A Study of Nomadism and Rhizomatic Consciousness in Kamila Shamsie’s Burnt Shadows

Abstract

Past and present postmodern nomadic epistemologies as well as the gendered dimensions of nomadism have often served as intellectual sites of resistance to destabilize totalizing hegemonies and ideologies often sustained in the name of nation-states and nationalisms. In this context, this study traces the nomadic post/trans-national ventures of Shamsie’s protagonist Hiroko Tanaka, in Burnt Shadows, that define her life in an anti-genealogical spatial stance akin to rhizomatic existence rather than in a chronological temporal frame. For this purpose, this research employs Braidotti’s notion of nomadic subjects as nomadic polyglots along with Deleuze and Guattari’s conceptualization of nomads as war machines external to the state apparatus. Through the multiple geographical, cultural, national displacements and the resultant nomadic becoming experienced by her protagonist, Shamsie seems to question the relevance of nationalism as an over-arching grand narrative in the works of second-generation writers of Pakistani origin. And by contextualizing her work as a tale of spatiality rather than of temporality, Shamsie seems to map the alternative fictional terrain of history, which is not concerned with the chronological mapping of national spaces; it is rather concerned with discovering new forms of nomadic interconnectedness without being bound to a single space or teleological purpose.

1. Introduction

It’s great to have roots, as long as you can take them with you.

Gertrude Stein

Kamila Shamsie’s fiction is multi-faceted and is difficult to categorize under a single label. Four out of the six novels that she has penned so far deal with national politics and its ensuing impact, predominantly, on women who, in most cases, reside in Karachi. In most of her works, “violence is caused by national politics” ([1], p. 386). But, in her fifth novel Burnt Shadows (2009), she deviates from this tradition of Karachi novels and pens a work that spans two continents, six decades, and events ranging from the Nagasaki bombing in the Second World War in 1945 to the 9/11 destruction of Twin Towers in the US in 2001. It was in Burnt Shadows (2009) that she “broke away from her focus on Karachi and Pakistani politics” ([1], p. 391). On the other hand, Western perception of literatures being produced in the third world countries by writers like Shamsie essentializes a homogenous reading as made evident by Jameson’s quite famous yet controversial construct of National Allegory in his work “Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism” [2] that scrutinizes, in a totalizing mode, the production of third world literary representations in the form of ‘national allegories’ with univocal, political, nationalistic and, to some extent, binaristic constructions of meaning as opposed to, what Jameson believes, the Western individualistic construction of meaning so rampant in Western literary representations. Jameson’s construct of National Allegory limits and/or privileges the literatures being produced by the once colonized nations as national allegories dominated by the political turmoil(s) taking place in these nations. But this simplistic or rather naively unitary perspective becomes susceptible to re-signification in the times of globalization. In this context, Shamsie’s fiction that deals with national as well global issues needs to be investigated to probe the kind of allegories/narratives being produced in her works. Burnt Shadows (2009) deals with the displacement(s) of a global nomad Hiroko Tanaka in a postnational setting. It revolves around the life of a Japanese woman Hiroko and her emotional mapping of the global events and spaces. So, in this study, Shamsie’s Burnt Shadows (2009) has been probed as a work of nomadic feminist allegory rather than a national allegory that includes Braidotti’s reading of nomadic subjects [3] along with Deleuze and Guattari’s Rhizomatic consciousness [4] and their conceptualization of nomad as a war machine (2010). This work also probes how nationalism as an over-arching construct limits and/or privileges nomadism among the male and female protagonists in Shamsie’s narrative.

2. Nomadic imaginary and rhizomatic consciousness

Rosi Braidotti, in her noteworthy study of nomadism (1994), exposes the arbitrary and constructed nature of cultural and national affiliations and posits a theory of female subjectivity based upon multiplicities and a strong sense of deterritorialization to resist totalizing hegemonies and ideologies often sustained in the name of nation-states and nationalisms. Being a nomad means, for Braidotti [3], being “a subject in transit” (p. 10); it refers to “the permanence of temporary arrangements” (p. 11) and “the nomadic tense is the imperfect: it is active, continuous” (p. 25). It is founded upon a state of “unredeemed otherness” which involves physical and esthetic mobility not as an imperative but as a willful choice directed against territorializing oppressive forces to resist “assimilation or homologation into dominant ways of representing the self” (p. 25).

The past and present nomadic epistemologies bear little resemblance and are quite significant in the context of this study. The nomadic subject in this postmodern global/urban world does not necessarily bear resemblance to the ruthless male nomadic subject portrayed in the myths as violent or as “War Machines” [5] external to the state apparatus involved in looting or sacking the cities. This “(neo)Nomadism of suburban unrest” ([3], p. 26) is concerned more with the metropolitan space(s), rather than the traditional nomadic trajectories. Hiroko, in Burnt Shadows (2009), also moves from one urban space to another in an act of “molecularisation of self” ([3], p. 16).

