Stowaway stories and mythological realism in Yuri Herrera’s Signs Preceding the End of the World and Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West

Abstract

This article examines how contemporary authors writing about migration turn to fantastic, spectral and mythical elements when writing about passages of transit. I turn to narratives written by Yuri Herrera and Mohsin Hamid and explore how these authors use mythology and magic to resist telling a ‘true’ story, creating what I call a stowaway aesthetic that hides away other stories in its narrative. By stowing away information and misrepresentation through magic, these authors create impossible stories that attend to archival silences. They enact a resistance against the ways in which the state extracts and polices narrative in the process of asylum-seeking. I argue that in the moments in which authors eschew realism, they direct the reader’s attention to the unknowable aspects of migrant lives that constitute an absent presence in the process of migration.