Home Fire By Kamila Shamsie/ A Story of Love and Hate

 

Home Fire is such a novel which can intrigue you or make you tear up because of its interesting storyline. This novel highlights the discrimination that Muslims go through in different parts of the region. Isma and Aneeka and Parvaiz are siblings, and they follow their own line of incidents and problems. Aneeka and Pervaiz are twins while Isma is their older sister, who took care of them since the age of seven when after the death of their mother they have become orphan. Their late father was a Jihadi, So Isma and Aneeka are in constant fear while living in Britain.

This novel highlights Muslims living in Britain and facing Islamophobia on various occasions. But the focus of this novel is their social and family life rather than their religion. But we get the gist from very ordinary things as Isma is interrogated at Immigration. This novel is the rewriting of Greek tragedy Antigone by Sophocles. In the same manner Aneeka, the reincarnation of Antigone in modern-day Home Fire faces the same dilemma about his brother Pervaiz, who just like his father joined the jihadi group.

  

Pervaiz story is, however, heartbreaking to an extent that it kept my eyes brimming with tears for a longer period. The struggle he does to get back his previous life and the consequence of his desperate attempt is heartbreaking. The way Aneeka strives to bury his brother’s dead body is somehow too much for me because she does anything in her power to bury his brother. She even uses Eamonn Lone, the son of British Secretary Karamat Lone, but Eamonn actually fell for her. The character of Karamat Lone raised several questions in my mind. Like why he reacted so strongly against Aneeka and other Muslims, but then suddenly I felt its character just being a mouthpiece of the government to highlight the struggle he is doing to maintain his position.  It seems that he is in a constant struggle to maintain his identity as the British Home Secretary by suppressing his identity of a Muslim. The way he sided with the government and as a result of Eamonn, his only son leaves him and his whole family fall apart.

At the end of this novel, I was crying and feeling overwhelmed with emotions. Well, in the last part when Aneeka run towards Eamonn, we as a reader get the vibe that this is the end. The way the writer took a story from 441B.C and placed in a modern-day world is sufficient to make us feel the craftsmanship of the author. The journey with this novel was beyond words because there are some feelings which can only felt. How was your experience?