Of particular significance, in Braidotti’s nomadic imaginary, is the figure of nomadic polyglot which is highly relevant to this study. Braidotti believes that nationalism feeds on the exaltation of a particular language, usually the mother tongue of the majority group in a nation-state, and that particular language is used to reinforce national identities and cultures. Nomadic polyglot, on the other hand, does not believe in the supremacy of any particular language and exists in-between languages which gives her/him a vantage point to deconstruct identities. The nomadic polyglot understands language/words to be in a state of transit, with meaning forever on the move, and hence, disavows the concept of steady identities and mother tongues.

Deleuze and Guattari [4] establish the relation between the individual nomadic body and the state apparatus. Basing their work upon Foucault’s biopower which perceives and exposes the relationship between the individual body and the state power as linear, structured around an hierarchy, Deleuze and Guattari perceive the nomadic subject as a flat surface/body (in opposition to the vertical, temporal perception of subjectivity so dominant in Western critical tradition) devoid of hierarchy and defined by spatiality rather than temporality, and this subjectivity tends to be self-sufficient; in fact, they term nomadic subjectivity as a “body without organs” to resist territorialization and exclusionary state practices.

Closely associated with nomadic subjectivity is the figure of rhizome. Deleuze and Guattari [4] introduced it to explain nomadic consciousness in opposition to the figure of tree that has vertical/linear roots. Rhizome also denotes underground roots, but these roots grow sideways, horizontally, not vertically. Rhizomatic consciousness is central to the nomadic imaginary as it puts an end to teleology in Nomadic ontology. As Deleuze and Guattari [4] put it:

A rhizome has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo. The tree is filiation, but the rhizome is alliance, uniquely alliance. The tree imposes the verb ‘to be’ but the fabric of the rhizome is the conjunction, ‘and…and…and…’ The conjunction carries enough force to force and shake the verb ‘to be’…… The middle is by no means an average; on the contrary, it is where things pick up speed. Between things does not designate a localizable relation going from one thing to the other and back again, but a perpendicular direction, a transversal movement that sweeps one and the other way, a stream without beginning or end (p. 25).

This state of interbeing, in-between-ness, non-fixity is closely associated with the emphasis on de-territorialization in these times of globalization. The politics of location that it entails involves a repudiation of the notion of rootedness or roots, and emphasizes the significance of ‘routes’, of passages, of states in transition. The figure of rhizome is particularly relevant for the understanding of Hiroko’s post/trans-national ventures that define her life in anti-genealogical spatial stance rather than in a chronological temporal frame.

3. Nomadic imaginary, linguistic polyglot and nomadic desire

Shamsie’s Burnt Shadows (2009) is a work of nomadic allegory that traces the dis/re-locations of Hiroko Tanaka who hails originally from the war-torn Japanese city of Nagasaki but goes through an empowering process of metaphoric nomadic becoming. Shamsie, in her work, has situated her protagonist in post-national nomadic imaginary and, through her multiple geographical, cultural, national displacements, Shamsie questions the relevance of nationalism as an over-arching grand narrative in the works of second-generation writers of Pakistani origin. Nomadic consciousness resists and challenges all sorts of situated rootedness in the form of nationalistic, linguistic, cultural belonging and emphasizes “blurring boundaries without burning bridges” ([3], p. 4). This “permanence of temporary arrangements” (p. 11) entails a “kind of critical consciousness that resists settling into socially coded modes of thought and behavior” (p. 5). Hiroko and her fiancé Konrad display this resistance to established norms and patterns of existence along with Raza—Hiroko’s son—whose nomadic performativity involves a different kind of mapping or tracing.

Shamsie has also placed Hiroko in contrast to the other nomads in her narrative—particularly her son Raza who is a nomad very much like his mother but who prefers adherence to the past nomadic trajectory rather than the postmodern nomadism of his mother. The gendered dimensions of nomadism have been highlighted by Shamsie in her narrative as the nomad as an “open-ended, interconnected entity” cannot be homogenously categorized by assimilating or negating the differences “between men and women” on the one hand and “among women” on the other hand ([3], p. 158). For this purpose, this study, first, draws parallels between Hiroko’s and Konrad’s nomadism and then between that of Hiroko and her son. In the end, it briefly touches upon Kim’s nationalistic revival that refutes the notion of women as a homogenous nomadic category.

