In his 1921 essay ‘The Task of the Translator’, philosopher Walter Benjamin notes the immanent bearing that translation must have upon the languages that share affinities in a translated text. “If the kinship of languages manifests itself in translations, this is not accomplished through the vague resemblance a copy bears to the original,” he writes. “It stands to reason that resemblance does not necessarily appear where there is kinship.” This kinship, according to Benjamin, is marked only vaguely by the question of ‘origins’— what is common to a text and its translation? — and is otherwise recognised by the process through which languages supplement one another. A ‘pure’ translated language which habitually chases meaning-making is the kin of that language of which it does not let go. In a translation, a language is always carried on the back of another, like the door that the eponymous Antigone has strapped to her back throughout Brecht’s 1948 adaptation of the Sophocles play, in which Antigone is buried alive in a cave by her maternal uncle Kreon, king of Thebes, for going against his wishes and giving her traitorous dead brother Polyneikes a proper burial. The play ends with three independent suicides: Antigone, who hangs herself in the cave; Kreon’s son and Antigone’s betrothed Haimon, who kills himself at Antigone’s feet; and Eurydike, Kreon’s wife, who stabs herself when she receives news of her son’s death.

In Kamila Shamsie’s latest novel Home Fire , an adaptation of Antigone set in contemporary Britain, Shamsie’s long-standing preoccupation with borders and kinship takes on new rigour. The novel is her most compactly written yet, spanning five sections, each devoted to a character: Ismene becomes Isma Pasha, a young woman from Wembley, London, on her way to Amherst to pursue a PhD; her fierce younger sister Aneeka is Antigone herself, and their brother Parvaiz, the orphan son of a militant, is Polyneikes who is off to Raqqa to be with the IS ‘media unit’. Haimon is written as Eamonn, an affluent mixed-race man from Notting Hill with “an Irish spelling to disguise a Muslim name”, whose father Karamat Lone — perhaps the most interesting character in Home Fire — renews the obstinacy of Kreon as the UK home secretary, whose Muslim-majority constituency once voted him out.

As a play text, Antigone is constantly in adaptation. The premise of the play appears to rely on a perpetually relevant conflict involving two forms of kinship: one with the law of the state and the other that is the law of blood. Antigone rejects her sister Ismene’s warnings about disobeying Kreon and even her eventual offer of solidarity, and refuses to dispute Kreon’s accusation that she attempted to bury her brother. While it is debatable what form of law Antigone defies — she claims she buries her brother to appease the gods, but says she would not do the same for a dead husband or child — what is extremely clear is that she conjures up, inexplicably, her own laws of kinship. Antigone (literally — autonomous, or “autoimmune” as Anne Carson translates in Antigonick , or as the play tells us, daughter of incest) defies, at the very least, every existing map of kinship.

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Shamsie’s previous novels, several of which span continents, involve expansive searches for the lost stories of families, frequently aided by language games (crosswords, poems, map names, letters, and anagrams, for instance, in her last four novels) and an abiding interest in how little we know about those whom we consider the closest: in Kartography (2002), childhood sweethearts Karim and Raheen retell Karachi’s urban history, and their own families’ navigation of the 1971 war; Broken Verses (2005) explores journalist Aasmaani’s decoding of her activist mother’s disappearance in Karachi; Burnt Shadows (2009) involves a Japanese-Pakistani family and their relationship with an English-German one, and moves between Nagasaki in 1945, New Delhi in 1947, Pakistan in the 1980s, and eventually America and Afghanistan post-9/11; and A God in Every Stone (2014), Shamsie’s most exacting undertaking yet in terms of the sheer temporal scope of the novel, tells the story of Vivian Rose Spencer (an English nurse in World War I), Qayyum Gul (a Pashtun soldier who fought at Flanders), and Qayyum’s younger brother Najeeb, an archaeologist and Vivian’s student, culminating in the Qissa Khwani Bazaar massacre in Peshawar in 1930. If these summaries of Shamsie’s novels reveal anything, it is her continual interest in exploring what constitutes the core of kinship.

