YASEMIN KARAAĞAÇ
Statelessness: The Concept of Homo Sacer in Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire
GLOBAL CONVERSATIONS: An International Journal in Contemporary Philosophy and Culture
Volume V, Number 01 (2022): 56-70

STATELESSNESS: THE CONCEPT OF HOMO SACER IN KAMILASHAMSIE’S HOME FIRE
Yasemin Karaağaç

Abstract
This article analyzes Kamila Shamsie’s novel Home Fire (2017), which is acontemporary remake of the family tragedy of Sophocles’ Antigone. The novel
focuses on the lives of three orphaned siblings, Isma, Aneeka, and Parvaiz, who are
British-Pakistani citizens, living as a minority group in multicultural British
society. However, following in his father’s footsteps, Parvaiz makes the decision toleave the United Kingdom and join a jihadist movement, which constitutes a threat
to his citizenship rights. Later on, he regrets being a part of a radical group anddecides to come back home in the United Kingdom, but the government has alreadyrevoked his citizenship. The situation becomes complicated when, following thedeath of Parvaiz, her twin brother, Aneeka makes a demand to the British
authorities to bury her brother’s body on British soil. Thus, Aneeka finds herself ina situation of confronting the sovereign power represented by the British Home
Secretary, Karamat Lone, who has revoked the citizenship of both her and herbrother for acting against the vital interests of the state. In this context, I will
explore the characters of Parvaiz and Aneeka as stateless people, drawing on
Giorgio Agamben’s notion of homo sacer, understood as someone condemned to‘bare life’ and thus as vulnerable to sovereign violence. The paper will focus on theexcess of sovereign power exercised over these two characters, which will beanalyzed drawing on Agamben’s arguments of state of exception, bare life, andhomo sacer.
Keywords: Homo Sacer, State of Exception, Bare Life, Agamben, Biopolitics

1. Introduction
It will not be an exaggeration to say that Kamila Shamsie’s novel Home Fire (2017) offers amodern-day version of Sophocles’ tragedy Antigone. It deals with the themes of identity crisis,
Otherness, and sovereign power, focusing in particular on the experience of three BritishPakistani siblings – Isma, Parvaiz, and Aneeka – living under sovereign surveillance as aconsequence of their father’s involvement with jihadism. As Claire Chambers puts it, “HomeGLOBAL CONVERSATIONS

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Statelessness: The Concept of Homo Sacer in Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire

Fire operates as a post-9/11 Antigone, and its adaptation element is immediately signaled by
the novel’s epigraph from Seamus Heaney’s translation of Sophocles’ play: ‘The ones we love.
. . are enemies of the state (n.p.)’.”1 More specifically, Shamsie portrays “the struggle of thosestuck between increasingly authoritarian, post-9/11 governments in the West and religious
fundamentalist groups in the East.”2 The events in the novel take place primarily in London,
but also in other locales, such as Amherst (Massachusetts), Istanbul (Turkey), Raqqa (Syria),
and Karachi (Pakistan). The story in Home Fire encompasses the fates of two British-Pakistanifamilies, the Pashas and the Lones, which are closely entwined with one another. They bothshared a Muslim cultural background but were otherwise exact opposites. Adil Pasha, the fatherof the three siblings at the center of Shamsie’s narrative, was a member of a radical Islamicgroup and upon detention died in Guantanamo Bay. Karamat Lone, for his part, is a Home
Secretary with the British government, seeking a political career and acceptance in the British
society, while distancing himself from his Muslim background in the process.
The main action of the story begins with the disappearance of Parvaiz, who decides tojoin the Islamic terrorist group ISIS. He follows in the footsteps of his jihadist father, whom henever met in person, under the influence of his father’s friend and jihadist recruiter Farooq.
Later on, Parvaiz realizes that he has made a horrible mistake and wants to come back home to
Britain, asking Aneeka for help. His life ends outside the British consulate in Turkey, where heis likely killed by Farooq for betrayal. Named a dead terrorist and a traitor in the news headlines,
Parvaiz is no longer regarded as British, as the Home Secretary revokes his British citizenship. 3
Lone’s decision is to ban Parvaiz’ burial on British soil, repatriating his body to Pakistan.
Unable to bring Parvaiz’ funeral to Britain, Aneeka initiates a protest against the sovereigndecision of the Home Secretary by sitting next to her brother’s coffin outside the Karachi British
High Commission in one of the city parks.
Aneeka’s steps to secure burial rights and justice for her brother via her public presence.
The media does not change Lone’s mind, who remains opposed to bringing Parvaiz’ body to
the UK. Instead, the Home Secretary revoked her citizenship as well, for acting against the vitalinterests of the UK. His position is laid bare in the suggestive statement “Let her continue to be
British; but let her be British outside Britain.”4 Meanwhile, Eamonn, Lone’s son, and Aneeka
start a relationship; he tries to convince his father to have Parvaiz’ body brought back to Britain
but was not able to change his mind. Thus, Lone’s unyielding political ambition and British
nationalism contributed to the lovers’ downfall and death – at the end of the story, the two werereunited in the park but were targeted and ultimately blown up by jihadists. In this relation,
Rehana Ahmed very properly points out that “The novel’s emphasis on performance andsurveillance highlights the role of the visual in shaping or entrenching perceptions of others,
and thereby entrenching barriers between cultural groups, or impeding communication acrossClaire Gail Chambers, “Sound and Fury: Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire,” Massachusetts Review, Vol. 3 (2018),
p. 208.
2Peter Krause, “Antigone in Pakistan: Home Fire, by Kamila Shamsie,” Journal of Comparative Literature andAesthetics, Vol. 43, No. 3, (2020), p. 15.
3
Kamila Shamsie, “Exiled: the disturbing story of a citizen made unBritish’, The Guardian (November 17, 2018),
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/nov/17/unbecoming-british-kamila-shamsie-citizens-exile.
4
Kamila Shamsie, Home Fire (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), p. 230.
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them.” 5 This concern can be pointedly traced in the novel, as Shamsie draws attention to
cultural differences which can become a source of problems and threats, thus raising thequestion of the possibility of a non-homogenous community. In this regard, Stuart Hall says,
What are the terms on which people from different cultural, religious, linguistic, and historicalbackgrounds, who have applied to occupy the same social space, whether that is a city or a nation,
or a region, to live with one another without either one group (the less powerful group) having tobecome the imitative version of the dominant one-i.e. an assimilationism- or, on the other hand, thetwo groups hating one another, or projecting images of degradation?6

