“He Wants Me to Bring Him Home, Even in the Form of a Shell”

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.