I just had the zoom 'your internet is unstable sign', which I of course do not want to happen.
Fingers crossed.
Welcome everyone, whether you're watching us live or whether you're watching us on catch up.
It's a great pleasure today to have Naomi Weiss to give an APGRD talk. I first met her back when
she was still at Somerville here in Oxford - we talked about your graduate work, I remember.
And then a couple of years ago - I last saw her 'live' a couple of years ago when we agreed that
she really must give an APGRD talk. In between those two times she went to Berkeley, did her
doctorate at Berkeley on 'mousike' in the broadest sense of the word, particularly song and dance,
and particularly in tragedy, particularly in Euripides. Some of that turned into the book
'The Music of Tragedy Performance and Imagination in Euripidean Theater' that came out in 2018.
She's now working on audience experience and the aesthetics of audience experience and tragedy and
is at Harvard, where she is the Gardner Cowles Associate Professor of the Humanities.
And today, I think - am I right , Naomi?- this is the first time you've reached out into
modern reception to talk about tragic form in Kamila Shamsie's 2017
novel, 'Home Fire', a very powerful and unsettling novel. So
greetings Naomi, even though at a distance, and we're delighted to have you talking to us today.
Thank you so much Oliver and thank you to everyone who's tuning in to listen. It's lovely to have
that introduction and wonderful to be part of this community with - as you say - my very first foray
into Reception Studies. If you just bear with me while I share my screen.
Okay. It seems easy to set fiction and theatre against each other: to juxtapose realism
and theatricality, private reading and public theatre-going
and performance. But the novel's borrowings from drama go all the way back to the genre's
beginnings 2000 years ago and Greek writers like Heliodorus integrated tragedy and comedy
within their prose tales of travel and romance and all the way forward into contemporary fiction. In
the last couple of decades there's been a spate of retellings of Shakespeare in novels published in
the U and the US led by the Hogarth Shakespeare initiative. There have also been numerous
novelistic adaptations - in English - of Ancient Greek stories taken especially from epic but also
from tragedy. 2017 alone saw the publication of Colm Tóibín's 'House of Names' (the Oresteia),
David Vann's 'Bright Air Black' (Medea), Natalie Haynes' 'The
Children of Jocasta' (a mix of Oedipus Tyrannus and
Antigone) and Kamila Shamsie's 'Home Fire' (Antigone). Among these recent
tragic retellings Shamsie's is unusual in the extent to which it draws on the ancient play
behind it despite - unlike the others you see here on the screen - being set in the modern day. This
novel doesn't just rework the story of antigone but is constructed around the dramatic form
of Sophocles' tragedy. It is in quite a fundamental sense a play-turned novel.
Kamila Shamsie is a very successful
Pakistani-British novelist and non-fiction writer, she's published seven novels
since 1998. 'Home Fire', her seventh, was received with much critical acclaim in both the US
and the UK where it won the 2018 Women's
Prize for Fiction. Originally the theatre director Jatinder Verma challenged her to
write a play, as she has said, something like 'Antigone' in an
Asian or British Asian context. Shamsie
has claimed 'I pretended to myself I was thinking of a play but really all along
I thought, oh, here's my next novel. The result is a multimedia text
full of theatrical traces a literary archive that serves the dramatic quality of Sophocles'
play, but also encompasses various forms of media elements: theatrical productions, tv dramas,
news programs, social media, poetry and even pop songs.
In this talk I'll first provide more of an introduction to 'Home Fire' and demonstrate
some of the basic contours of its 'Antigone' plot. I'll also talk about some of Shamsie's intertexts
across various media - other versions of antiquity and other examinations of British Muslims'
relationship with the British state from the last two decades. The novel's intermediality will lead
me then to focus on its theatrical engagement with Sophocles' play, specifically in terms of how it
reworks some of the tragedy's formal elements, its structural features. I'll close by briefly
suggesting how such manipulation of tragic form contributes to 'Home Fire''s political import.
Antigone more than any other surviving tragedy has a rich, rich history of politically resonant
adaptations from Jean Anouilh's 'Antigone', to Athol Fugard's 'The Island', to
Theater of War's 'Antigone and Ferguson'. Such
plays have often used Sophocles' tragedy to explore ways for the
oppressed and the powerless to publicly counter their powerful oppressors. 'Home Fire' as
a novel focused on Muslim identity, islamophobia and citizenship rights in contemporary Britain,
fits within this tradition of Antigone's theatrical adaptations.
I hope to show that it does so in part through its multimedia theatricality,
for this facilitates in 'Home Fire' something that Greek tragedy itself,
especially Antigone, produced - that is a contestation of multiple voices, a litany
for its reader or its audience to hear, to critique, to put against their own.
