LESSON 8

Kamila Shamsie’s
Home Fire (2017) - 1

ASHA S
DECL, CU KERALA
 Kamila Shamsie (b. 1973)
 Born and raised in Karachi
 the daughter of literary critic, editor and journalist,
Muneeza Shamsie
 Granddaughter of Jahanara Habibullah, the author
of a memoir in Urdu, Zindagi Ki Yadein: Riyasat
Rampur Ka Nawabi Daur
 the niece of the celebrated Indian novelist Attia
Hosain
 A reviewer and columnist, primarily for the
Guardian
 Now lives in London primarily – used to divide her
time equally between Karachi and London
 Writing the Unsaid
 “I’m always interested in the stuff between words and the
stuff unsaid”
 The inability of language to make sense of what is going on.
 “It is certainly true that sometimes the linearity of language,
the logic of first this-then this-then this, words become
sentences become paragraphs – sometimes that seems too
neat, too false, to convey a shattering, a sundering”
 “The best writers are almost always the ones who allow the
readers’ brains to do the most work, making connections
between things, filling in the gaps, visualising in colour and
motion things that remain unwritten, feeling the emotions
that are never spelled out.”
 Quite a different reading experience from TFA
 Kamila Shamsie: Works
 In The City By The Sea (1998)
 Salt and Saffron (2000)
 Kartography (2001)
 Broken Verses (2005)
 Burnt Shadows (2009)
 A God in Every Stone (2014)
 Home Fire (2017)
 Offence: the Muslim Case (2009)
 Duckling: A Fairytale Revolution
(forthcoming)
Kamila Shamsie (b. 1973)
 Awards & Recognitions
 In the City by the Sea, Salt and Saffron and
Kartography - shortlisted for the John Llewelyn Rhys
Award in the UK
 Received the Prime Minister’s Award for Literature in
Pakistan in 1999
 Burnt Shadows - long listed for the Orange Prize for
Fiction
 Home Fire – long listed for the 2017 Man Booker Prize
– short listed for the DSC Prize for South Asian
Literature
 Major Thematic Concerns
 Politico-historical novels
 writing fiction that tackles political issues head on
was not a conscious decision – writing politics in may
literary traditions is not a willed, thought out act –
politics is in life – “my understanding of the day to
day facts of life involves what is going on politically”
 Writes uninhibitedly about taboo subjects like female
sexuality – natural, given her elite background
 The city of Karachi - an overwhelming presence in the
first four of her novels
 moves out of the familiar landscape of Karachi from
the fifth novel on
 people moving in various countries and of the
possibility of a borderless world – Burnt Shadows
 Major Thematic Concerns
 In the City by the Sea - Hasan growing up in an oppressive
military regime-negotiations of democratic space in a dictatorial
government
 Salt and Saffron - the life and loves of a Pakistani girl Aliya living
in the US - pain of Partition
 Kartography - the friendship and love of Raheen and Karim -
reveals the pangs of the separation from Bangladesh
 Broken Verses - a journey through modern-day Pakistan - an
intimate mother-daughter story -women's rights movement
 Burnt Shadows - 5 countries and 60 years – Japan, India,
Pakistan, USA and Afghanistan
 A God in Every Stone – a London archaeologist's travels to
Peshawar - vast sweeps of history from 5th century BC to the
1930s
 British- Pakistani: Problems of
Categorization
 Shamsie – a dual citizen, a naturalized citizen
 How to read Shamsie’s fiction?
 British fiction?
 Pakistani fiction in English?
 British-Pakistani fiction?
 Other Pakistan-born British writers: Hanif Kureishi,
Sara Suleri, Mohsin Hamid, Nadeem Aslam
 Themes explored - cultural issues concerning Asian
Muslims in Britain, racism, arranged marriages, 9/11,
US insurgency in Afghanistan, clash of civilization,
blasphemy laws, impact of East West encounter etc.
 Citizenship Problems
 Came to the UK in 2007 on a Writers, Artists and
Composers visa
 The mutable nature of immigration laws - their ability
to make migrants feel perpetually insecure
 The “war on terror” – collapse of civil liberties.
 New legislation introduced –the Nationality,
Immigration and Asylum Act of 2002, which came into
effect in 2003.
 For the first time since 1948, it became possible to
deprive any Briton of their citizenship status “if the
secretary of state is satisfied that the person has done
anything seriously prejudicial to the vital interests of
the United Kingdom or a British overseas territory”.
“I passed the test, I climbed
Everest
 Citizenship Problems
 Narrates the situation of a Pakistani-
British friend
 Had the conversation while working on
HF
 Claim on citizenship – contingent
 A British citizen, but could be made
unBritish
 (“Exiled: the disturbing story of a citizen
made unBritish” Guardian 17 Nov. 2018)
 “British by birth, but could be made
unBritish”
 POC – Pakistan Origin Card
 Change in British immigration laws in 2003
 People with dual citizenship could be deprived of British
citizenship, even though they were born in England.
 “British by birth, but could be made unBritish”
 Until 1948, British women who married a foreign national
could be stripped of citizenship.
 Fluidity of citizenship laws – uncertainty continues even
after acquiring a citizenship certificate
 Citizenship Laws can change dramatically from one regime
to the next
 Equality of all citizens – a myth
 Kafkaesque and Orwellian
Citizenship is a privilege, not a right
 Theresa May, Amber Rudd and Sajid Javid – British
Home Secretaries – Remember Karamat Lone,
appointed as BHS in the early part of the novel, HF
 The practices May embraced were continued by
Amber Rudd and Sajid Javid.
 The no. of people who had their citizenship revoked
rose from 6 in 2012 to 40 in 2017.
 the rise in numbers occurred at the time when more
numbers of British citizens first went to join the ISIS,
the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, and then tried to
return after the collapse of the caliphate.
 Mahdi Hashi
 Shamsie cites cases of Muslim boys of non-British origin
stripped of citizenship on suspected grounds of their
involvement in Islamic extremism
 “we don’t have the evidence to prosecute them so we’ll just
send them into exile”.
 impossible to gather sufficient evidence for prosecution
against people who had committed their crimes in Syria
 but that didn’t mean they wouldn’t be a threat to the UK if
allowed to return.
 Exiled at the discretion of a single person (the home
secretary), bypassing the court system or the need for
evidence.
 Moral values set aside in the name of security - go back
where you came from
Mahdi Hashi

