Kamila Shamsie didn’t have to stretch to fit the plot to the times when she decided to adapt the Greek tragedy Antigone into a contemporary novel about terrorism. In Sophocles’s play, the heroine Antigone buries her dead brother, although he has been declared a traitor and denied funeral rites by the king, Creon. For that, Creon condemns Antigone to death, despite the pleading of his son (her betrothed), his wife, and public opinion. Hysteria around the burial of terrorists isn’t only ancient: In the wake of the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013, officials in Massachusetts responded to this primal fury by acceding to protests that the body of the slain bomber, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, should not be buried in the state. Democratic Sen. Ed Markey said at the time, “If the people of Massachusetts do not want that terrorist to be buried on our soil, then it should not be.” Protesters’ signs bore slogans straight out of Sophocles: “Bury this terrorist on U.S. soil and we will unbury him.” In Shamsie’s retelling of Antigone, the recently published “Home Fire,” the family at the center of the drama is British-Pakistani: two sisters, Isma and Aneeka, and their beloved brother Parvaiz, who goes to Syria to join the Islamic State. Their story is intertwined with that of Karamat Lone, imagined as Britain’s first Muslim home secretary, one who shares the anti-immigrant politics of Theresa May. Parvaiz is quickly disillusioned with the caliphate and tries to return home, but Lone has a new zeal for stripping people associated with terrorism of their citizenship. Parvaiz’s sisters are drawn to try to save him, and the end is predictably tragic. The gripping novel explores how Western responses to terrorism show the limits of our ideals and laws. In an interview over Skype, Shamsie told me her initial imperative with the novel was to explore the question of citizenship, to delve into what it means to begin stripping people of citizenship for certain crimes.



“Repeatedly people in [Theresa May’s] government have said, ‘citizenship is a privilege not a right,’” Shamsie said. “And that’s simply legally untrue, but increasingly they want to be able to take away citizenship for people who they think are unworthy. And they get to decide.” She added: “It’s your own citizens and you’re saying that for all that we have, our judicial system and prison system and probation and all of that, this is the one crime that we don’t know how to deal with, so we’re just going to leave you out of the country. It should be seen as a real failing of a state, to say that our judicial system is incapable of knowing how to respond to this criminal act.” Rather, crimes of terror are considered a category apart, an offense so extreme that society’s order is upended in reaction, and laws and tradition are suspended. (In the poet Anne Carson’s unconventional adaptation of Antigone, she writes: “a state of exception/ marks the limit of the law/ this violent thing/ this fragile thing.”) And, as in the United States, the notion of terror is racialized and associated with Muslims. (President Donald Trump entertaining the idea of sending Sayfullo Saipov, the man who killed eight people when he drove a truck down a bike path in Manhattan on Halloween, to Guantánamo, is at this point to be expected.) While stripping citizenship might initially be justified only in terrorism cases, Shamsie noted May’s attempts to revoke the passports of a group of British-Pakistani men convicted of sex crimes – “There’s no way of saying it’s not about Islamophobia and racism, because no one is making those suggestions about anyone who is white and committing similar crimes.” In the narratives that she read of radicalization, of youth attempting to join ISIS, Shamsie saw only demonization and one-dimensional narratives: “It’s almost an inevitability now. If you’re young, Muslim and male, and angry, then you’re going to strap a bomb onto yourself.” But she dug into research on ISIS propaganda and youth who were convinced by it, and found that the reality for many teenage would-be fighters, was complex. “One of the things I was interested in was the lure being something other than violence, and all the other ways that this world that we know to be nihilistic and brutal could also be seductive,” Shamsie said. To convince 19-year-old Parvaiz, the ISIS recruiter plays on his insecurities and loneliness and offers him an imagined community of brotherhood. In “Home Fire,” in keeping with a long lineage of feminist interpretations of Antigone, the experience of women is made central; it’s the sisters, mothers, and lovers who aren’t just the targets of violence but also bear the burden of its aftermath.

“There is this link between masculinity and violence that should be inescapable, it should be part of every conversation on violence.”