Language: An Archive of History and Experience in Kamila Shamsie’s Novels

Abstract

Kamila Shamsie is a Pakistani novelist who represents the
new generation of writers writing in English. In her novels, she makes
language a means and tool to consolidate the identity of her nation
through her syncretic linguistic strategy of appropriation and abrogation
of English. She combines her poetic English prose with Urdu words and
phrases and gives her readers a glimpse of her native culture and
tradition. This paper will discuss certain techniques which allow Shamsie
to bring to consciousness and articulation a richly tessellated society
which is subsisting under the weight of destructive cultural encounter, i.e.
the encounter between East and West. Shamsie’s alchemic response to
the crisis and confusion in the country is impressive exploration of
linguistic permutation in her narration. She resolves the pull between
native and imported or received language by hybridizing her discourse
through metonymic gap, syntactical and lexical abrogation,
appropriation and syntactic relexification. The paper will elaborate as to
how Shamsie seizes and replaces the borrowed English language to adapt
it to her own usage and negotiates the gap that exist in different nations
in the world at large.