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Abstract
This essay discusses the issue of body repatriation as it is dealt with in Kamila Shamsie’s 2017 novel Home Fire. Part of this modern rewriting of Sophocles’ Antigone deals with the protagonist Aneeka’s attempts to have the remains of her twin brother, Parvaiz, repatriated from Pakistan to England – as the siblings have always lived in London. Yet Parvaiz has been characterized as a terrorist by the British government and the repatriation of his body has thus been rejected by the Home Secretary. Drawing on Judith Butler’s work on public mourning and grievable lives, I will show how Shamsie’s novel offers a form of literary reparation regarding the death of a character that can be mourned neither privately nor publicly. Such reparation operates in at least two ways: it relies on the corporealization of its Muslim subjects as if what was at stake was to counter their invisibilization in society – the fact that Karamat Lone will not have the body repatriated, which complicates the mourning process; it also occurs through Shamsie’s use of intermediality. The omnipresent screens and media, instead of documenting the situation in an exhaustive way, add further distance between the Muslim subjects and us, readers, which counters the risk of the former becoming prone to public consumption. Shamsie’s novel also offers an acknowledgement of the extent to which the death of a relative occurring in a migratory context has forcible impact upon the ways of mourning and remembering the departed, as far as the bereaved family members are concerned.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 In February 2023, Begum lost her appeal against the decision to revoke her British citizenship.
2 In 2018, Shamsie published an article in The Guardian entitled: “Exiled: The Disturbing Story of a Citizen Made UnBritish”. This text was published after Home Fire and partakes of a wider discussion regarding the 2002 Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act (which made it possible for any Briton to be deprived of their citizenship status) as well as the anti-immigration and anti-terrorist laws which were voted in the 2010s in the UK (Shamsie Citation2018).
3 The phrase “British values” is reminiscent of “spoken word” artist Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan’s piece.
4 According to Ghassan Hage: “what the racialization of the Arabs always intimated was that they were more of the order of dirt, rubbish and waste, an inevitable left-over of the process of colonization that one has to live with and manage but that one can do without” (Citation2017, 31).
5 Isma’s cousin precisely refers to Parvaiz’s body as “unwanted” when he tells her: “your government thinks this country can be a dumping ground for its unwanted corpses” (Shamsie Citation2017, 209).
6 This is reminiscent of “This is not a humanizing poem” by Manzoor-Khan in which she lists the injunctions her fellow Muslims and herself are subject to: “Be relatable, / write something upbeat for a change, crack a smile / tell them how you also cry at the end of Toy Story 3 / and you’re just as capable of bantering about the weather in the post office queue” before adding, “I put my pen down / I will not let this poem force me to write it because it is not the poem I want to write / It is the poem I have been reduced to”.
7 Several articles have stated the way the veil has been framed in the West as a sign of Muslim women’s lack of agency without taking into consideration the many reasons why women may choose to wear one or not: “[veils] provide the foil or negative mirror in which Western constructions of identity and gender can be positively reflected. It is by means of the projection of gender oppression onto Islam, specifically onto the bodies of veiled women, that such mirroring takes place” (Al-Saji Citation2010, 877).
8 “There are textual moments when voice and sound are positioned as a way of ‘being heard’ that is literal, but also metaphoric of access to representation and a recognition (or, more accurately, reception) that might be political, social, or literary. At other points, the author is thinking about sound as a material and embodied experience (a phenomenological issue) – in, for example, the torture scenes. Where sound (or indeed silence) is metaphorical, it seems for the most part productive and to have ethical value, as when we are urged by Spivak to listen to the other” (Chambers Citation2018, 217).
9 The term “re-storation” is borrowed from Ciraj Rassool’s Citation2015 work on the repatriation of human remains from Vienna’s museums to South African museums in a whole process of “re-patriation”.
10 As Soukaï notes: “Parvaiz’s death is paradoxically first unveiled through Aneeka’s fervent denial of the news” (Citation2021, 228).
11 Mbembe speaks of “the creation of death-worlds, new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjugated to conditions of life conferring upon them the status of living-dead” (Citation2003, 39–40).
12 Indeed, earlier in the novel, Isma tells Eamonn: “We don’t even know if anyone bothered to dig a grave” (Shamsie Citation2017, 50).
13 In the novel, a Muslim religious man claims that according to Shariah law, “[Parvaiz] should have been buried before sunset on the day he died, no matter how far from home he was, and anything else was unIslamic” (Shamsie Citation2017, 220).
14 The reluctance of both representatives of England and Pakistan to repatriate the corpse in the novel echoes that of “real-life” imams who have sometimes refused to bury terrorists in the city the latter have lived in.