Antigone vs. Empire: Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire
I’ve found that modern retellings of Greek myths can go either way. For readers educated within a “western cultural tradition” framework (sometimes by choice -- but more often, not), these “revisions” might reinforce their sense that the Greeks were the original “masters.” It’s that often still-unquestioned view that Culture™ started in Greece and lives on. These sorts of reimaginings promote a Eurocentric, and by extension white supremacist, view of not only culture, but of humanity in general.
But there’s another kind of retelling of an old myth: the kind with the potential to subvert and surprise. What if revising the Ancient Greeks manages to unsettle the very western cultural frame in which their myth is situated?
What if revising the Ancient Greeks manages to unsettle the very western cultural frame in which their myth is situated?
This, I believe, was Kamila Shamsie’s intention with her Antigone, called Home Fire. Sophocles’ Antigone is a story about multiple allegiances: to family, to country, to higher morals. After her brother’s death, heartbroken and outspoken Antigone is left with a forced choice. The state considers her brother a traitor and refuses him a proper burial. Antigone will not abide this. To whose rules is she beholden -- her nation’s, or her gods’? It’s a great play for thinking (and teaching!) about not just duty, but also argument; Antigone’s claims appeal to one set of ethics, while the state’s appeal to another. The play can also be read through a feminist lens, or really any political lens that acknowledges the limitations of the nation-state for determining justice.
Shamsie’s novel translates this moral quandary for a 21st century context. But not just any context: a specifically post-9/11 context, one of American and British imperial violence met with insurgent violence in return. It’s an ideological context that makes the perpetrators of ISIS’s random and brutal violence into monsters, while American and British forces and their disembodied drone strikes get to be heroes. It’s a period -- arguably our present day -- when the terror “the West” brings to others’ homes gets a context, while the terror inflicted by those who fight back does not.
Instead of Greek, Shamsie’s characters are Pakistani-British. The curtain opens on the Pashas, three young adult siblings: elder sister Isma, 28, and twin youngests, Aneeka and Parvaiz, 19. Isma is starting her PhD in Massachusetts, and the book opens at Heathrow, in a TSA interrogation room. “She’d made sure not to pack anything that would invite comment or questions -- no Quran, no family pictures, no books on her area of academic interest -- but even so, the officer took hold of every item of Isma’s clothing and ran it between her thumb and fingers, not so much searching for hidden pockets as judging the quality of the material.” Racial, ethnic, and religious profiling sets the stage for the moral questions of this story: when does national security supersede freedom? To whom does national security answer? Whose freedoms are on the side of the nation, and whose are deemed expendable?
Isma is not one to linger on the indignity of an incident like the one at TSA, but her sister Aneeka, the fiery law student, is. We are first introduced to Aneeka -- our Antigone -- through her more moderate sister’s narrative, another flip of the original script. Isma, or Ismene in the Sophocles, is usually more of a foil than a frame, but by opening with the grounded older sister, the moral terms of the story are cast first through the lens of sibling love and sacrifice. Shamsie humanizes all of Sophocles’ characters, but adding dimension to Ismene might be my favorite of her reimaginings.
Isma is abroad, but it becomes clear that she is not only a stranger in a strange land; she’s estranged. Her relationship with her younger siblings is shrouded in secrecy and pain, and as we piece things together, we realize that Isma’s façade of calm and moderation are just that: only the tip of the iceberg. When she starts to get close with another Pakistani-British expat, Eamonn, Shamsie’s careful, limited third person narrator doesn’t reveal who Eamonn really is, nor how complicated things could get if Isma continues to let her guard down and reveal what’s really going on in her family. Where is Parvaiz? Why does he keep mysteriously logging onto Skype, only to quickly disappear?
The book completely changes after Isma’s story; points-of-view shift, as does geography. But at the end of the book I found myself reflecting on Shamsie’s choice to start with Isma. To start with a scholar of sociology who seeks answers to life’s big questions in the calm of academia, all while a chaos, invisible to the outside world, grips her heart. She won’t find the answers she’s looking for, just as she doesn’t in Sophocles’ original. But this time, it’s for reasons much more complex, more human.
At one point Isma is having tea with a professor and mentor of hers, Hira. “‘Habits of secrecy are damaging things,’” Hira tells Isma. “‘They underestimate other people’s willingness to accept the complicated truths of your life.’”
Isma is frozen in this way: she is stuck in her secrecy. Shamsie literalizes this in a cryptic and symbolic scene soon after the tea with Hira, when Isma is walking through the quaint and wintery Massachusetts town. “All along the redbrick building, end to end, icicles hung from the eaves, a foot or more in length,” Shamsie writes. “Against these broadswords, pellets rained down and made music. The acoustics of ice on ice, a thing unimaginable until experienced.” In a flash, Isma remembers her brother Parvaiz, and she experiences a full-body visceral pain: “Parvaiz, a boy never seen without his headphones and a mic, would have lain out here for as long as the song continued, the wet of snow seeping through his clothes, the thud of hail beating down on him, uncaring of anything except capturing something previously unheard, eyes hazy with pleasure.”
Where is Parvaiz, other than in Isma’s memory? Is he dead? Or something worse?
Parvaiz has also gone abroad, but unlike his older sister, he’s left the empire. A sound technician with a passion for capturing obscure audio, he’s been recruited for a video production job. In a new land, living by new rules, Parvaiz comes alive, in largest part because his colleague tells him stories of his father, a man who died in Pakistan, disgraced. Parvaiz and Aneeka never got to know him.
Parvaiz is frozen, too. Icicles appear once again in Shamsie’s novel, this time in a story Parvaiz is told about his disgraced father. While performing religious ablutions in a freezing cold river, the story goes, their father emerged “with a beard of icicles.” Parvaiz’s colleague recounts, firsthand, the tale: of the beard icicles leading to “dancing on the riverbank.” “Of all the stories this was the one that most clearly evoked the father he’d never known: the rushing stream, the dancing icicles,” muses another close-third person narrator. Parvaiz longs not only for the father he was deprived of, but for the most obscure audio of all: that of the “windchimes” of those icicles, an echo of the music his brokenhearted sister heard in her own frozen place. His grief, like hers, estranges him.
And finally, Aneeka. Maybe less frozen than on fire. But frozen as in headstrong, as in the quintessential Antigone: strong, brilliant, sexy, intimidating. Frozen as in: immovable. A fierce defender of her brother, her twin. She’s not speaking to Isma. “She doesn’t think our lives allow for dreaming,” she says of her sister. But that’s what Aneeka can’t understand: that her dreams might be different from her sister’s. Sometimes, what prevents justice is the inability to hear the other side.
In Sophocles, the tragedy was that no one could hear each other, and so grief piled on grief. In the 21st century, that’s our problem, too, and Shamsie knows it, laying bare our global cycle of grief for what it really is: pride, disguised as justice.
For a young man known for his ear, Parvaiz can’t hear his sisters’ grief from where he has found himself. But the ear most unhearing of all is that of empire. Shamsie shows us that any family grief, any private frozenness, is no match for the cold hand of the state, whether it be pawing your personal effects in a TSA checkpoint, or slamming shut its doors to one it calls a traitor. I read Antigone anew with Home Fire alongside it: now I know that for some, it’s not a choice between your brother or your country, because your country was never yours.
