humanizes displacement and conceivesof new possibilities of belonging, thus enriching political- linguistic readings of contemporary Anglophone, post-colonial and migration fiction.
