5

Stranger Intimacies – The Novels

of Kamila Shamsie

5.1 Saud Baloch

122

M. Clements, Writing Islam from a South Asian Muslim Perspective

© Madeline Clements 2016
 Stranger Intimacies – The Novels of Kamila Shamsie 123

Prologue: ‘Do Not Feel Safe. The Poet Remembers’

If something terrible is happening in the world, I want to know

about it . . . I will see what the problem is. I will see who the villain
is. And I will bring him to trial by writing the book . . . ‘Do not feel
safe. The poet remembers.’
(Aslam 2012)1

What is one Afghan? . . . Maybe he’s guilty, maybe not. Why

risk it?
(K. Shamsie 2009b: 362)

Nadeem Aslam’s striking comments, made immediately prior to the

publication of his fourth novel, underscore the author’s belief that,
acting on the courage of his moral convictions and clarity of insight,
he must use his fiction to unmask the “warlord” or terrorist and
cast him cowering into his cell. This antagonist is envisaged not as
a potential partner who may be held in ‘converse’ – as the epigraph
to Vigil (2008: n.p.) may imply – but as a subject fit for global inter-
rogation, exposure and, finally, “poetic” indictment at the novel’s
triumphal close.
If Aslam sets out to show his readers what he knows of the world,
why it is as it is, and who is to blame, his female contemporary
Kamila Shamsie, as the above quotation (‘What is one Afghan?’)
emphasises, repeatedly questions how we know what we see when
we look at it, and whether it is morally defensible to bring our cir-
cumscribed comprehension and values to bear to condemn those
others with whom we share the planet (2009b: 362).2 Her 2009 novel,
Burnt Shadows, opens with a man shackled, interned and anticipat-
ing receipt of ‘an orange jumpsuit’ (Shamsie 2009b: 1). But there is
no sense of vindication here, nor is the reader given any means by
which to “know” how to interpret the scene that Shamsie’s ‘Prologue’
frames. We are confronted only with the consequences of condem-
nation: subjugation, confusion and dehumanisation; and with the
answerless question: ‘How did it come to this?’ (1).
It is my contention that Shamsie crafts in her (geo)political nov-
els, from Kartography (2002b) to Burnt Shadows (2009b), a decentred,
Muslim, female fiction of global unknowing, suspended judgements
and intimacy with strangers. She attempts – in a phrase borrowed
from Broken Verses’ uncertain heroine Aasmaani – to use it to