As mentioned earlier, Burnt Shadows (2009) is a tale of spatiality rather than temporality. It maps different spaces in an act of defining the “fictional terrain” ([6], p. 198) of history; it is not concerned with the chronological mapping of national spaces. It encompasses, through the characters of Hiroko and Konrad, “a reterritorialization that has passed through several versions of deterritorialization to posit a powerful theory of location based on contingency, history and change” ([6], p. 198). Konrad, due to his multi-national lineage (a German who lives in Japan and has an English half-sister who lives in India), is an apt example of nomadic post/trans-national performativity. When he is sent by his British brother-in-law James to Azalea Manor in Nagasaki, Japan, to take care of his inherited property, he is fascinated at once and the most by the photographs displayed in that house; photographs that contain the hint of a promise, a visionary promise akin to the nomadic “visionary epistemology” ([7], p. 31), photographs that show “Europeans and Japanese mixing uncomplicatedly” ([8], p. 6) and he instantly believed in that promise. As the allegorical representation of nomadic imaginary, he manifests faith in discovering new forms of interconnectedness without being bound to a single space or teleological purpose. His nomadic performativity is evident from his act of keeping diaries, his purple notebooks which contain “research and observation about the cosmopolitan world” ([8], p. 9). His very act of keeping and maintaining these notebooks can be deemed as an act of subverting the linear form of national history based upon exclusionary practices. As the nomadic rhizomatic consciousness is “the opposite of history” ([4], p. 23), so his notebooks can be termed as works of alternative “fictional terrain” ([6], p. 198) that challenge the sedentary nature of national linear history by highlighting the fascisms inherent in national discourses. Hiroko describes Konrad’s desire to write these notebooks in these terms: “I always thought his obsession grew from a need to believe in a world as separate as possible from a Germany of ‘laws for the protection of German blood and German honour’” ([8], p. 69). This desire to rebel against or challenge the macro/micro-fascisms inherent in national discourses is an integral part of nomadic becoming which entails a need to challenge the hegemony through the act of moving away and also through the act of imagining or envisioning an alternative intellectual terrain, an alternative epistemology, which is represented through his notebooks. His notebooks also express a move away from the national discourses towards post-national cosmopolitan imaginary which is an integral part of the global imaginary. His rhizomatic becoming (spaced in three countries across two continents) expresses the very act of subverting hegemonies and macro/micro-fascisms which are often the consequence of narrow and suffocating nationalism. As the nomadic consciousness is both an act of de-territorialization and also of re-territorialization, so Konrad’s act of moving away from the micro/macro-fascisms inherent in German linear nationalism during the second world war is both an act of de-territorialization which leads towards re-territorialization. His disavowal of the German nationalist ontological space as an act of de-territorialization leads him to Japan in search of “a pattern of people moving towards each other” ([8], p. 68); hence, his act of moving away from micro/macro-fascisms is also an act of moving towards a visionary space which Benhabib terms as a Utopian “no-place”. This Utopian space is a “space of critical no-whereness” (Benhabib as cited in [3], p. 32) where exclusionary practices are not legitimized, where hegemonies are challenged, a space enclosed in the intellectual terrains of Konrad’s purple notebooks as works of alternative fiction. This Utopian “no-space” is the space of no labels, be it national, ethnic, religious, or cultural; a “no-space” devoid of strangeness or alienation or othering bestowed by these labels; a desert nomadic terrain containing the map of “a world in which he [Konrad] could have arrived in Delhi to see his sister… as an equal and not found that his Germanness, her Englishness, were all that mattered” ([8], p. 69). But this Utopian impulse was burnt to ashes in the Nagasaki bombing when, ironically, everything else in the neighborhood except the tree on which he had hung his notebooks remained unburnt, uncharred. The annihilation of Konrad’s visionary notebooks which contain the map of nomadic Utopian “no-place” is highly significant and highlights the resistance faced by nomadism as a visionary epistemology at the hands of the sedentary forces of nation-states or nationalism.

Hiroko, on the other hand, can be termed a nomadic polyglot. She displays a kind of identification with the nomadic symbolic imaginary that makes her resist the idea of fixity and rootedness. As mentioned earlier, nomadic epistemology is premised on the idea of “permanence of temporary arrangements” ([3], p. 11) which involves physical as well as intellectual dis/re-location. Hiroko goes through this process of dis/re-location multiple times. She manifests strongly the tendencies of postmodern urban nomadism in contrast to her son Raza who exhibits an ambivalent relation to the past nomadic epistemology. Her identification with the nomadic imaginary is quite strong and can be traced in multiple ways. Her multiple dis/re-locations present a “fictional terrain, a reterritorialization that has passed through several versions of deterritorialization to posit a powerful theory of location based on contingency, history and change” ([6], p. 198). This ‘powerful theory of location’—location as both the geographical location as well as a “notion that can only be mediated in language and consequently be the object of imaginary relations” (Rich as cited in [3], pp. 21–22)—entails also the notion of identification as an introspective process mediated via language through her multiple dis/re-locations. Hiroko’s first act of dis/re-location was a deliberate choice and an act of refusal to identify with the identity bestowed upon her by the war, the ‘hibakusha’—the person affected by the big bomb. It was this fear of reduced identity that led her to identify with the nomadic imaginary and to give up the sedentary nature of national being.

