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

Abstract

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.