‘The Ones We Love...are Enemies of the State’i : The Personal Is Political in Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire

Abstract

The brutality of British counter-terrorism in US led War on Terror was resultant of an
already rampant Islamophobia in Britain. With the impinging questions of loyalty of
transnational population towards the host country, one can pose concerns about South-Asian
communities in Britain. In this paper, I would read the multiplicity of Muslim identities
portrayed in Kamila Shamsie’s novel, Home Fire. The novel is a humanist project, an alternate
documentation of personal wounds acquiring political flavour. The paper explores the faceless
‘Other,’ whose narratives are eradicated from public memory defining national grief by
nullifying certain other lives as grievable.