Home Fire is not Shamie's first experiment with integrating Ancient Greek texts into her fiction,
perhaps unsurprising for a writer whose grandfather apparently
read her Homer in Greek when she was a toddler. Her earlier novels contain numerous allusions
to Greek myth and literature amid a really dazzling array of intertexts from the Qur'an
to T.S Eliot to the exile poetry of Faiz Ahmad Faiz. 'A God in Every Stone',
published three years before 'Home Fire', opens with an epigraph from Herodotus and indeed
that sets the entire plot off. In Shamsie's second novel, 'Salt and Saffron' from 2000,
Aliya and her not-quite twin Samia remember her family used to explain their relationship
through the Greek story of Leda's twin eggs, one from Tyndareus and the other from Zeus. When
Aliya dismisses it as mythology from a cultural tradition 'not our own', Samia points to the rich
transcontinental cultural interactions and - really a hallmark of all Shamsie's fiction -
she says actually Ancient Greek texts were kept alive through Arab translations.
But 'Home Fire' is distinct from this earlier work by actually being modelled on an Ancient Greek
text. Here's - for those of you who need it - a quick reminder of Sophocles' play about
Oedipus' family. So, in the aftermath of Polynices attacking his own city of Thebes, resulting in
the mutual slaughter of him and his brother, Eteocles, their uncle, Creon, is now king.
His son Haemon is engaged to Antigone, sister of Polynices.
Creon has ordered Polynices' body to be left unburied as punishment outside the city,
but Antigone buries him despite her sister Ismene trying to stop her. As
punishment Creon has Antigone locked up in a cave. He has second thoughts
after the seer Tiresias intervenes, but it's too late - Antigone has hung herself. Then
Creon and his men find Haemon, who then kills himself over Antigone's
body. Creon's wife Eurydice also commits suicide and the play ends with the King's wretched
mourning. This tragedy is still one of the most widely performed surviving Greek dramas.
It's also the most extensively discussed across many disciplines: classics, of course, but also
political science, psychoanalysis and gender studies. Now, 'Home Fire', set in 2015, revolves
around the families of two British Muslims of Pakistani heritage: Adil Pasha, a jihadi
killed years earlier on his way to Guantanamo; and Karamat Lone, the British Home Secretary.
Just as a warning here, I hope you've read the novel already, because 'spoiler alert':
Polynices is Parvaiz, a 19 year old recruited by the Islamic State to work in their media
division in Syria. The story has five narratives, or 'acts', each focusing on a different character.
It begins with Isma, Adil's daughter, who has recently arrived in Massachusetts to pursue
postgraduate study after years of caring for her younger siblings, Parvaiz and his sister, Aneeka.
Isma soon meets Eamonn, Karamat's son, whose mother, Terry, is Irish American. Their
encounter results in Eamonn, in the next 'act', meeting Aneeka, a law student back in London.
Eamonn and Aneeka soon embark on an intense sexual relationship. He later discovers that she has,
though, an ulterior motive - to secure his assistance, as the Home Secretary's son, in
getting Parvaiz back to the UK. Eamonn, besotted with Aneeka, goes to his father for help -
unsuccessfully. The narrative then shifts in the next 'act' to Parvaiz. We learn of the process of
his 'recruitment' (or entrapment) by ISIS. He desperately wants to come home and he gets in
touch with Aneeka to form a plan, but he's killed as he makes his way to the British Consulate.
Aneeka's 'act' comes next, followed Karamat. On his first day as Home Secretary, Karamat
revoked the citizenship of all dual nationals who have left Britain 'to join our enemies'. Now he
applies this law even to Parvaiz's dead body, which must be repatriated to Pakistan instead.
Anneka then travels to Karachi and sits by her brother's corpse which has been
covered with ice outside the British Deputy High Commission. Eamonn goes, but as he approaches
two men fasten a suicide vest on him and the novel ends with his and Aneeka's final embrace.
Now, though it stretches from London to Massachusetts, Syria, Turkey and Karachi, this
novel actually doesn't feature the sort of really large-scale transcontinental cross-generational
interaction common to much of Shamsie's previous work. 'A God in Every Stone' has characters from
Turkey, Britain and pre-partition India; 'Burnt Shadows', from 2009,
perhaps her other best known novel, moves with a multinational cast from Nagasaki, to Delhi, to
Karachi, to New York, to Afghanistan. In contrast, 'Home Fire''s five protagonists are all British
and all of Muslim Pakistani descent, though with different degrees of identification with Islam.
'Antigone' concerns the city of Thebes; 'Home Fire' primarily concerns London,
where Shamsie herself now lives.The city's urban fabric really weaves
its way through much of the narrative.
The story's chronological scope, like that of 'Antigone', is also more compact than that of
her earlier novels, even as there's always a strong sense, of course, in 'Antigone',
of the weight of the past - of the father - on the present.
The novel's politics are similarly focused. Karamat, the novel's Creon,
is modelled on Theresa May, Britain's anti-immigration Home Secretary
from 2010 to 2016. His character is also in several respects Sajid Javid, one of May's
successors, criticised intensely for his revocation of citizenship from Shamima Begum the
ISIS bride (so-called) two years ago when she, like Aneeka and Parvaiz, was just 19 years old.