We need to note here that, since Shamsie’s novel lays out the discussion about the ways of
belonging and not belonging around citizenship rights, multiculturalism, and resistance toassimilation, the novel answers Hall’s question with a resounding ‘no’. As Debjani Banerjee
points out, Shamsie succeeds in analyzing the issues precisely by providing “a deeper look into
the community to show the nuanced relationship within British Muslims and their multilayered
connections with faith and with state machinery.” 7
In this context, sovereign power over citizenship and human rights appear as important
themes of the novel, which challenge the idea that liberalism, democracy, and totalitarianism
are mutually exclusive opposites. Shamsie narrates her story by juxtaposing them in the courseof the events. Notably, once Parvaiz and then Aneeka are condemned to being stateless andoutside the law, we can think of them as a kind of “living dead,” in Agamben’s terms homines
sacri/homo sacer. We can thus examine the themes of the novel, including being stripped oflegal rights, deprived of citizenship, and statelessness, through Giorgio Agamben’s work Homo
Sacer and particularly drawing on his discussions of the suspension of the law, the state of
exception, and the production of bare life.
At this point, we will need to note that for Agamben the political subject of modern life
is “not man as a free and conscious political subject but, above all, man’s bare life.” 8 But tounderstand what Agamben means by “bare life,” and the transformative effects of the sovereign
power on it, we will need to look at the Western politics, in which these effects show in the lifeof individuals. We will discuss this further in the following section.

Rehana Ahmed, “Towards an Ethics of Reading Muslims: Encountering Difference in Kamila Shamsie’s Home
Fire,” Textual Practice, Vol. 35, No. 7 (2021), p. 13.
6
Stuart Hall, “Rethinking the cultural question” (a video conversation with Nira Yuval-Davis), shown at theinterim conference of the International Sociological Association with heading Racisms, Sexisms, andContemporary Politics of Belonging (London, August 2004); see also Nira Yuval-Davis, The Politics ofBelonging: Intersectional Contestations (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2011), p. 26.
7
Debjani Banerjee, “From Cheap Labor to Overlooked Citizens: Looking for British Muslim Identities in Kamila
Shamsie’s Home Fire,” South Asian Review, Vol. 41, No. 3-4 (2020), p. 289.
8
Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 128.
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2. Sovereignty and Homo Sacer
Sacredness is a line of flight still present in contemporary
politics, a line that is as such moving into zones
increasingly vast and dark, to the point of ultimately
coinciding with the biological life itself of citizens. If
today there is no longer any one clear figure of the sacredman, it is perhaps because we are all virtually homines
sacri. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer, pp. 114-115

For Agamben, “the production of a biopolitical body is the original activity of sovereign
power”9; thus, the latter controls the individual human rights and decides who is inside andoutside the law. Since in this way individuals become the biopolitical tool of the sovereign, thelatter regulates the juridical order through them, including by suspending the law “and,maintaining itself in relation to the exception,” that is, by “first constituting itself as a rule.” 10
In other words, within Agamben’s perspective on sovereign power, the sovereign, as thedecision-maker over law and political life, has the power to decide who is inside and outside
the law. Also, the sovereign can exclude itself from the law because the sovereign is the creatorof the juridical order. This is a preferable exception for the sovereign because in this way it
resides outside that order and is excluded from any restrictions and penalties of the law while
it is under the protection of the law.
Since the law is related to “bare life,” in the state of exception, human life and rights
are captured by sovereign power. The sovereign can thus decide that certain individuals can be
excluded from full participation in political life. From this perspective, Being can be seen as“nothing other than Being in the ban of being,” 11 which backs up the idea that “the originalpolitical relation is the ban.” 12 In this sense, the state of exception becomes a zone ofindistinction between outside and inside, exclusion and inclusion, which produces the form ofbare life as the fundamental act of sovereignty in the sense of being included in the political
realm by virtue of being excluded. 13 Thus, this paradoxical “inclusive exclusion” paradigm
becomes significant for the analysis of the act of sovereign exception in the production of barelife.
Agamben proposes that this exclusive operation is intimately bound up with thedistinction between bios and zoē, which is found in the ancient Greek conception of life. Thus,zoē refers to the natural life (common to humans, animals, and gods), whereas bios indicatesthe form of qualified life peculiar to a single individual or a group. In this context, bios indicatesthat individuals’ lives are grounded in the political form of life, while zoē can be associatedwith a kind of animalization. That is, zoē can be seen as opposed to or excluded from thepolitical life. All in all, the binary confrontation of bíos and zoē highlights the biopoliticaldivision between political and natural life. At this point, homo sacer is not the same thing as
9Ibid., p. 6.
Ibid., p. 18.
11
Ibid., p. 60.
12Ibid., p. 181.
13
Nasser Hussain & Melissa Ptacek, “Thresholds: Sovereignty and the Sacred,” Law & Society Review, Vol. 34,
No. 2 (2000), p. 496.
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Statelessness: The Concept of Homo Sacer in Kamila Shamsie’s Home Firezoē, but rather stands on the “threshold between nature and culture, zoē and bios.” 14 That is, thedivision between political and natural life relates living beings to bare life, places them on thethreshold of the juridico-political realm.
Bare life, in this sense, is a product of the state of exception, or as Agamben puts it, “theproduction of bare life is the originary activity of sovereignty.”15 This means that “bare life” isdifferent from zoē and that instead it is produced by the sovereign power which captures theliving beings from the very “arising of the political in the West, Greek democracy and Roman
law.”16 As Agamben explains,
The fundamental categorial pair of Western politics is not that of friend/ enemy but that of barelife/political existence, zoē /bios, exclusion/inclusion. There is politics because man is the living
being who, in language, separates and opposes himself to his own bare life and, at the same time,
maintains himself in relation to that bare life in an inclusive exclusion.17

