Kamila Shamsie’s Burnt Shadows is a beautiful and sensitive portrayal of the diversity of the human race. Shamsie begins her ambitious novel in Nagasaki just before the end of the Second World War, and ends it in New York in the months after 9/11. Her characters live in India before the partition in Pakistan and after it, as well as in Afghanistan and Turkey. Through the wide historical and geographical scope of Burnt Shadows, Shamsie refuses to prioritize one global tragedy over another; rather, she creates a historical link from Nagasaki to 9/11, tying together clashing worlds, cultures, and people until all are forced to acknowledge the momentous impact of tragedies in the East as well as the West.
Shamsie’s protagonist Hiroko is a bilingual Japanese woman who survives the US bombing of Nagasaki. Through a series of events, she finds herself living in India in 1947. Shamsie artfully weaves a web of cultures and diverse characters together until their lives are intrinsically linked to one another for generations, whether they are from India, Pakistan, Japan, Afghanistan, or America.
At the heart of Burnt Shadows, Shamsie portrays the humanity in each of her characters, regardless of their nationality. Through her powerful and poetic language, readers are able to live through each character’s experiences of love and loss, as well as their ambitious endeavours and inner struggles. Readers experience the raw humanity of an Afghan immigrant living illegally in America and cannot help but feel sympathetic as they recall the series of tragedies that brought him there. Shamsie incorporates necessary dialogue into her novel as characters challenge each other’s narrow-minded opinions. As a result, she also challenges the opinions and perspectives of her readers, too.
Personally, Burnt Shadows is one of the best novels that I have ever read. It is incredibly refreshing to read a novel that confronts the tendency of the West to prioritize its tragedies over the suffering of others, and Shamsie does so with perfect subtlety and stunning prose. She holds a mirror up for her readers as they discover pieces of themselves in characters from lands they had never thought of understanding. Through Shamsie’s writing, readers begin to realize that a man from the East is just as human as a woman from the West.
By Alliyah Riaz
Please note that opinions expressed are the author’s own. They do not necessarily reflect the views and values of The Blank Page.