Karamat's action on his first day in office was to make much more use of the Nationality
Immigration Asylum Act of 2002 whereby the British government can strip any dual national
Briton - whether naturalised or British-born of their citizenship status if and I quote:
'the secretary of state is satisfied that the person has done anything seriously prejudicial
to the vital interests of the United Kingdom or a British Overseas Territory'. Under Theresa May
this law was expanded to include citizens without another nationality, who, with their British
citizenship revoked, would then be stateless. Near the end of 'Home Fire' we learn that Karamat,
against considerable opposition, is planning to expand the law similarly. He thinks it, I quote,
as you see here: 'the sensible fulfillment of a law that was so far only half made'.
In this particular political focus Shamsie draws not only from her extensive research
on citizenship debates and Islamic State propaganda as well as from her
own first-hand experience as a Muslim living in both the U.S. and Britain,
but also from several previous re-workings of Sophocles' play, which become folded into her own.
The novel's epigraph 'The ones we love... are enemies of the state' comes from Seamus Heaney's
'Burial at Thebes', a loose translation of 'Antigone'
commissioned for the Abbey Theatre in Dublin in 2004.
Sorry, just checking my internet connection is okay. So it was commissioned in 2004. For Heaney,
'Antigone' in part represents Ireland against her colonial British oppressor
but other inspiration for him came from the Bush administration's 'War on Terror',
as Heaney writes in his notes in to his translation.
Just as Creon forced the citizens of Thebes into an 'either or' situation in relation to Antigone,
the Bush administration was using the same tactic to forward its argument for war on Iraq,
asking in effect are you in favour of democracy or are you not. Heaney's translation echoes the
Bush administration's language of terrorism: we have 'enemies of the state', 'patriots',
'traitors' - there's two lines which are 'whoever isn't for us is against us' and Shamsie, in turn,
echoes Heaney as Karamat (Creon) views the post-911 world in similar terms.
But the other translation that Shamsie mentions specifically
and repeatedly in interviews is Anne Carson's 'Antigone' of 2015 (not to be confused with her
'Antigonik'). This 'Antigone' combines such language of terrorism
with an anti-immigrant strain as you can see in some of the quotations i've included here.
Between the translations of Heaney and Carson are at least
two other versions of 'Antigone'. One is a novel - Joydeep Roy-Bhattacharya's 'The Watch',
published in 2012, sets the story at a remote U.S. military base in present-day Afghanistan, where
a young Pashtun woman pleads with the soldiers to return her brother's body. Shamsie herself,
in a review of the book for the Guardian, notes a structural feature
that's actually key to her own 'Antigone' novel - that is the series of character perspectives,
a structure design, she says, to embrace a multiplicity of voices. In the same review she
also mentions another 'Antigone', Polly Findlay's production at the National Theatre that year,
which deliberately evoked the war in Afghanistan as well as the 'War on Terror' more generally.
In interviews, Findlay likened 'Antigone' to a 9/11 bomber.
'Home Fire''s 'Antigone' story weaves together these
precedents in its focus on the sociological impact of the 'War on Terror'. That's actually what
the character Isma is researching -she's co-writing a paper entitled 'The Insecurity State:
Britain and the Instrumentalization of Fear'. Two other dramatic works
feed into Shamsie's exploration of this particular issue: one is Gillian Slovo's
'Another World: Losing Our Children to Islamic State', a play about rise of IS and its appeal
to young Europeans. This was commissioned around the same time as 'Home Fire' and was shown at the
National Theatre in 2016. It's a verbatim play - that is, it's interview-based, bringing together
the testimony of young British Muslims, mothers whose children have joined the Islamic State,
former Guantanamo prisoners, academics, lawyers and soldiers. Shamsie dedicates 'Home Fire'
to Slovo and she notes in her acknowledgments how helpful it was to exchange ideas with her
while they were writing respectively a play and a novel on a similar topic.
The other work is Peter Kosminsky's 'Britz', a powerful two-part drama made for Channel 4 in
2007, about the impact of British anti-terrorism legislation on Britain's Muslim community.
I'll play it - but silently - for you here, a clip of the last scene. The Muslim protagonists
whom you can see in this clip are brother and sister - he joins MI5, while she,
a medical student, becomes increasingly radicalised. The ending of 'Home Fire' echoes
the ending of 'Britz', when these two characters finally come together in an embrace as she
(in 'Britz') flicks the switch of her suicide vest. Reading the last two pages of the novel,
a description of Eamonn and Aneeka's final moments as shown on TV, think anyone who remembers 'Britz'
has this final powerful tableau in mind. The embrace of a brother and sister in the embrace of
Eamonn and Aneeka. And with this echo of 'Britz', lover and brother merge, just as they do at
various other points in the novel, for 'Home Fire' subtly picks up on the currents of non-normative
desire that flow through Sophocles' play. It's significant, I think, that so many of the multiple
overlapping models or intertexts in Shamsie's version of 'Antigone' - a novel originally
meant to be a play - are dramatic: from the stage, above all, but also from the screen.
At the start I mentioned the novel's intermediality and this is why I think
it's appropriate for a talk at the Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama,
since it's a novel born out of theatre and performance as much as it is out of text.