In this regard, Home Fire does go the furthest in that for the first time since Kartography , Shamsie revisits the very conditions of kinship. In Kartography , Karim and Raheen cannot understand their relationship to each other without also learning truths about the ways in which their respective parents have betrayed each other. The disclosure of dank familial circumstances forces a confrontation of the very politics that both Karim and Raheen thought they espoused; suddenly the borders are also filial, when they were only ever political. Home Fire asks similar questions, but in hingeing the stakes on the state, creates a powerful premise in which the ultimate disavowal of kin is not owed to the remit of law, or what the state allows its citizens to do, but in what one considers to be the ethical obligations on one’s part — autonomously, if you will — to one’s kin. In this, kin is broken, when Aneeka considers Isma’s inability to back her wish to bring Parvaiz home alive, but kin is also made, when Aneeka falls in love with Eamonn (in perhaps the most unconvincing section of the novel) in spite of their differing political views, and it is re-made when Aneeka wants to help Parvaiz come ‘home’, when his act could have constituted an irrevocable rupture. Eamonn will do anything for Aneeka — is that not the origin of kin? But Karamat will not do anything for his son that will ultimately compromise the image he has crafted for the state — that is kinship too.

The ability to work through such a potentially frustrating paradigm is Shamsie’s strength, and it renders Home Fire , for the most part, an immensely persuasive adaptation: unpicking the fraying motivations of unrelenting characters is not an easy task. But this is also where the novel falls ever so clearly short: Shamsie’s Aneeka does not seem to wrestle obstinately with her obligations towards her kindred, as much as she seems to want to atone for breaking her word to Parvaiz. The former condition is an asinine spiral into desperation that one could also call grief. Grief: the very opposite of belief, or a state that testifies most thoroughly to our inability to know or comprehend a situation. Antigone is nothing if not the very embodiment of grief. And while the latter (wanting to atone) is not an uninteresting dilemma, it is fundamentally uncomplicated by death. Antigone is a play full of death by kinship in which no one kills anyone else: the dead arrive as such, and if they have not died, they are eventually dead by their own hands — or the long arm of the state. “Accept the law, even when it’s unjust,” says Isma. “You don’t love justice or our brother if you can say that,” retorts Aneeka, who appears to love both, and in that one might read Home Fire as a text whose ‘pure language’, as Benjamin’s notion suggests, briefly loses kinship with Sophocles’s Antigone, whose name Carson also translates as “instead of being born”, who does not find herself outside the law or kin, for she never did play by the tenets of either. This is what makes Antigone such an exceptional story, not in irrelevant times: it is not Antigone’s desire to bury her brother against the law that is exceptional, it is that she thinks she should do so, because she cannot imagine another possibility. That Aneeka finds herself in a state of atonement, rather than renewed ethical possibility, is only a compromise because her autonomy is, in other facets of life, not entirely discounted in the novel.

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Home Fire is one of the more memorable modern adaptations of an already exceptional play, not least because it offers us a world heavily conditioned by racist borders and class warfare. Shamsie nimbly reveals the different forms of kinship that Muslims can have with the British state: Isma is interrogated when she travels to America, Parvaiz’s very citizenship is questionable because of his activities, West London-raised Eamonn’s red passport that allows him to travel without a second’s notice, or a job, while Aneeka must make a choice at the nexus of passport privilege and next-of-kin. Privilege here is not a game of checkers or something that can be eschewed at will, but a daily, unending trial with the state entailing different forms of visibility and luck, often not of one’s choosing, particularly when one strives to protect one’s own (never more evident than with Eamonn’s elite white friends with whom his friendships thrive as he instinctively plays up his whiteness).

Shamsie’s novels reimagine the contours of kinships across racial, linguistic and socio-geographical borders, and while this occasionally results in histories that are not given the room to explode, such as in her 2014 novel A God in Every Stone, her ambition in probing how unlikely friendships, romances, familial ties and even pedagogical relationships bear witness to — and are responses to — life-events such as war and empire is exactly what bares the true pulse of her fiction. Home Fire is a gutsy, quicksilver read that taps into this (im)pulse, and is a fascinating exploration of the promises of kinship under late racial capitalism.

Sharanya lives and writes in England

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