It was the fear of reduction rather than any kind of quest that forced her away from Japan. Already she had started to feel that word ‘hibakusha’ start to consume her life. To the Japanese she was nothing beyond an explosion-affected person” ([8], p. 49).

Her disavowal of the national location (Japan) to mediate through language the imaginary relations based upon identification is an act of nomadic becoming. This geographical mapping is also an act of cartography—to exist in a mobile manner, to draw maps of the places visited, to contextualize one’s existence without the need to cling to situated form of being or of rootedness. This disavowal also entails an unhinged form of existence, liberation from the normative modes of nationalist being and freedom to practice or embrace the horizontal modes of rhizomatic becoming. Here, the relevance of Jameson’s National Allegory (1986) does become questionable in Shamsie’s narrative as it is only when the protagonist has liberated herself from the identity imposed upon her by an event associated with the national imaginary (the bombing) that she is able to attain subjectivity and centralize her existence; it is only when she becomes a globe-trotter and steps into the in-between space(s) of nomadic becoming that she is able to sever her national ties and visualize a rhizomatic “No-(wo)man’s land” ([3], p. 19).

She had not thought of destination so much as of departure, wheeling through the world with the awful freedom of someone with no one to answer to. She had become, in fact, a figure out of myth ([8], p. 48).

Hence, her identification with the nomadic imaginary gets intensified when she gives preference to routes not to roots, to departures not to destinations, to the act of transit and not to the teleological purpose behind it. And when she arrives, all of a sudden, at James and Elizabeth’s home in India, she did appear to James as a ‘figure out of myth’ ([8], p. 48) as it was utterly impossible for him to categorize or label her. Her refusal to cling to national/gender/class identities or labels renders her into a figure utterly alien, impossible to be categorized according to the normative ‘male-stream’ ([3], p. 6) patterns of existence.

James was oddly perturbed by this woman who he could not place. Indians, Germans, the English, even Americans… he knew how to look at people and understand the contexts from which they sprang. But this Japanese woman in trousers. What on earth was she all about? ([8], p. 46).

In the ‘male stream’ ([3], p. 6) national imaginary, hence, Hiroko has no space; she is an alien with no recognizable fixed roots or rather she is rooted in non-fixity, in non-belonging, and her roots are spread not in a linear sedentary mode rather in the horizontal spatial mode of rhizomatic being. She is a figure devoid of nationalities as a nomad has “no passport—or has too many of them” ([3], p.33); she is an alien body that resists assimilation or amalgamation. As a male patriarchal figure, James finds it difficult to comprehend this ‘woman in trousers’. Hence, Hiroko as a nomadic figure challenges the phallogocentricism inherent in the national imaginary which categorizes masses especially women on the basis of their appearance and dressing.

James’ wife Elizabeth, at that moment, also realizes and appreciates this challenge to phallogocentric monologism of ‘male stream’ thinking and wonders when did she start believing that “there is virtue in living a constrained life?” ([8], p. 46) Hiroko is a nomadic figure with a desire very much like that of Konrad to find Benhabib’s Utopian “no-place” (Benhabib as cited in [3], p. 32) devoid of labels or nationalities and her presence turns Elizabeth into a desiring subject too. Elizabeth’s very act of relinquishing her relationship with James and traveling to New York is also an act of giving up on the sedentary situated nature of marital life and shifting to nomadic existence as she does not want to be the “Good Wife” ([8], p. 117) anymore. Her move from India to London and then eventually to New York where she spends the rest of her life manifests identification with that mode of nomadic imaginary in which transit or move from one place to another is more internal rather than external. In this respect, she offers a contrast to Hiroko’s nomadic wanderings from Nagasaki to India to Istanbul to Karachi and then to New York. Elizabeth’s nomadism is more internal than external; one that does not require change in the nomad’s habitat or place as she decides to get anchored in New York but it is a part of nomadic imaginary as nomadism, basically, involves “subversion of set conventions… not [necessarily] the literal act of traveling” ([3], p. 5).