So, now I want to go back to Shamsie's engagement with 'Antigone' itself and with Greek tragedy as
a genre, for the theatricality of this novel lies not just in its interaction with actual dramatic
productions, but also in how Shamsie integrates the formal elements of Sophocles' play.
By 'formal elements', I mean some of tragedy's basic structural features.
I'm going to focus on speech and dialogue, the 'agon' (or contest of speeches and arguments),
the chorus, recognition ('anagnorisis') and reversal ('peripeteia')
and the messenger speech. For the first of these, dialogue, I draw your attention again to what is
perhaps the most obvious feature of the novel:
its division into five 'acts', like dramatic acts, each from the
perspective of a different character, as if each character is speaking in turn. As I mentioned,
this 'relay race' as Shamsie herself has called it, may be influenced by the multiplicity
of voices in Roy-Bhattacharya's 'The Watch'. Shamsie has also experimented with shifts from
one character perspective to another, sometimes converging on the one event, especially in 'A God
in Every Stone' and also in 'Burnt Shadows'. But it also evokes the
dialogue form of drama - combined, perhaps, with the testimonial structure of Slovo's play.
Even with each character having a distinct 'act' or 'testimony', there is from the start a strong
sense of dialogue between them and also a sense of contrast each character with a distinctive
voice, just as in Sophocles' play The Greek tragedy 'Antigone' begins with a dialogue,
as Antigone addresses Ismene - literally ' Oh, common self-sistered head of Ismene', in, as I
said, a literal, not very elegant translation. Such an emphatic declaration of sisterhood,
like so much of the play's language, stresses what Mark Griffith has called the self-reflexivity of
family affection, which is of course fundamental to Antigone's character and her motivation.
Shamsie has said that her starting point for the novel was the centrality of sibling-hood,
specifically at the beginning - the relationship between Isma and Aneeka (Ismene and Antigone).
'Home Fire', like the first line of the play, begins with Isma (Ismene) and
conversation with Aneeka (even though she's not actually directly there) quickly enters,
initially in the form of a flashback to the sisters roleplaying before Isma's
interrogation at Heathrow. This sets up their difference in language and
attitudes towards the state and its islamophobic practices, so for example as I've included here,
Aneeka recommends that she show at least a tiny bit of contempt and joke about the Queen;
instead Isma says quite seriously: "I greatly admire Her Majesty's commitment to her role."
Such differences set up a multi-vocal quality, a polyphony,
that continues throughout the novel, both within immediate exchanges and from one 'act', or narrative, to
the next. The contrast in style between Isma's and Aneeka's narratives is really striking. Aneeka's
is divided into much shorter sections: the first is almost lyrical in its repetitions, quite unlike the
more prosaic description of Isma's airport interrogation with which the novel begins.
The contrast between the sisters' voices is emphasised a little later on in Aneeka's narrative,
in a section of almost pure dialogue that reads like a script. Their exchange there also
evokes the opening scene of Sophocles' play, as Aneeka asks for her sister's help in bringing
Parvaiz's body home and Isma insists that they must accept the law even when it's unjust Between the
two sisters' narratives are those of Eamonn and Parvaiz, but Aneeka's voice is always there, it always seems
present through conversations with them both - Skype and text messages with Parvaiz and the
things her voice said in Parvaiz's audio track, entitled 'Twin Heard from the Garden Shed'.
Now, Isma largely fades away as a character once Eamonn's narrative begins and increasingly
the dominant contrast of voices is the one between Aneeka on the one hand and Eamonn's father,
Karamat on the other. Likewise, in 'Antigone' the drama revolves around the opposition of Antigone and
Creon. As Anne Carson writes, they 'stand opposed to one another instinctually, in
the very morphology of their language, in the very grain of the way they think and speak'.
So, for example, Eamonn watches a clip of Karamat delivering a speech at a predominantly Muslim
school in Bradford on how Muslims must abandon any 'outdated codes of behaviour', he says, that mark them
as different. Eamonn briefly tries to defend this in the face of Anneka's fury. Their argument makes
them openly acknowledge the differences between them: differences in religion, class,
wealth and politics - but the underlying opposition here already seems to be
the one between Aneeka and Karamat, channeled through his very defensive son. This opposition
underscores another formal element of tragedy reworked in the novel, the 'agon', a
set of opposing speeches, typically divided by a few lines spoken by the chorus.
Antigone and Creon's 'agon' scene, beginning after the guard brings her on stage, is relatively brief -
that of Haemon and Creon is actually longer. In 'Home Fire', Eamonn and Karamat face each other
both at the end of the son's narrative and in the father's. There's a phone conversation
that includes several echoes of their exchange in Sophocles' play.
Aneeka and Karamat, on the other hand, never actually meet - but Shamsie really captures their opposition
by placing their narratives against each other, next to each other, so we have a sort
of juxtaposition of world views, of motivations, of registers. So, for example, Aneeka's narrative
ends with her patient, steadfast, lyrical resolve to sit by her brother's corpse until the world
changed or both of them crumbled into the soil around them. Karamat's then begins with his
immediately more practical frustrated concern with how an insulated coffee mug doesn't keep
one's hands warm and he then starts considering his relationship to Britain. Another voice enters
that of Terry, his wife, whom he imagines calling his plan to amend citizenship laws contemptuous.