Agamben suggests that this biopolitical paradigm captured in the distinction between bare lifeand politics originates in Ancient Athens and runs through to modern Western history, whilestill determining and obscuring the very nature of politics. As he writes, “in Western politics,
bare life has the peculiar privilege of being that whose exclusion founds the city of men.”18 In
this sense, bare life becomes indistinct from a basic form of life, whereas its eventual
differentiation becomes possible through a politicization by way of exclusion.
In this framework, Agamben discusses the historical figure of the archaic Roman law,homo sacer, the outlaw who has been excluded from the religious and the juridical-politicalcommunity and thus “may be killed and yet not sacrificed.” 19 According to the Roman law, thehomo sacer can be killed by anyone without this constituting a homicide as this banned person
no longer has a political identity and is seen as a mere bare body. For Agamben, homo sacer isdeprived of “normal political rights and legal safeguards” by the sovereign, who forces him outof bios and thus reduces him to bare life.
At the same time, it is impermissible for homo sacer to be sacrificed because of hissacredness. As Agamben claims, “homo sacer belongs to God in the form of unsacrificeability
and is included in the community in the form of being able to be killed.” 20 This, then, is asituation in which, as a result of a double exclusion, homo sacer is excluded from both thesphere of the profane law (ius humanum) and that of the divine law (ius divinium). Agamben
explains,
What defines the status of homo sacer is therefore not the originary ambivalence of the sacredness
that is assumed to belong to him, but rather both the particular character of the double exclusion into
which he is taken and the violence to which he finds himself exposed. This violence – the14

Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, p. 181.
Ibid., p. 83.
16
Ibid., p. 32.
17
Ibid., p. 8.
18Giorgio Agamben, The Omnibus Homo Sacer, translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, California:
Stanford University Press, 2017), p. 10.
19
Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, p. 8.
20
Ibid., p. 82
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unsanctionable killing that, in his case, anyone may commit – is classifiable neither as sacrifice nor
as homicide, neither as the execution of a condemnation to death nor as sacrilege.21

Thus, by being banned, homo sacer is left to live under the sovereign power and – via his
unsacrificeability – also outside the realm of God. In this way, his two forms of existence arecaught in the zone of indistinction as inclusive exclusion.
In the light of these explanations, Shamsie’s novel can be seen as offering a discussionof characters that are homines sacri and are thus marked by a border status of indistinction as
belonging to neither zoē, nor bios. That is, as homines sacri, the lives of Aneeka and Parvaiz
are included in the law by being excluded from it, which is always related to the possible andpresent state of exception. In this sense, we can say that, for Agamben, sovereign power isembedded in biopolitics and this indeed implies the paradox that life conditioned in the sphereof sovereignty is life that has been abandoned by its juridico-political order.22
As it has been noted, since Shamsie depicts her characters as being on the threshold
between inside and outside of the juridical order, we can speak of a zone of indifference
identifiable in her novel. As homines sacri, the siblings now can be seen as being in a liminal
position which is neither that of simple natural life, nor social life, but bare life. That is, they
exemplify a situation, in which bare life and juridical order appear at the threshold ofindistinction, of a paradoxical ‘inclusive exclusion’. This peculiar condition is identifiable interms of Agamben’s sense of Homo Sacer and allows for the novel Home Fire to be readthrough the lenses of his critique of sovereignty as enacting a state of exception.
3. Homines Sacri in Home FireAs the novel tells us, the young orphaned Muslim siblings had a financially constrained life ina London suburb near Wembley. After their father, Adil Pasha, became a terrorist, they lived
under the surveillance by MI5 officers. The siblings feared that the British government would
withdraw the state welfare benefits from any family it suspected to be siding with terrorists. 23
They had to be mindful about pretty much everything they did in this society, for fear of beingharassed by the Special Branch of the security agency, as well as by people in the neighborhood
who suspected their sympathies based on the story of Adil Pasha. 24 In an important sense, theirfather’s criminal past had already placed them outside British society, as they were alreadyregarded as members of a more or less disenfranchised social group. We can therefore think ofthem as a kind of homines sacri endeavoring to survive in the multicultural British society while
being placed in a disadvantaged position.