Through her multiple willful dis/re-locations, Hiroko allegorically epitomizes the role of pre-state matriarchy in opposition to the patriarchal nation-state. The pre-state matriarchy which is nurturing and protective in contrast to the patriarchal nation-state which is imposing and controlling makes itself manifest in Hiroko’s attempts to shield her father—“the traitor” ([8], p. 15)—from state control and brutality. Her father who is an “iconoclastic artist” ([8], p. 13) is repeatedly tortured and arrested for speaking out against the military and the emperor. The patriarchal nation-state arrests her father, bars her from working in the school where she went to teach German language and sends her to work in a munitions factory instead. Hence, rather than being nurtured and protected by the state, she and her father are banished and stigmatized. This control and manipulation are quite reminiscent of, what Kortenaar as cited in Lee [9] describes as, the reduction of people “to a single known quality” (p. 139). The patriarchal nation-state further banishes her and Sajjad and bars them from entering into India after partition. The role of nation-state can be further perceived through Raza’s “teenage rebellion” when he yells at his mother: “I can’t ask any of my friends home…with you walking around, showing your legs. Why can’t you be more Pakistani?” ([8], p. 130) She also tries to protect Abdullah—her son Raza’s childhood friend—and tries to smuggle him to safety in Canada. Hence, Hiroko allegorically symbolizes the nomadic maternal (no)space with no boundaries or labels, which is nurturing and yielding rather than controlling or unforgiving.

Shamsie has also employed various metaphors to symbolize nomadic and nationalistic modes of existence. Birds have been used by Shamsie as an ambivalent metaphor—a metaphor of nomadic becoming, non-belonging, and non-fixity as well as the representative of bloodshed and turmoil in the name of nationalism and nation-states. The birds carved on Hiroko’s back symbolize the ravages of the ‘new bomb’, the horrors of war, the ‘hibakusha’. The “three charcoal-coloured bird-shaped burns on her back, the first below her shoulder blade, the second half-way down her spine, intersected by her bra, the third just above her waist” ([8], p. 91) symbolize the impact of nation-states engaging in brutal acts of terror. Hence, the bird shadows burnt on Hiroko’s body allegorically represent the nation-states and their strifes. But these birds also allegorically stand for the nomadic wandering spirit; they also represent the resistance to “assimilation or homologation into dominant ways of representing the self” ([3], p. 25). Sajjad also highlights the ambivalence in this metaphor as he re-signifies the scarred back of Hiroko as “birdback” because everything about Hiroko is “beautiful” ([8], p. 91). Repeatedly, Shamsie employs birds as an ambivalent metaphor of horrors of nationalistic wars and the hopeful spirit of nomadism. Birds leave their comment in the form of “white streak” (p. 10) on Konrad’s purple notebooks hung under the leaves; the silence in James’ home at Delhi is only shredded by the “vibrant bird calls” which assure Hiroko that “there was nothing here she couldn’t leave without regret” (p. 58); at Qutb Minar in Delhi, Hiroko circles the minaret like a bird while Sajjad thinks of her as a “wounded bird” but with “something more feral in her” (p. 81). For Sajjad, birds symbolize the permanence of Dilli in contrast to Delhi for “no matter how often he circled Delhi he would always return to world of Dilli” (p. 106). Birds, here, allegorize Sajjad’s rootedness in contrast to Hiroko’s non-rootedness; his enthusiasm and spirit to belong to a certain place in this case the old Dilli which is in contrast to Hiroko’s non-belonging nomadic spirit; his sedentary nature of belonging in contrast to Hiroko’s rhizomatic non-linear consciousness. It is due to his belief in the sedentary nature of existence that he is the most distraught when he is forced to give up his Indian nationality at the time of partition. “They said I’m one of the Muslims who chose to leave India. It can’t be unchosen. They said, Hiroko, they said I can’t go back to Dilli. I can’t go back home” ([8], p. 125). Birds as a representation of nomadic existence also appear in Karachi at Hiroko and Sajjad’s home where she is fascinated by the “sudden chittering of sparrows” (p. 130). Birds as a metaphorical representation of the new bomb haunt Hiroko’s life, especially when she gave birth to a stillborn daughter, she realized that “the birds were inside her now, their beaks dripping venom into her bloodstream, their charred wings engulfing her organs” (p. 222). Birds as an ambivalent allegorical representation of nationalistic violent belonging and nomadic becoming stand in stark contrast to the metaphor of cashmere jacket which was given to Sajjad by James. James also understands the imperial symbolic value of this act as he muses: “Discarded clothes as metaphor for the end of empire…I don’t care how he looks at my shirt so long as he allows me to choose the moment at which it becomes his” (p. 35). Bilal [10] interprets this symbolic gesture as an act of transferal of agency from the colonizer to the colonized with the “discarded clothes” acting as the metaphorical representation of the empire. Shamsie interprets this metaphor as an act of discarding the empire and maintaining the persona of being in control when in reality the English had lost control and were being driven out of India (Shamsie as cited in [10]). Shamsie and Bilal [10] both interpret the cashmere jacket or the “discarded clothes” (p. 35) as an imperialistic and colonial metaphor. After her father’s death when Kim gets hold of the jacket—the discarded clothes—in Raza’a apartment, she puts it on, and “it fitted almost perfectly—the sleeves only a little too long” ([8], p. 325). This borrowing and perfect fitting of a highly imperialistic and colonial metaphor is quite significant as it foreshadows the revival of nationalistic spirit in Kim which eventually leads to the undoing of both families—the Weiss-Burtons and Tanaka-Ashrafs.