The opposing voices of Anneka and Karamat also counter each other within the characters' own
narratives. Within Anneka's, Karamat intrudes through the TV news report about his revoking the
citizenship, even of a dead body and also through a newspaper article that mentions an upcoming
immigration bill that would, I quote: make it possible to strip any British passport holders of
their citizenship. Within the newspaper report there's also an opposing voice, a statement
from 'Liberty', the human rights campaign group and then the
narrative returns to Aneeka. I've included a photo here from my own copy of the novel, just so you
can see this switch. You can see even just the visual effect of moving from one perspective
to another. Within Karamat's narrative, as well, Aneeka increasingly intrudes. Already, just a couple
of pages in, he's thinking of her as his opponent. Soon the narrative starts to be dominated by TV
images of Aneeka in Karachi. At one point their speeches actually directly counter each other,
even though they are not in the same physical space. So, after a dust storm, Aneeka faces the camera
and speaks, as if to Karamat himself, as you can see here: 'Then she looked directly at the Home
Secretary and spoke: "In the stories of wicked tyrants men and women are punished with exile,
bodies are kept from their families - their heads impaled on spikes, their corpses thrown into
unmarked graves. all these things happen according to the law but not according to justice."' The
stories of "wicked tyrants" may be as close as the novel gets to more directly suggesting a mythical
model, but with the opposition of justice and law, these lines also evoke the beginning
of Antigone's speech to Creon in their 'agon' scene in Sophocles' play. Karamat's response, like Creon's,
follows almost immediately, as he distorts Aneeka's words in his own speech in the 'agon'
of Prime Minister's Questions in Parliament. The polyphony, the multi-vocality of 'Home Fire'
also manifests itself through Shamsie's transformation of the tragic chorus.
Allusions to Sophocles' play become most concentrated in Aneeka's narrative,
- the moment, in the story, of the immediate aftermath of her brother's death, coincides
with the start of the tragic plot. This narrative 'act', as we've already begun to see, is also the most
experimental and polyphonic, with short sections focused on Aneeka herself, interrupted by other
voices communicated through a variety of media. So we have tv interviews, newspaper articles, racist
hashtags (I put 'memes' here, I meant hashtags), tweets mocking the twins' neighbour Gladys after
she appears on TV and is talking sympathetically of Parvaiz and finally a poem. The poem
comes right after a tabloid piece about the secret sex life of 'Pervy' Pasha's twin sister and
it presents a completely different perspective on their relationship: Eamonn is opportunity, hope, love.
Shamsie has talked about how this variety of media represents the novel's chorus. The more she thought
about how fickle the chorus of 'Antigone' is, the more, she says, she thought: it's social
media, it's the news. So the extracts of social media and news that interrupt Aneeka's narrative
function like the chorus of Sophocles' play, representing the voices of the broader
community: voices that can be sympathetic, but are often deeply racist, misogynistic and sensational.
many draw directly from contemporary Islamophobic and anti-immigration rhetoric in Britain like
Theresa May's 'Go Home' billboard campaign. The contrast of choral voices continues into Karamat's
narrative where a negative tabloid headline is followed by TV interviews with people supporting
Aneeka - pushback that we also see in Sophocles' play, as the chorus becomes more assertive against Creon.
Most of these pieces of news and social media do not evoke particular choral odes from 'Antigone',
but the tabloid article about Aneeka's secret sex life is, I think, perhaps reminiscent of the fourth
song or could be reminiscent of the fourth song of 'Antigone': a short hymn to Eros and Aphrodite.
On the surface the 'Eros' seems to be about Haemon's blinding desire, but as Mark Griffith says, it
is and I quote: 'a one-sided interpretation that allows Sophocles to introduce telling ironies'.
Its wedding imagery conflicts with Antigone being really determined to marry death, not Haemon and
Haemon himself has shown that he's not motivated simply by love but is actually rebuking his father for his unjust
acts. Actually Eamonn's entire narrative also recalls, I think, this ode - perhaps especially
Carson's rendering where she has this great line: 'you change the levels of a person's mind'.
But in this narrative Shamsie recalls it again and produces a similar sort of ironic effect to the
original songs through the contrast, the juxtaposition of the tabloid and the poem, complicating any
one-sided perspective. The increased integration of multiple forms of media toward the end of
'Home Fire' is especially suggestive of the tragic chorus, but elements of its songs
surface earlier in the novel as well. So, Parvaiz's narrative is like
the 'parados', the chorus' entrance song, looking back to explain the present plot line
and constantly shifting between different moments in time. More generally, references to music
in the first half of the novel invoke, I think, the Ancient Greek chorus which would sing and dance
at regular intervals, in the orchestra, during a dramatic performance. Such music can appear,
as in tragedy, as a break before speech - like when Parvaiz remembers how he and Aneeka were listening
and dancing to a playlist in the kitchen before Isma told them to turn the volume down and listen.