Slide 16 of 82
 “I might think of myself as English,
but the English never would”
 Gap between the law and what was culturally
accepted
 “Culturally there are too many people who think that if
you aren’t white and of Christian stock then you really
aren’t “one of us”.”
 Shamsie cites the example of her mother - the cultural
prejudices she had to contend with
 Things – improve by the time Shamsie came to England
 But the 7/7 bombings showed the cultural prejudices were
very much alive
 Media depictions of 7/7 bombers - “even when the
word ‘British’ was used it was always ‘British of
Pakistani descent’ or ‘British Muslim’ or, my favourite,
‘British passport-holders’, always something
 Home Fire: Background
 A contemporary re-imagining of Sophocles’ Antigone
written in 5th century BC
 Jatinder Verma - the Tara Arts Theatre in London –
wants her to write a play for him – why don’t you
adapt something like Antigone
 re-reads Antigone – the experience of being a Muslim
in Britain, being under surveillance, did not require
research, says Shamsie.
 How to negotiate between an old text and a
contemporary one? Set the old book aside
 “Antigone was not the structure, the skeleton of the
book, Antigone was in the marrow of the book”
 Home Fire: Setting
 Set in various places in London, primarily
 A bit in Massachusetts, Syria and Karachi
 Set in 2014 and 2015 – contemporary
 Follows the lives of 5 British Muslim characters – their
relationship to the phrase British Muslims varies quite
a lot – idea of loyalty to being Muslim or being British
varies across characters
 2 families – 3 siblings (Isma, Aneeka and Parvaiz) and
the British Home Secretary Karamat Lone and his son
Eamonn
 The father of the 3 siblings was a jihadi who died on
his way to Guantanamo – these lives collide – set up
against each other – five sections – each from the
point of view of the 5 protagonists
 Thematic Concerns, Questions
 “The ones we love … are enemies of the state”
(Antigone trans. Seamus Heaney)
 British British vs, those who are British only
till the home secretary decides otherwise
 Prejudices beneath the façade of liberalism
 Personal loyalties and loyalty to the state
clashing – in the contemporary world, there is
no imagining the personal away from the
political.
 Transnational concerns – a novel cannot be
restricted within the boundaries of a single
nation
Thematic Concerns, Questions
 ISIS (ISIL) – control over Raqqa in Syria – July
2014 to October 2017
 Jihadism
 Googling while Muslim (GWM) – what Shamsie
experienced while doing research on Islamic
radicalism, ISIS and its recruitment of jihadis
 State surveillance
 Recap
 Kamila Shamsie as a British Pakistani writer
 Major novels
 The uncertainty and fluidity of citizenship laws
in England
 British British and British passport holders
 The question of surveillance
 Reworking of Antigone
 Five protagonists – five sections – nine
chapters
 Recommended Reading
 Shamsie. Kamila. “Exiled: the disturbing story
of a citizen made unBritish” Guardian 17 Nov.
2018. https://www.theguardian.com/
books/2018/nov/17/unbecoming-british-kamila-
shamsie-citizens-exile.
 Kamila Shamsie on applying for British
citizenship: 'I never felt safe’ Guardian 4
March 2014. https://www.theguardian.com
/uk-news/2014/mar/04/author-kamila-
shamsie-british-citizen-indefinite-leave-to-
remain
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