As mentioned earlier, Hiroko allegorically represents the role of a feminist nomadic polyglot. Polyglots comprehend and understand the slippery and treacherous nature of languages, their arbitrary constructed structures and the elusiveness and multiplicity of signifiers. Nationalism usually establishes a linear relationship with a particular (mother) tongue with chronological tracing of its evolution while nomadism deconstructs the idea of fixity and nostalgia for an origin that is associated with a mother tongue. Mother tongue, as Braidotti [3] puts it, “feeds into the renewed and exacerbated sense of nationalism” (p. 12) which makes the nomad pause and critically view the notion of steady national identities to burst open “the bubble of ontological security that comes from familiarity with one linguistic site” (p. 15). Hiroko exhibits this nomadic skepticism towards national languages/mother tongues right from the beginning of the narrative. It is her ability to move in-between languages that first brought her in contact with Konrad. More specifically, it was his visionary notebooks that contained the traces of a futuristic Platonic “no-place” (Benhabib as cited in [3], p. 32) that brought them close as Konrad wanted a translator to translate the letters for his visionary book. Their conversations always moved between different languages such as German, English and Japanese. As Braidotti [3] says that “being in-between languages constitutes a vantage point in deconstructing identities” (p. 12) so it provides both Hiroko and Konrad with a “vantage point” to perceive and challenge the constructed and arbitrary nature of national identities and identifications. It made Konrad understand and challenge the nationalistic and suffocating world of Germany and her laws, and it was due to her familiarity with multiple linguistic sites that Hiroko was able to give up her national space (Japan), work with the Americans as a translator right after the Nagasaki bombing, and move to India. It was her ability and desire to deal with multiple languages that brought Hiroko and Sajjad close to each other as she wanted to “learn the language they speak here” ([8], p. 57). It is due to her ability to move in-between languages as a “polyglot has no vernacular, but many lines of transit, of transgression” ([3], p. 13) that she is able to move in-between borders and cities, to be always in a state of transit.

Being a nomadic polyglot, Hiroko is able to perceive languages and history in a horizontal spatial frame rather than in chronological linear setting. For her, all languages and signifiers have a rhizomatic non-sedentary relationship which makes it possible to comprehend the “fictional terrain” ([6], p. 198) of history in rhizomatic and non-linear fashion. As Hiroko is unable to ‘settle’ into a single linguistic point of origin, similarly she is unable to believe in a single version of history; for her the events that took place in Nagasaki in 1945 belong to the “fictional terrain” of alternative rhizomatic history. She conjures up “fairy tales” ([8], p. 177) to word her stories of pain and horror of Nagasaki bombing.

The one about purple-backed book creatures with broken spines who immolate themselves rather than exist in a world in which everything written in them is shown to be fantasy. The woman who loses all feeling, fire entering from her back and searing her heart,… The men and women who walk through shadow-worlds in search of the ones they loved. Monsters who spread their wings and land on human skin, resting there, biding their time. The army of fire demons, dropped from the sky, who kill with an embrace ([8], p. 177).

This description of alternative rhizomatic history which is non-linear, in which there are no victors or losers, where there is merely the space to suffer and mourn, and where the human suffering has been transported to the domain of fairy tales and demons, displays Hiroko’s nomadic critical sensibility which makes it possible for her to be a subject always in transit, always on the move—be it between borders or between fairy tales and linear history. To her “language came so easily it seemed more as though she were retrieving forgotten knowledge than learning something new” ([8], p. 60). For her, the very search for linguistic origin entails not something associated with national language or mother tongue, rather it is the acceptance or embracing of the arbitrariness of language(s), to recognize their futility and hollowness but despite that ascribe to signifiers that aspect of “visionary epistemology” ([7], p. 31) that makes her perceive their porous interconnectedness, their transformative potential that destabilizes stereotyped commonsensical meanings to resist established structures of power and to re-define subjectivity; in short, to word a personalized version of alternative history. By wording her personalized fairy tale version of Nagasaki bombing, she attempts to make manifest history at corporeal lived level of her body by turning her body into a text, a signifier, a corporeal language with fairy tales inscribed onto it.

