Analysis Of Home Fire

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Detail Assignment, Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie Like Antigone, the Sophocles tragedy on which it is based, Kamila Shamsie’s novel Home Fire ends with an unedifying spectacle. In the novel’s transposition of the events of the ancient Greek play to the present day, Antigone and her sister Ismene become Aneeka and Isma, British-born Pakistani sisters who over the course of the narrative are forced to respond in opposed ways to the treatment of the corpse of their brother Pasha, who is executed while trying to defect from ISIS but is considered a terrorist by the British government in the form of Karamat Lone, the home secretary and the father of Aneeka’s fiancé Eamonn. Instead of being repatriated to his family’s home in London, the body is sent …show more content…

This is an aspect of the scene that makes it more widely relevant. To Aneeka, the spectacle is indifferent to her situation. The fact of her grief is more important than anything else, and we are told that her only reaction to this act of temporary preservation is to make a request about not covering her brother’s face. For the viewers over the television in London, the ice has different potential meanings. Observing a local community acting decently and practically to a situation created by Lone and his government acting callously in self-interest, the action of creating the ice coffin serves as a reproach. Lone (and Isma, who, it turns out is complicit in a way she will have to reckon with) have to observe the spectacle in the recognition that the ice coffin will prolong the situation and allow continued televisual coverage of the event as the corpse is now decent enough to be broadcast for much longer than if it had been allowed to decay naturally in the sun. They also see the temporary nature of the delay figured in the material of the coffin. While the ice is a practical solution that will briefly delay the decomposition of the corpse, it is itself always already melting, creating a metaphor for the fleeting time of the situation. What is happening to the ice will happen to the body in time, no matter the

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