Obsessive ‘Westoxification’ versus the Albatross of Fundamentalism and Love as Collateral Damage in Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire

Abstract

The paper critically analyses Kamila Shamsie’s highly
political novel Home Fire by juxtaposing the character; Karamat Lone
and Parvaiz Pasha as the two extreme viewpoints representing the rise of
obsessive ‘Westoxification’ and an ever clinging sticky
‘Fundamentalism’ respectively that pit the Aneeka/Eamonn love affair to
the inconsolable destiny of their collateral damage. The paper, taking for
granted the most popularly established interpretation of the novel as a
present day fictive adaptation of Sophocles’ drama Antigone, advances
another dimension of literary interpretation, beyond Antigone, by
playing out the concepts of ‘Westoxification’ and ‘Fundamentalism’ as
linked with the postcolonial studies by the postcolonial critic Klaus
Stierstorfer. The paper marks Shamsie’s novel as a timely overture to the
perils of rising Islamophobic ‘Westoxification’ of so called Muslims like
Karamat Lone and its devastating effects on innocent people like Aneeka
and Eamonn. Shamsie’s fictive depiction of a post-9/11 Britain is
essentially of the one that has reeked herself of intolerance and in her
installation of extreme safety measures has introduced draconian laws of
citizenship that run the greater risk of estranging its innocent citizens to
the fading human face of multicultural secular England that once bore
the banners of civilization. This research argues that Kamila Shamsie, by
portraying the battling trends of obsessive ‘Westoxification’ and an
overwhelmingly reclaiming ‘Fundamentalism’ among Pakistani-British
diasporics, complicates and confronts the widespread stereotyping single
dimensional Islamophobic discursive misrepresentations of PakistaniBritish Muslims voluminously exacerbated post-9/11 and post-7/7 events.