21

Ibid., p. 82
It is to be noted that Agamben criticizes Michel Foucault for limiting his studies to hospitals and prisons andnot focusing on the concentration camp as a peculiar example of disciplinary biopolitics. According to Agamben,
Foucault in this way has ignored the politics of the totalitarian states of the twentieth century (Giorgio Agamben,
Homo Sacer, p. 118). Similarly, he criticizes Hannah Arendt for the lack of biopolitical analyses in her
investigations, even though she did discuss the link between totalitarian rule and the concentration camp. Agamben
thus suggests an analysis of sovereignty as making up for the deficiencies in the views of these two thinkers withthe political sense of bare life.
23
Kamila Shamsie, Home Fire, p. 49.
24
Ibid., p. 49.
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While accepting that the sovereign and homines sacri stand in opposition to each other,Agamben also claims that they are at the same time symmetrical and belong to the same order.
In his own words, “the sovereign and homo sacer present two symmetrical figures that have thesame structure and are correlative: the sovereign is the one with respect to whom all men arepotentially homines sacri, and homo sacer is the one with respect to whom all men act assovereigns.”25 Thus, while the Pasha family had to live with the anxiety of being constantly
questioned regarding their loyalty to the British nation, Karamat Lone, as a sovereign figure,was in a position of privilege which potentially enabled him to designate a person as homosacer in Agamben’s sense. That the Home Secretary fittingly exemplifies this Agambenian
sense of a sovereign who is ready to differentiate and thus designate homines sacri withinsociety as a whole becomes clear in a statement Shamsie has him making:You are, we are British. Britain accepts this. So do most of you. But for those of you who are insome doubt about it, let me say this: don’t set yourselves apart in the way you dress, the way you
think, outdated codes of behaviour you cling to, the ideologies to which you attach your loyalties.
Because if you do, you will be treated differently – not because of racism, though that does still
exist, but because you insist on your difference from everyone else in this multi-ethnic, multireligious, multitudinous United Kingdom of ours.26

In brief, just as the two opposite figures of the sovereign and homines sacri can be seen as
symmetrical and belonging to the same order in Agamben’s perspective, so too Lone’s speech
appears to ordain the position and correlative relationship of the siblings with British society.
As perceived throughout the novel, the sense of this ordinance becomes particularly
somber. For, the predominant public view associated these British siblings of Pakistani descentwith terror, which by itself is indicative of the discrimination each of them was exposed topersonally. When Isma appeared at the airport on the way to her doctoral studies in the UnitedStates, she was interrogated for nearly two hours by the immigration officer: “‘Do you consider
yourself British?’ the man said./ ‘I am British.’ / ‘But do you consider yourself British?’ / ‘I’ve
lived here all my life’ […]. /She meant there was no other country of which she could feelherself a part, but the words came out sounding evasive’.” 27 These experiences that resulted
from prejudice toward their descent came on top of an extremely difficult childhood which thesiblings had to endure upon the loss of their mother (shared between Aneeka and Eamonn):“Everything else you can live around, but not death. Death you have to live through.”28
In this sense, the novel presents the characters in-between spaces and on bordering
thresholds, positioning them somewhere between dead and living subjects in a way that reflects
the contradictory positions they attain with regard to the law. In this intermediary position, thecharacters in the novel, being neither dead nor alive, can be seen as representing the figure of
der Muselmann who stands on a “moving threshold” between the human and inhuman. 29 Being

25

Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer, p. 84.
Kamila Shamsie, Home Fire, pp. 88-9.
27
Ibid., p. 59.
28
Ibid, pp. 93-4.
29
Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and The Archive, translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen(Zone Books, 1999), p. 48.
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like a living dead, a ghost-like figure, the Muselmann here can be seen as symbolizing theborder of bare life and political existence, and thus as representing the impossibility of
testimony. It is in this sense that, for Agamben, der Muselmann is the faceless center of theconcentration camp 30 and represents the impossibility for ethical resolution in Auschwitz,
where the very idea of an ethical limit loses its meaning.31 That is why Agamben’s conclusion
is that the camp is “the hidden paradigm of the political space of modernity.”32
The figure der Muselmann is of particular interest here. Etymologically, it comes fromthe word Muslim, which in Arabic refers to the person who unconditionally submits himself tothe will of God. In the chapter “The Muselmann,” Agamben focuses on the figure of theMuselmann who survives in the concentration camps as a particular type of deportee while also
representing the other deportees who endure the worst level of the camp before being killed ina gas chamber.
In this sense, every character of the novel can be seen as representing the status of theMuselmann, viz. Muslims, as living in the British society “on a moving threshold.” This is
attested by Aneeka’s statement: “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 forwanting a world without British injustice.” 33 Notably, this statement aligns with Agamben’s
point that the Muselmann occupies “a zone of the human where not only help but also dignity
and self-respect have become useless.”34
Living under surveillance on the margin of society, as a member of the working class,and as a Muslim colonial subject, Parvaiz “hated his life, this neighborhood, the inevitability of
everything.”35 He already felt alienated from his environment, which conditioned his sense ofunbelonging, identity crisis, and ostracization. Thus, he was aware that he dwelled in-between
spaces trying to sustain his political existence. Like Agamben’s figure of the Muselmann,
Parvaiz’ character marks the presence of the moving threshold, across which he becomes oneof the living dead. Here the figure of the Muselmann looms particularly large, as Parvaiz’
alienation appeared to be transmitted to him by his own family – his cousin tells him “I’m a
Pakistani and you’re a Paki.” 36 Still, for Parvaiz, his two sisters too allowed themselves tobecome part of the corruption, as one of them was going to study in America, “the nation thatkilled their father, whereas the other was propping up the lie that theirs was a country where
citizens had rights and courts of appeal.”37
Learning that Parvaiz had joined ISIS, Isma decides to report him – in a gesture of cooperation with the state – for the sake of the safety of all three siblings, including for the safe
return of her brother. Aneeka thought that in this way Isma betrayed her siblings: “Parvaiz is30

Ibid., p. 52.
ibid., p. 63.
32
Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer, p. 123.
33
Kamila Shamsie, Home Fire, p. 91.
34
Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, p. 63.
35
Kamila Shamsie, Home Fire, p. 123.
36
Ibid., p. 150.
37
Ibid., p. 148.
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Statelessness: The Concept of Homo Sacer in Kamila Shamsie’s Home Firenot our father. He’s my twin. He’s me. But you, you’re not our sister anymore.” 38 But Isma
performatively maintained her loyalty to the state, warning Aneeka “We’re in no position to let
the state question our loyalties.”39 She was similarly determined to help Parvaiz return safe
home, but her position stands in sharp contrast to that of Aneeka. Like Karamat Lone, Isma canbe seen as a law-abiding person trying to legitimize herself as a loyal British citizen, though ina way that seems to condone the apparent discriminatory practices of the state authorities.
Aneeka, for her part, stood up to what she saw as conflicting notions of citizenship rights forthe sake of her family.
Although Eamonn showed a reaction to Aneeka after learning that she used him toaccess Lone’s political power to rescue her brother, he still decided to talk with his father on
her behalf, believing that there was nothing his father would not do for him. 40 Eamonn’s
expectation was not met, though, for “where there had been a father, now there was a Home
Secretary.”41 Lone, who worked for the public service and national good his entire life, knew
everything about Adil Pasha and his brainwashed son. Consequently, he decided to restrict thecontact of his son with Aneeka: “you will have no more contact with this girl. I’m setting up a
security detail for you.”42
Lone was known as a man with a Muslim background, but Muslim groups questioned
his “Muslim-ness”43 and called him a “hate preacher.”44 Indeed, “the press tried to brand him
an extremist” but it was actually London’s Muslim population “who had turned their back on
Karamat Lone and voted him out,” because “he expressed an enlightened preference for theconventions of a church over those of a mosque, and spoke of the need for British Muslims tolift themselves out of the Dark Ages if they wanted the rest of the nation to treat them withrespect.”45 As a sovereign figure, he has the power to impose bare life upon the Muslim society,exemplifying in this way Agamben’s point that in performing this task the sovereign constitutes
itself as sovereign.46 In other words, whereas sovereignty comes into being out of a politicizedbare life, it at the same time produces bare life. 47
Upon witnessing beheadings and tortures by ISIS, Parvaiz decides to return to London.
He has no illusions about his situation and declares his readiness to face the consequences of
his actions: “I made a mistake. I’m prepared to face trial if I’ve broken laws. Just let me go to
London. But he was the terrorist son of a terrorist father. He rested his head on his knees. He
did not know how to break out of these currents of history, how to shake free of the demons he
had attached to his own heels.”48 Indeed, he did believe that he could find his way to honor the38

Ibid., p. 42.
Ibid., p. 42.
40
Ibid., p. 80.
41
Ibid., p. 109.
42
Ibid., p. 109.
43
Ibid., p. 33.
44
Ibid., p. 35.
45
Ibid., p. 59.
46
Mika Ojakangas, “Impossible Dialogue on Bio-power: Agamben and Foucault,” Foucault Studies, No. 2 (2005),
p. 7.
47
Peter Fitzpatrick, “Bare Sovereignty: Homo Sacer and the Insistence of Law,” Theory & Event, Vol. 5, No. 2(2001), retrieved, October 21, 2011, from https://muse.jhu.edu/article/32622).
48
Kamila Shamsie, Home Fire, p. 171.
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Statelessness: The Concept of Homo Sacer in Kamila Shamsie’s Home Firememory of his father with the help of Farooq, but what he found simply did not meet his
expectations.
Parvaiz was manipulated by Farooq who told him heroic stories about Adil Pasha inorder to recruit him. He “would listen to those stories of his father for which he’d always
yearned… a man of courage who fought injustice, saw beyond the lie of national boundaries,
kept his comrades’ spirits up through times of darkness.”49 The ISIS media wing gave Parvaiz
a position in Raqqa and he took a place in a villa, which made him happy for three months. 50
The media wing accepted Parvaiz, trained him, and he found pleasure in the learning. For atime, Parvaiz felt like a powerful, manly, and proud member of ISIS happy to explore hisfather’s history. The role and the benefits he gained as a media sound technician helped him tosuppress the identity crisis he had been living through since his childhood.
Before he was shot outside the British High Commission in Turkey, Aneeka suggested
that he go to the British Consulate and ask for a passport. Trying to persuade him to return
home, she assures him “What happened to our father won’t happen to you.” 51 After Parvaiz
was killed, the media presented him as a London-born terrorist who joined people the state
regarded as enemies of Britain. 52 Meanwhile, Lone declared, “I revoked the citizenship of all
dual nationals who left Britain to join our enemies […] His body will be repatriated to his homenation Pakistan […] We will not let those who turn against the soil of Britain in their lifetime
sully that very soil in death.”53 The fact of the matter, though, was that both Parvaiz and Aneeka
were not Pakistani citizens, even though they held NICOP (National Identity Card for Overseas
Pakistanis), which exempted them from visas or bureaucratic procedures if they wished to travel
and work there.54 Thus, Lone appears in the position of determining and ensuring the state of
exception, which confirms Agamben’s claim that the state of exception is the dominantparadigm of government in contemporary politics and that the sovereign has the authority tosuspend the law by placing itself outside it. 55 In other words, the sovereign holds the right to astate of exception that leads to the suspension of the law. We need to note here that on this basis
Agamben claims that it is impossible to differentiate between the violation of the law and its
execution.56
At this point, it appears feasible to suggest that Shamsie depicts the character of the
career politician Karamat Lone by reimagining Antigone’s uncle Creon. Lone’s revocation of
Parvaiz’ British citizenship and repatriation of his body to Pakistan evokes Creon’s refusal tobury Polyneices. In the process of investigation of the crime, Lone sought to determine theexception of all British passport holders by declaring that it is “possible to strip any British
passport holders of their citizenship in cases where they acted against the interest of the UK.
Under present rules, only dual nationals or naturalized citizens with a claim to another49

Ibid., p. 128.
Ibid., p. 167.
51
İbid., p. 175.
52
Ibid., pp. 197-198.
53
Ibid., p. 188.
54
Ibid., p. 202.
55
Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer, p. 15.
56
Ibid., p. 57.
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Statelessness: The Concept of Homo Sacer in Kamila Shamsie’s Home Firenationality can have their citizenship revoked.” 57 Thus, Lone’s activity as a public official again
fits Agamben’s concept of sovereignty. It indicates that the sovereign has the power to declareinhabitants as non-citizens; that is, to create – through the sovereign right of exception – a homosacer that dwells in the condition of bare life.58 In this sense, the sovereign’s act of declaring
people outside the law and thus reducing them to bare life also indicates that one’s natural life
is captured in the mechanism and calculation of the sovereign decision.59
In this context, bare life is the life that is produced exclusively by the sovereign power
and is thus characterized and determined by the paradoxical logic of sovereignty. This
exclusion, however, is not totally exclusive but is also inclusive by the manner of its
constitution. It is very indicative that the Home Secretary “expanded on his predecessor’s claimthat ‘citizenship is a privilege not a right’ to say ‘citizenship is a privilege not a right orbirthright’,”60 because for Lone, “someone’s fitness for citizenship should be based on theiractions, not on accidents of birth.”61 In the context of removing rights, Lone’s statement can beread as pointing to the paradoxical character of the state of exception 62 which is based on theidea that “fact and law [or the exception and the rule] are indistinguishable,” and so “theproblem of defining it concerns precisely a threshold, or a zone of indifference, where insideand outside [of the juridical order] do not exclude each other but rather blur with each other.” 63
In this regard, it is possible to maintain that Parvaiz’ dead body is indicative of thesovereign act of the ban on the human body. As Agamben claims, “the relation of the exception
is the relation of the ban. He who has been banned is not, in fact, simply set outside the law andmade indifferent to it but rather abandoned by it, that is, exposed and threatened on the thresholdin which life and law, outside and inside, become indistinguishable.” 64 Thus, Parvaiz’ deadbody is also indicative of biopolitics as a ban or as a tool of sovereign power, as much as ofbare life placed outside the law, outside bios, or on the threshold of bios.

57

Kamila Shamsie, Home Fire, p. 198.
Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer, p. 171.
59
Ibid., p. 113.
60
Kamila Shamsie, Home Fire, p. 198.
61
Ibid., p. 214.
62
Agamben’s main argument for the state of exception is influenced by Carl Schmitt. Schmitt discusses thesovereign in his book Political Theology. For him, “sovereign is he who decides on the exception.” [Carl Schmitt,
Political theology: Four chapters on the concept of sovereignty (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005),
p. 5)]. Schmitt writes, “The exception reveals most dearly the essence of the state's authority. The decision parts
here from the legal norm, and (to formulate it paradoxically) authority proves that to produce law it need not be
58

based on law.” (Ibid., p. 13). Schmitt also points out that “the exception is to be understood to refer to a general
concept in the theory of the state, and not merely to a construct applied to any emergency decree or state of siege.”(Ibid., p. 5) Instead, the suspension of the law needs to create a state of emergency for the preservation of thejuridical order: “The state suspends the law in the exception on the basis of its right of self-preservation, as one
would say” (Ibid., p.12). See also, Giorgio Agamben, The Omnibus Homo Sacer, pp. 17ff.
62
Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, translated by Kevin Attell (Chicago & London: The University of
Chicago Press 2005), p. 23.
63
Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, translated by Kevin Attell (Chicago & London: The University of
Chicago Press 2005), p. 23.
64
Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer, p. 28.

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Meanwhile, the human rights campaign group Liberty issued a statement to show theirreaction against the sovereign: “Removing the right to have rights 65 is a new low. Washing ourhands of potential terrorists is dangerously short-sighted and statelessness is a tool of despots,
not democrats.”66 The British media supports Parvaiz and criticizes the sovereign for excluding
him from the legal rights of human beings. Reporters blame the state for not paying enoughattention to children like Parvaiz: “It’s a cause of profound concern that the children of jihadis,
many of them British born, are not closely watched by the state. How many more Parvaiz
Pashas will it take for things to change?”67
Before going to Pakistan to receive his body, Aneeka asked Isma for help only to bewarned by her again not to attempt anything against the state: “Why can you never understandthe position we are in? We do not have that liberty. Remember him in your heart and yourprayers, as our grandmother remembered her only son. Go back to uni, study the law. Accept
the law, even when it’s unjust.”68 Still, Aneeka endeavored to bring Parvaiz’ body to London
where she believed he properly belonged. And when a journalist asks her why she is going to
Karachi, her answer is straight: “For justice.” 69
Aneeka starts her protest against the Home Secretary in front of the British Deputy HighCommission with the thought that “here she would sit with her brother until the world changed
or both of them crumbled into the soil around them.”70 In this sense, Parvaiz’ body is politicizedby the sovereign power, which links to Agamben’s claim that politics is always already related
to biopolitics and is at the core of sovereign power to such an extent that – by declaring a stateof exception – it transforms the political realm into the realm of bare life.71
Here, Shamsie provides “a fresh layer to the classic by reconsidering the issues
Sophocles raised against the backdrop of racist immigration laws and radicalization.” 72 Like
Antigone, Aneeka tried to claim the right to bury her brother in his place of birth; she made herpoint in front of cameras that were recording her: “In the stories of wicked tyrants men andwomen are punished with exile, bodies are kept from their families – their heads impaled on
spikes, their corpses thrown into unmarked graves. All these things happen according to thelaw, but not according to justice. I am here to ask for justice. I appeal to the Prime Minister: letme take my brother home.”73 Her quest for justice can now be readily revisited in Agambenian
According to Arendt, “right to have rights” (right to membership) should be a basic human right in order topreclude the possibility of being stateless. The cases of stateless people show that having human rights is necessaryfor every human being in the World. Thus, “right to have rights” needs to be an integral part of any politics. But
if belonging to a political community is prevented, the “right to have rights” is no longer present. Hence, Arendt’s
emphasis on belonging to a political community as a basic human right. See, Hannah Arendt, The Origins of
Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, 1951), p. 296; Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago andLondon: University of Chicago Press, 1958), p. 309.
66
Kamila Shamsie, Home Fire, p. 198.
67
Ibid., p. 201.
68
Ibid, p. 196.
69
Ibid., p. 207.
70
Ibid., p. 210.
71
Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare life, pp. 6-55.
72
Claire Gail Chambers, “Sound and Fury: Kamila Shamsie's Home Fire,” Massachusetts Review, Vol. 59, No. 2(2018), p. 208.
73
Kamila Shamsie, Home Fire, pp. 224-225.
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perspective, as by that time Parvaiz’ politicized body had turned into a tool of biopolitics quite
articulately: “the ‘body’ is always already a biopolitical body and bare life, and nothing in it or
the economy of its pleasure seems to allow us to find solid ground on which to oppose thedemands of sovereign power.”74
Lone asked for the removal of the corpse from the park and for an end to Aneeka’s
protest, but the Pakistani Home Commissioner did not intervene, making clear in a statement
the possibility for another perspective on the matter: “The people, and several opposition
parties, have decided to embrace a woman who has stood up to a powerful government, and notjust any powerful government but one that has very bad PR in the matter of Muslims and as
recently as yesterday insulted us directly. So, now it’s political suicide for my government to
get involved.” 75 The controversy was further fueled by a representative of the Muslim
Association of Britain and British Muslims, who claimed that Lone hated Muslims, as well as
by Lone’s staunch defense – “I hate the Muslims who make people hate Muslims.” 76 In fact,
these adverse reactions to his politics apparently played a part in Lone’s decision to go on withrevoking Aneeka’s citizenship. Thus, acting from the position of the sovereign, the Home
Secretary institutes an exception that takes place in conditions very different from those of
Auschwitz – indeed in the present conditions of the contemporary political order. 77 His politicalactions practically confirm that the contemporary political conditions equally provide for atransformation of the citizens into bare life and homines sacri. 78
Aneeka’s wish was to receive her brother’s corpse, but for Lone she was a “slag,
terrorist-spawn, and enemy of Britain.”79 He decided to “strip her of her citizenship, a movethat could be traced back to personal motivations,” 80 making it impossible for her to return to
the UK without applying for a visa. Consequently, her British passport was confiscated by the
security services as she attempted to board a flight to Istanbul, and so the position of the Home
Secretary to keep her outside Britain was upheld – “let her be British outside Britain.”81 Lone’s
aim was to send “a message to those who treated the privilege of British citizenship assomething that could be betrayed without consequences.” 82 Thus, based on the definition ofhomo sacer as being included in law through exclusion, Aneeka’s character comes to symbolize
a living dead figure that has turned into an unrecognized part of politics. This symbolism,
therefore, asserts once again Agamben’s point that in the modern world there is no clear-cut
zone between bios and zoē, and that ‘“bare life is no longer confined to a particular place or adefinite category,” but instead “it now dwells in the biological body of every living being.” 83