It's also part of the novel's exploration of self-identity and familial connectedness
for example in his second encounter with Isma, Eamonn sings some lines of a Pakistani pop song
that he remembers from when he used to visit his father's relatives. Later he begins to learn Urdu
with the help of music videos . When Farooq starts to attract Parvaiz towards joining the
Islamic State, his story of Adil Pasha involves dance as well as musical sound, as you see here:
'Here was Abu Parvaiz dipping his head into a mountain stream to perform his ablutions
and coming up with a beard of icicles, which led to dancing on the riverbank as if he were Adil Pasha at
a discotheque rather than Abu Parvaiz in Chechnya, whose every shake of the head produced the sound of wind
chimes. Of all the stories this was the one that most clearly evoked the father he'd never known:
the rushing stream, the dancing icicles, the men around him similarly braving the cold water
so they could provide the jester-warrior Abu Parvaiz with an accompanying orchestra'. This story's
musicality plays a part in Parvaiz's own identity formation in relation to his father, as the icicles
on Adil's beard produce music and Adil's chorus of followers become an accompanying orchestra.
The novel's music is also bound up with its focus throughout on sound and hearing.
This motif, tied in particular to Parvaiz, who's an aspiring audio engineer, is
closely connected to two more formal aspects of recognition or to use Aristotle's term
'anagnorisis' and the often-related moment of reversal (or 'peripeteia'). The crucial scene of
recognition and reversal in Antigone happens with the blind prophet Tiresias. After his
departure, Creon - his mind disturbed, his opinion changed - attempts too late to undo his mistake.
In 'Home Fire' there are several moments of recognition and reversal (or near reversal)
all linked to a sound that forces another viewpoint - another voice, a different understanding -
upon the listener. So, the first is Isma's own icicle scene: she hears very strange music
in Massachusetts, she eventually then understands its source as the acoustics of ice on ice
and allows herself to feel physically the pain of losing her little brother. In
doing so she remembers him not as ungrateful or selfish but just as a boy obsessed with sound.
The second moment of recognition and reversal is less temporary and more vital to the plot,
when Parvaiz hears the voice of a wounded woman in Raqqa begging for help, but is forbidden from
helping her because she's removed her veil, so he says: 'Oh God, a Londoner's voice, a young voice,
maybe his age, Aneeka's age... Oh to be deaf. Allah take away my hearing.'
The voice makes him remember Aneeka, also his mother, Isma and himself. It makes him wish to be deaf
and it prompts him to make contact with Aneeka via a voice call on Skype to ask for help.
Karamat's own moment of self-recognition and reversal comes in two stages: both of them closely
linked to Sophocles' play. Evoking Antigone's cry amid the dust storm, as reported by the guard in
the play, Aneeka's own cry is witnessed by Karamat on his TV screen - as you can see in the first quote
here: 'For a few moments there was only a howling noise, the wind raging through the park, and then
a hand plucked away the white cloth and the howl was the girl. A howl deeper than a girl, a howl that
came out of the earth and through her and into the office of the Home Secretary, who took a step back.
The physical impact on karamat here - the howl reaching him all the way from Karachi to London
isn't enough to make him change course, but it does suggest the beginning of his unravelling.
Just a couple of pages later the Pakistan High Commissioner tells him that their government
can't intervene since support for Aneeka is growing and again Aneeka affects Karamat physically
as he's left tasting dust on his hand. Karamat's moment of full self-recognition and reversal
finally comes with his wife Terry who's the novel's Tiresias (not so much Eurydice), when she
momentarily takes away his sight by placing her hand over his eyes and he focuses on other senses:
the smell of the rotting body which seems to reach him from Karachi just like Aneeka's howl did.
Terry's touch, which I quote: 'made something in him stop, something else in him start and
her voice, saying "be human, fix it"' and then finally the cold touch of ice
that he feels on his own fingertips, like Aneeka touching the ice coffin.
The final formal moment I want to discuss is different, in that Shamsie's reworking
of it doesn't immediately involve the sort of polyphony, the contestation of voices that the tragic
structures provide. This is the messenger speech, which, in the play, reports the suicide of Haemon
over the body of Antigone. In 'Home Fire', its contents are communicated via the TV screen,
just like the dust storm and Antigone's (Aneeka's) howl. The final scene, as I mentioned earlier, is mediated through
Kozminsky's 'Britz'. While we know that Karamat is watching - everybody's watching - it isn't
framed by him. Everyone, instead, is watching as 'every television channel replayed it endlessly'.
Some reviews of 'Home Fire' actually criticised the theatricality here,
whereby the reader is put in the position of the spectator: watching as we might
watch 'Antigone' or 'Britz'. From this position, we can't reach the interior world of either Eamonn
or Aneeka - they're simply a man in a navy blue shirt and the woman he's come for.
