GENDERED BODIES, GENDERED EARTH: AN ECOFEMINIST ANALYSIS OF POWER IN KAMILA SHAMSIE’S HOME FIRE

Abstract

Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire has been widely read as a novel about citizenship, Muslim identity, radicalisation, gender, grief and state surveillance. The connection between its regulated bodies and its material language of soil, burial, territory and bodily exposure, however, have not been the focus of sustained ecofeminist analysis. This article tries to fill that gap by engaging in close reading that is informed by Maria Mies and Vandana Shiva’s description of linked systems of domination. It asks how political and patriarchal power regulates bodies and access to place, and how care, grief and burial contest that power. Through this analysis, it can be seen that the interrogation in the airport is a form of mobility that is stateful, as the interrogation of the body is always a prerequisite condition and self-presentation is in a controlled manner. Karamat Lone has described Parvaiz as a contaminant of British soil, making the very ground of the nation an exclusive property, thus bringing the punishment beyond death. Aneeka’s effort to recover, touch and bury her brother challenges the official division of body, family, and home. Her Karachi vigil also affords insight into the way her grieving body becomes a public space up for grabs in the media, religious commentary, security measures, heat and dust turn her grieving body into a contested public object. Read together, these scenes locate the novel’s ecofeminist significance in borders, burial, material belonging and in the politics of return. This article extends ecofeminist criticism into the urban and diasporic politics of citizenship and identifies care as a counter-ethic that reveals the human cost of exclusionary law.