Hiroko’s son Raza is also a nomadic polyglot who exists in-between languages and is “struck by the maddening, fulminating insight about the arbitrariness of linguistic meanings” ([3], p. 14). For him, like his mother, languages contain the map or the cartographic illusion of the transformative “no-place” (Benhabib as cited in [3], p. 32), the “visionary epistemology” ([7], p. 31), to hinder the “free fall into cynicism” ([3], p. 14). His ability to converse in different languages seems to mirror the non-sedentary and non-linear nature of his existence. His very name “Raza Konrad Ashraf” is an amalgamation of multiple nationalities—German, Indian, and Pakistani. His features make him susceptible to different labels—Japanese, Chinese, Afghan, Pakistani, and when he joins CIA in Afghanistan, he acquires the broadly homogenous label of Third Country National.

Raza’s nomadic existence, despite being a polyglot like his mother, is different from the one his mother adhered to. It is premised upon a sense of lack—a lack developed by his failure to obtain the ontological grounding imperative for a sedentary nationalistic notion of subjectivity. Repeatedly, Raza is deprived of ontological grounding or roots while living in Karachi as he is teased due to his features:

…a wretched group of children who had danced around Raza earlier, tugging at the skin around their eyes while chanting, ‘Chinese, Japanese..’ ([8], p. 182).

Being deprived of ontological grounding in national/istic terms renders Raza into a global nomad in contrast to his mother Hiroko who herself had disavowed the national space for a nomadic existence. After the start of Afghan war, Raza is repeatedly asked about his nationality as he was frequently mistaken for an Afghan from the Hazara tribe. His desire to acquire new words, new languages, seems to be consequence of his lack; it seems to be an effort to fill the gaping void left by the absence of an over-arching grounded national identity through signifiers.

I want words in every language….I think I would be happy living in a cold, bare room if I could just spend my days burrowing into new languages ([8], p. 146).

For him, belief in a single “linguistic site” ([3], p. 15)—a mother tongue—fails to provide the ontological grounding which his body has also denied him; his desire to dive into new words, new vocabulary, and to transit between them hints at his desire to establish a de-territorialized identity through language.

As mentioned earlier in this section, Hiroko’s feminist nomadism is more prone towards postmodern nomadism that deals with cities, urban unrest, not necessarily with the desert spaces. In contrast, the past nomadic epistemology that Raza identifies with has traditionally been associated with spaces outside the city, an exteriority, not an interiority, existing outside the state apparatus. Deleuze and Guattari have discussed the functioning of past nomadic apparatus in their work Nomadology: The War Machine (2010). Deleuze and Guattari define it as “the mechanisms” used by “the counter-state societies” to challenge and prevent the dominance of nation-states (p. 15). These mechanisms, Deleuze and Guattari believe, can take two forms: huge mechanisms spanning the entire globe or “the local mechanisms of bands, margins, minorities, which continue to affirm the rights of segmentary societies in opposition to the organs of state power” (2010, p. 15). Hence, these dissenting sections of society challenge and resist the hegemony of the state through nomadism. But there is no denying it that the first form of nomadism contains the propensity to evolve into a hegemonic system as Deleuze and Guattari have included the global systems of economic control and the global wars in this category.

Deleuze and Guattari [5] further highlight the ambivalent role of religion in traditional nomadic imaginary. Religion is considered to be part of the state apparatus that is used to construct a certain interiority, to impose a certain nationalistic version of history. Bhabha as cited in Lee [9] terms it as the “pedagogical” role of the state in which education is used to condition the masses to accept a certain nationalistic religious viewpoint (p. 3). But “religion is fundamentally a center that repels the obscure nomas…nomads do not provide a favaourable terrain for religion” ([5], p. 47). Both Hiroko and Raza exhibit their nomadic resistance towards state’s control and manipulation of religion. The “pedagogical” (Bhabha as cited in [9], p. 3) role of the state has been highlighted by Shamsie through the repeated failures that Raza has to go through in his Islamic–Studies intermediate exam. He failed that exam twice because “the jumble of words only grew more jumbled, bright spots of light appeared before his eyes as he tried to read, and nonsensical answers to questions he didn’t even understand kept coming to mind in Japanese” ([8], p. 144). His absolute failure to respond in a coherent way to ontological queries left him bewildered and he simply wrote, “There are no intermediaries in Islam. Allah knows what is in my heart” ([8], p. 144) and handed in his paper. Nomads, as Deleuze and Guattari [5] put it, do have a sense of the absolute, but this internalization of the absolute may be difficult, for the nomad, to reconcile with established religious forces because of the dissenting nature of their existence. It is due to the insistence of the state on “devotion as a public event, as national requirement” ([8], p. 145) that Raza fails to perform in Islamic-Studies exam. His nomadic becoming is hindered or impeded by sedentary forces of religious nationalism. The “fictional terrain” ([6], p. 198) of nomadism does not “provide a favaourable terrain for religion” ([5], p. 47) as is evident from Hiroko’s unease at the “new wave of aggressive religion”, which made youths with “fresh beards” come to a book shop in Karachi to vandalize it for selling “unIslamic” ([8], p. 142) books.

