Unbearable Muslim Masculinity in Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire

Abstract

Researchers’ concern has grown over an alarming trend among young Muslim men of immigrant backgrounds born in Western countries to adopt religiously extremist tendencies. They have overlooked the Western-born young Muslim men who are disillusioned by fundamentalist Western states and social behavior and reactionary Islamist politics. It is this relatively overlooked young Western-born (especially British-born) Muslim masculine subject that I intend to explore in Shamsie’s Home Fire through Parvaiz’s character by drawing on Bradley’s concept of unbearable life with the aim to intervene in the discourse of post-9/11 Muslim jihadist masculinity and cultural integration. I examine how Parvaiz is derecognized and politically erased by the nihilopolitics of set norms of gender, religion, Islamism, and the state apparatuses of Britain; and, then how he resists and politicizes this space of non-subjectivity. I argue that this state of nullification becomes a new site of politics for him to assert his distinctive masculine self, belongingness, and voice.