74

Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, p. 187.
Kamila Shamsie, Home Fire, p. 228.
76
Ibid., p. 231.
77
Giorgio Agamben, Means Without Ends: Notes on Politics, translated by Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), p. 6.
78
Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer, p. 111.
79
Kamila Shamsie, Home Fire, p. 229.
80
İbid., p. 230.
81
İbid., p. 230.
82
İbid., p. 231.
83
Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer, p. 140.
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Statelessness: The Concept of Homo Sacer in Kamila Shamsie’s Home FireIn this sense, Aneeka and Parvaiz are subjected to the sovereign power by being
politicized as liminal figures. They appear caught in the zone of indistinction between humanand non-human, whereas this paradoxical situation can be fittingly apprehended within theterms of a possible and present state of exception. As Agamben puts it, “this threshold alone,which is neither simple natural life nor social life but rather bare life or sacred life, is the always
present and always operative presupposition of sovereignty.” 84 We can therefore affirm withthe help of these characters our point that liminal figures come into being on the threshold
between zoē and bios through the sovereign act of ban.
In another related development, to clear speculations about the Pasha family, Eamonn
released a video, in which he admitted that he talked to his father about Parvaiz Pasha because
he felt honor-bound to tell his father that his personal life and his father’s professional life wereon the way to collision. Eamonn pointed out that Parvaiz Pasha was, in fact, trying to get to the
British Consulate in Istanbul not to carry out a terrorist act but to apply for a new passport toreturn home. Eamonn thus stood with Aneeka in this process: “While her brother was alive thatlove was turned toward convincing him to return home; now he’s dead it’s turned to convincing
the government to return his body home.”85 Similarly, Terry, Lone’s wealthy Irish-American
wife, also made her point for justice in an argument with her husband: “I am talking about anineteen-year-old, rotting in the sun while his sister watches, out of her mind with grief. He’s
dead already; can’t you leave him alone?” 86 To make herself clear, she pulled no punches inarguing with Lone:
your political mind is not as sharp as it was [...] You arrogant idiot [...] this orphaned student who
wants for her brother what she never had for her father: a grave beside which she can sit and weep
for the awful, pitiable mess of her family life. Look at this sad child you’ve raised to your enemy,
and see how far you’ve lowered yourself in doing that […] And you have lost your son too. […] Be
human. Fix it.87

Lone was unrelenting, though: “until this thing is over, I don’t have a son and I don’t have awife. I have a Great Office of State.” 88
Still, Lone was unable to straighten out the consequences and dangers that his policies
brought to the siblings and his son. There were threats against him, his wife, and his daughter;
people tried to attack him. While they stayed in a safe house, Eamonn had already arranged tomeet Aneeka in the park in Karachi. Two men caught him and strapped him into an explosive
belt. He warned Aneeka not to come close toward him, but she ran, crashing right into him.
They were able to embrace for a second before they were blown up.
4. Conclusion
In essence, in her novel Home Fire Shamsie remakes Sophocles’ tragedy in a modern-day
context to engage with “the vital project – at once feminist, anti-imperialist, and anti84

Ibid., p. 106.
Kamila Shamsie, Home Fire, p. 245.
86
Ibid., p. 252.
87
Ibid., pp. 252-253.
88
Ibid., p. 246.
85

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Islamophobic – of wresting victimhood from the invader and reframing the war as a needlessly
violent fiasco.” 89 The novel directly addresses the questions of citizenship, belonging,nationality, and justice. It vividly depicts the complexities of national citizenship in terms ofthe conditions of inclusion/exclusion of the characters from the political realm and law of thestate. As it has been suggested, “the novel’s staging of conflicting concepts of citizenship –exclusive vs. inclusive, contract vs. right, conditional vs. unconditional, etc. – illustrates thecomplexity, even messiness of the contemporary debate.” 90
Aneeka’s struggle to secure a burial for her brother as a British citizen points to anecessary discussion of the relationship between politicized biological life and sovereign
power. In this regard, we found it particularly fitting to read the story through the lenses ofAgamben’s notion of the state of exception and the political and social criticism that is germane
to it. Agamben’s perspective thus made it possible for us to see Lone’s act of revocation of
Parvaiz’ and Aneeka’s citizenship as a most fitting example of the socio-political creation ofhomo sacer and bare life through a sovereign state of exception. And generally, the story told
by Shamsie can be understood as presenting us with characters who find themselves in thatzone of indistinction, the threshold between zoē and bios, which, for Agamben, is constitutedby the sovereign in the political sphere by way of exclusion.
In this perspective, the characters of the siblings reappear to us as homines sacri,
outlaws, desperately traying to survive on the threshold between zoē and bios. Aneeka andParvaiz, in particular, most fittingly exemplify Agamben’s sense of bare life and homo sacer.
They remain trapped on the threshold in the zone of indistinction in which inside and outside(of the juridical order) are inevitably blurred.
Finally, it would not be an exaggeration to say that, from the very beginning, the siblings
are more or less positioned outside the law due to the past of their father, and that they thus
acquire the status of scapegoats.91 The surveillance of the Pasha siblings, instituted because of
the preceding involvement of their father with radical Islam, can be seen as an infringement of
their citizenship rights since in this way they are presumptively differentiated as figures thatthreaten the British state. Therefore, they are also representative of Muselmann figures that are
excluded from the political humanity and left with a blurred status on the threshold in the zoneof indistinction.

Peter Krause, “Antigone in Pakistan: Home Fire, by Kamila Shamsie,” p. 15.
Katja Sarkowsky, “Expatriation, Belonging and the Politics of Burial: The Urgency of Citizenship in Kamila
Shamsie’s Home Fire,” in Caroline Koegler, Jesper Reddig, and Klaus Stierstorfer (Eds.), 29-44. Citizenship, Law,
and Literature (Berlin & Boston: De Gruyter, 2022), p. 42.
91
The figure of scapegoat has been insightfully discussed in comparative fashion in both literature and myth. See,
René Girard’s The Scapegoat, translated by Yvonne Freccero (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989),
pp. 20-22.
89
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