Rehana Ahmed has brilliantly shown how this ending maintains Aneeka's elusivity,
undermining the surveillant gaze and denying the reader - especially the white secular middle class
reader - knowledge of the Muslim woman at the heart of the book. But through the lack of involvement of
the novel's other characters and the spectatorial perspective from which the scene is described, such
an ending also directly engages us as the viewer- reader and all the more so because this is where
we're left. In the play, both the chorus and the messenger maintain a heavy silence after his
speech, just before Creon's final entrance. The novel's ending literalizes that silence.
As a result - as Shamsie herself has pointed out - as you can see here, there's no longer any other
media or chorus to interpret this moment for us. As she says, you're forced to think 'beyond
the moment it ends at', go beyond that moment 'be the chorus yourself'. Ultimately, then, 'Home Fire'
positions its readers as a sort of 'chorus', urging them to add their own voices to its polyphony.
So, just over 10 years ago, Edith Hall drew our attention to a group of modern novels - not just
anglophone ones - where, I quote: 'the question of rival subjectivities, the radically different
ways in which individual subjects can experience the same events, is brought into focus through
interaction with an Ancient Greek tragedy. Novels like Christa Wolf's 'Medea' and Barry Unsworth's
'The Songs of the Kings' have heard in tragedy; I quote again: 'the plurality of voices, the polyphony,
indeed the antiphony'. 'Home Fire', I think, belongs to such a group in its engagement with Sophocles' play.
But what I've tried to show today is the close connection between its polyphony,
its intermediality and its and tragic form; the contestation of voices produced through its
integration of multiple media and it's reworking not simply of the story of Antigone, but of the
structural building blocks of her tragedy. Carson's translation of Sophocles' play begins with Antigone
saying 'We come out of the dark". As if responding to this opening line, Shamsie's novel makes visible and
audible those typically in the dark: those denied a political voice, alongside those who have a very
powerful one. In staging so many different voices in contestation with each other, Shamsie not only
demonstrates the heterogeneity of the British Muslim community, but also on a broader scale,
undermines any 'either-or' dichotomy of the sort that Heaney talks about in 'The Burial At Thebes'.
We, the readers, are invited to participate in this multitude of voices and in this respect,
tragic form does important political work. We don't know what will happen after Eamonn's vest
explodes: we have no lament, no choral conclusion like we do in the play; we don't know if Karamat
will want (or if he'll be able) to accomplish his plan to change citizenship laws as Theresa May did.
The final image of Aneeka and Eamonn as lovers in an embrace - an embrace that Antigone and Haemon
in Sophocles' tragedy have only as corpses - that final image renders us, like them, momentarily
suspended. The scene's open-endedness raises the question of whether it could be otherwise
and it leaves us to answer it. Thank you so much.
Well ,thank you Naomi, that was terrific - it was a really gripping talk, thank you.
I would love to ask questions myself -though anyone, please feel free to send in
a question either through youtube or send an email to APGRD,
because your questions will reach us that way as well. But while we wait, perhaps,
can I just take you up at the very end there. It does seem to me that there
is also a difference from the tragic form of 'Antigone' - and from typical tragic form - which
shows you the aftermath of the catastrophe, the aftermath of the violent turning
point. and Sophocles' play, you know, has this really protracted Creon scene at the end, whereas
Karamat, as you said, you have no idea. I mean, I must say I took it that his life was
in ruins, like Creon's. That he would never recover: he would abandon his political career and
his marriage is over. But it seems to me that, arguably, Sophocles' play
wrings out of Creon some kind of understanding of his
position and of the suffering that he's brought on himself, but I'm not sure whether in the Shamsie
novel Karamat is - he's given some understanding, but he's
given very little in the way of redeeming features, you know. He's
he's fairly close to a kind of modern political villain, almost, isn't he? Or am I wrong about that?
Yeah, I don't think you're wrong - it's certainly true that the the novel just ends
there and we don't have the sort of extended lament that Creon sings at the end
of play. Where, as you say, you really get a sense that in some respect he's learned something
and has been completely devastated, although we don't know exactly
how he's going to act. With the novel, I think that open-endedness is is very
deliberate, so we have to, as I said, we sort of have to think about how this might
affect Karamat. I do wonder, if you're not - I mean, like most readers, if you if you don't have 'Antigone'
in the back of your mind, how you would then interpret or think about Karamat at the end of
the novel. I think it might be more open-ended as a result. I mean, his closeness to
his son has been emphasised throughout and there are strong indications that his marriage is about
to fall apart, where Terry crosses over with Eurydice -she leaves the room at very
significant moment. So you do get that sense of unravelling but I still think there's a question mark
left there. I guess the other thing I'd say is, while Karamat is certainly
not very likable, one thing that I think Shamsie has really caught in the play, which a
lot of adaptations don't, is some of the ways in which Creon and Antigone -you know, they're
from the same family and they're they're both, in fact very elite.
While there are very strong differences between them, there are also some important ways in
which their background is the same and Shamsie communicates that through all these
characters being from the British Muslim community and there even actually being
more direct points of contact between Karamat's family and that of Anneka and her siblings.
