Materializing grief: The reclamation of loss in Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire

ABSTRACT

Over recent decades, Sophocles’ Antigone has become widely adapted within postcolonial contexts, the tragedy’s collapsing of the boundaries between the home, nation, and law positioning it as a useful text for offering counter-discourses to a state’s ideas of justice. Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire is one such adaptation that explores the themes of Antigone through the experiences of one British Muslim family. Drawing from Judith Butler’s scholarship on grievability and Sara Ahmed’s work on the politics of emotion, this article examines how Muslim lives are made abject by Britain’s post-9/11 Islamophobic politics and media. It then examines how Home Fire’s characters resist this abjection and use the materiality of mourning to reclaim subjectivity and human dignity for themselves and those they have lost. Finally, this article employs affect theory to examine how the materiality of mourning speaks across difference and reclaims grievability for those precarious lives in conflict with their nation.

KEYWORDS:

• Home Fire
• Antigone
• post-9/11
• grief
• materiality
• affect

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. More specifically, I am referring to Seamus Heaney’s (2004) translation. Heaney cites the post-9/11 “political context” (2004, 76) regarding the Middle East as one of his personal justifications for creating a new translation of the tragedy.

2. Contemporary examples of postcolonial adaptations of Antigone include but are not limited to those by: Fugard, Kani, and Ntshona (1993), Paulin (1984), Gambaro (1992), Òsófisan (1999), and Saad (2006). See Mee and Foley (2011) for a more exhaustive list.

3. Ahmed explores how Aneeka’s hijab becomes an expression of her agency in the way she uses the exoticization of the veil to create an “interplay of surveillance and subterfuge” (2020, 4) that allows her to manipulate Eamonn for her own interests while remaining elusive to his gaze.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Gabriella Pishotti

Gabriella Pishotti is an English doctoral candidate at West Virginia University. Her work focuses on global anglophone and migration literature, and she has a research interest in how experimental narrative forms influence human rights stories and conversations.