Women’s Prize 2018: Home Fire
“I’m talking about a nineteen-year-old, rotting in the sun while his sister watches, out of her mind with grief. He’s dead already; can’t you leave him alone?”
To my shame, before I read this modern retelling I was not at all familiar with the story of Sophocles’ Antigone — but, my ignorance made the last scenes of Home Fire a pretty wild ride.
Clearly, I didn’t know much about this book before I picked it up, and yet I was hooked from the off. The story begins with elder sister Isma Pasha at the airport, being subjected to lengthy and invasive airport security check due to her faith, her hijab, and her Jihadi father — who was killed on the way to Guantanamo. She leaves behind nineteen-year-old twins Aneeka and Parvaiz , the siblings she raised following the deaths of their mother and grandmother.
I felt for Isma. She forces herself to treat her parents as “lost” in order to cope with their absence, so that she can do the right thing for her living siblings. But clear-headed Isma is nowhere near as interesting to read about as Aneeka. Aneeka’s loyalties are difficult to pin down; the only thing we know about her for certain is her undying allegiance to her twin. So, when Parvaiz goes to Syria in the name of his father, without telling her, she remains dedicated but unpredictable.
The narrative follows the three siblings in Massachusetts, London and Raqqa respectively. We also see the story from two more points of view: Home Secretary Karamat Lone and his son Eamonn, who have a quite different relationship with Islam than the Pashas do.
“ Laughing, he said, ‘Cancer or Islam — which is the greater affliction?’
There were still moments when a statement like that could catch a person off-guard. He held his hands up quickly in apology. ‘Jesus. I mean, sorry. That came out really badly. I meant, it must be difficult to be Muslim in the world these days.’
‘I’d find it more difficult to not be Muslim,’ She said, ”
While I tired of hearing about Aneeka and Eamonn’s romance pretty quickly, I thought it added a great dimension to the more interesting relationship of the book: Eamonn and his father. Karamat Lone was my favourite character, not because of his charming personality, but for the moral questioning he added to the story. His suspicions over Aneeka’s motives, his eschewing of his Muslim heritage, and his (almost) always unswerving belief that he is fighting for justice add some emotionally and morally charged scenes to the latter half of the book. I came away from some scenes not really knowing who I felt was in the right, or what I wanted to happen.
“The one’s we love… are enemies of the state.” — Sophocles (trans Seamus Heaney)
Through the uncomfortable eye of politics, this is predominantly a novel about family. Parvaiz’ desperation to feel a connection with the father he never knew leads him to Syria, feeling no more at home there than he ever had in London. Aneeka’s fierce loyalty to her brother finds her outside the British embassy in Istanbul, guarding a rotting corpse. Eamonn’s love for Aneeka ends with his death at the hands of a suicide bomber.
Through the two opposing households, the Pashas and the Lones, we our shown how our identities and our actions are inextricably linked to family ties, whether we want them to be or not.
“Do you love your children based on how much concern they show for you?”
Home Fire successively grapples with the complexities of family identity versus individual integrity, without reducing the characters to tropes or martyrs. While I found the closing scene to be a little over the top, the final 50 pages of Home Fire definitely made me want to read more of Kamila Shamsie’s work.