So there are various things that slightly muddy the idea that they're in
any sense polar opposites and even his political stances, while some might seem -
to those of us who are politically so inclined -
abhorrent, they're combined actually with apparently more progressive approaches
towards the community that he himself is from. So I think he's a slightly more
ambiguous character, perhaps, than than we might initially think. Yes it reminds me that
when Nelson Mandela organised a play reading of 'Antigone', he himself took
on the part of Creon because he felt he wanted to understand what it was that made Creon
tick, rather than simply uh be the Antigone. So have we got any questions arising?
Just a comment so far, I think -
that it won the London Hellenic Prize, this novel, which is
for any kind of work, including our paltry scholarly works, connected to
Hellenic culture and I think quite understandably, this novel was regarded as throwing as much,
if not more, light on Hellenic culture than more conventional academic work.
Now here's a new question to do with the role of the chorus.
Yes, so this is to do with the spectators being called on to perform the role of the chorus
and wondering in particular whether there's an element of its
relating to a post-dramatic theatre, where this is a feature that instead of that
instead of the chorus being there that you you are obliged to become the chorus. Naomi?
Thank you so much, Fiona, for that question. Yes, I think that could definitely be in play, I definitely want to make it in play because
I've thought about that sense of audience engagement, sort of directly
looking at the spectators and confronting them and making them aware of their own spectatorial
gaze, that can be a hallmark of quite a lot of, as fiona puts it, post-dramatic theatre.
I've thought about that in connection with Ancient Greek theatre and moments when I think the
audience is again confronted with their own role and made to really think about what they're
doing as spectators. So then to also think about that in terms of what this novel is doing to its
readers is great. So yeah, I think that's a wonderful way of thinking about this too, thank you.
I see here a question relating to Judith Butler - who of course has
taken this play as a centerpiece for some of her discussion of gender -
and asking do you think that the novel has any interaction with that?
So, from what I gather - having not managed to speak to her directly, Kamila Shamsie - I
don't think is directly engaging with some of the, you know, really foundational
discussions of this play going back to Hegel and Lacan through to Judith Butler
um and Bonnie Honig. That said I do think there are aspects of Butler's approach
and also to take another feminist approach (I hope i'm pronouncing her name right), Honig's
one, I do think there are features there that are interesting to think
about in relation to 'Home Fire'. So I mentioned, very briefly, the currents of non-normative desire
that are flowing through Sophocles' play Butler - amongst others - drew our attention
to in particular. I think Shamsie is very aware of that, those
features at various points where Eamonn's activities start mirroring those of Parvaiz,
Aneeka's brother, when they're in the full throes of their very intense sexual relationship.
Also in other contexts - the guy who recruits Parvaiz, Farooq - there
are moments in their encounters which also seem quite sexually charged. Indeed,
Aneeka doesn't know about Farooq, but thinks that Parvaiz has met a woman and that he, you
know, he's thinking that he might get married, or he's he's having a good time with her. So
anyway, I think that side of things, you know, you could maybe draw some connections
to Butler's work and then also, just thinking of Antigone-Aneeka as a very strongly powerful figure,
I don't think she's there's anything abject about her in 'Home Fire'.
She seems to be a quite a strong political agent, so we might
think about that in relation to Butler's work. Also, as I said, Hoenig's work, because Hoenig
brings in Ismene, whom Butler doesn't talk about very much. But I think
Shamsie is really interested in Ismene: while Isma does recede from the novel, because she
began it and she comes back into it in an exchange with Karamat, that's also very powerful,
I think we're really meant to think about her role too, even if it's not the same sort of
co-conspiratorial role that Hoenig discusses in her work. Thank you very much, Freya, for that
question. I thought you brought out very well the way that she didn't come to 'Antigone' from a
teaching or academic angle, but it was originally put in her
mind by Jatinder Verma who was very much a man of the theatre, so she was thinking
about it theatrically right from the start. I also wondered to what extent,
you know, to bring in any of the most well-known fundamental versions of
'Antigone', like Anouilh. Shamsie actually said in an interview
point blank 'no, I haven't read that', so I don't know to what extent to
put this novel in play with the numerous other dramatic versions
of 'Antigone', versus some specific ones that I think we can identify at work within the novel.
Good. Well, is there anything else? Claire is looking out for questions for us.
Well, we're actually absolutely on the dot at three o'clock - or three o'clock our time - and
I hope other people share with me, that I felt that was a fascinating talk and I
learned a lot from it and I greatly admire your close reading and
some of the themes you've brought out. I mean I hadn't really thought, for example,
about the theme of the ice, which is fascinating. I mean, I think of you as
a critic of of Greek poetry and Greek drama, as somebody with a very strong sensual
approach and you brought that same approach to the novel as well. It was a marvellous talk. Naomi,
we very much look forward to having you in Oxford, in person, where you can meet our students. I can't
wait! We can take you out to supper. But thank you very much for 'zooming'
to us today and we're looking forward to it. Thank you. Thank you so much, Oliver. Bye everybody, bye.
Brilliant!