Raza’s polyglot nomadic becoming, moreover, is quite different from that of his mother’s feminist nomadism in its propensity to function as a “war machine” [5]. Hiroko’s postmodern urban nomadic becoming is premised on the notion of escape: escape from the ravages of war by moving from one urban city space to another—be it the bombing of Nagaskai in 1945 or the looming possibility of a nuclear war between India and Pakistan or the World Trade Center bombing in 2001—she is always in a state of transit, of becoming. To escape war, she does not revert to the traditional desert space of nomadism existing outside the state apparatus; it’s the urban landscape of the global imaginary that fascinates her. Raza, on the other hand, displays the classic nomadic tendency to move to the desert spaces, not to seek an escape from war, rather to flee towards it; he reverts to the spaces created by the forces existing outside the sphere of the nation-state, an exteriority, not an interiority. He manifests this tendency, first, when he escapes to the war camp of ‘mujahiddin’ in Afghanistan. Ironically, it was the imposed identity of ‘hibakusha’ that made him escape the national space just like his mother, but unlike his mother, rather than escaping to the urban spaces of transnational nomadic imaginary, he escaped to the “barren planet” ([8], p. 214)—the harsh region bordering Pakistan and Afghanistan. The imposed identity of ‘hibakusha’ that had turned his mother into a postmodern nomadic globe-trotter turned Raza into an alienated nomad who reverted to war to escape the labels imposed by the national imaginary. His very escape allegorically represents resistance to the enclosed space of national imaginary based upon the ethos of exclusion, not inclusion.

…he realized he had been waiting a long time for confirmation that he was…not an outsider, no, not quite that. Not when he had lived in this mohalla his whole life…Not an outsider, just a tangent. In contact with the world of this mohalla, but not intersecting it. After all, intersections were created from shared stories and common histories, from marriages and possibilities of marriages between neighbouring families—from this intersecting world Raza Konrad Ashraf was cast out ([8], p. 189).

Raza’s escape, hence, to the war camps is outcome of the deterritorialization of the national space when due to his shared stigmatized identity with his mother and his “unPakistani looks” ([8], p. 259) he was made to feel like an outcast. Again, later in the narrative, Raza’s decision to work as a translator for the private military contractors in Afghanistan and other war torn regions is an act of nomadic becoming. Hiroko also opted to work for Conrad as a translator and later for the Americans, but all her ventures were motivated by her desire to escape the ravages of war, unlike Raza who retreats to war-torn regions. Deleuze and Guattari refer to the form of nomadology as “huge worldwide machines branched out over the entire ecumenon at a given moment, which enjoy a large measure of autonomy in relation to the states” (2010, p. 15). These private military contractors working on the global scale outside the boundaries of the nation-state act as an exteriority, not an interiority. Their form could not be reduced to the enclosed space of the nation-state but exists outside and above it. Raza’s decision to join the private military contractors functioning in war torn regions is an act of merging or amalgamating the two forms of nomadism i.e. the “huge worldwide machines” and “the local mechanisms of bands, margins and minorities” ([5], p. 15). Both forms of nomadism are forms exterior to the national space and time; they exist as an exteriority, outside the “polis” (p. 51), the state law. But these private military contractors also highlight the ambivalence in the functioning of the nomadic war machine itself when this machine has been appropriated by the state, to do the bidding of a particular nation-state and impose its “aims” upon other states (p. 96). This duality in the role of these war machines is made evident when Raza fails to make his cousin Sajjad comprehend the difference “between working for the American military and working for a private military company contracted to the American military” ([8], p. 259).

Being a nomad is being deprived of history as “nomads have no history; they only have a geography” ([5], p. 62). They have no shared history as history represents linear hierarchical becoming. The only have shared geography and alliances. So, Raza exists only in different spaces; he is relegated to a spatial existence, not necessarily temporal—Karachi, Afghanistan, Dubai, Miami and other parts of the globe. This non-sedimentary rhizomatic spatial existence is emblematic of nomadic becoming outside the domain of the nation-state. