Shamsie relocates Antigone to Britain in the second half of the 2010s, and her conflict is not just between family and state but also between one’s religious and cultural beliefs, particularly for British Muslims, and both family and state. are enemies of the state.ģ) Most strikingly in a 2016–17 context, Antigone’s lament that she is a “ metic, not among the living nor among the dead.” In modern day parlance, she is essentially proclaiming herself a citizen of nowhere, to use the accusatory phrase used in 2016 by the newly appointed British Prime Minister towards those who would calls themselves citizens of the world. Studying Antigone in preparation for Home Fire I was struck, as I imagine Shamsie was, by the contemporary relevance of three key Greek concepts, left untranslated in the version I read.ġ) the ambiguous use of the word nomos, which to Antigone denotes customs and values, but to King Creon the laws of the land.Ģ) Antigone’s prioritisation of philia (obligations to friends, family) over obligations to the state, and Creon’s explicit rejection of that stance: “Whoever deems a philos more important than a fatherland, this man I say is nowhere.” Or, as in Seamus Heaney’s rewrite of the play, which forms the epigraph for Home Fire: It perhaps isn’t the best book on the 2017 Man Booker longlist, if measured by pure literary merit, but it may very well be the most important and thought provoking. Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire is a 21st Century rewrite of Sophocles’s Antigone. ‘We’re in no position to let the state question our loyalties. Home Secretaries talking about people setting themselves apart in the way they dress. Terrorist attacks involving European victims. Sometimes things happen that make people more hostile.

Mostly it’s the kind of thing that’s easy to shrug off. If you’re nineteen and female you’ll get some version of a hard time for whatever you wear. ‘What do you say to your father when he makes a speech like that? Do you say, Dad, you’re making it OK to stigmatise people for the way they dress? Do you say, what kind of idiot stands in front of a group of teenagers and tells them to conform? Do you say, why didn’t you mention that among the things this country will let you achieve if you’re Muslim is torture, rendition, detention without trial, airport interrogations, spies in your mosques, teachers reporting your children to the authorities for wanting a world without British injustice?’

Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie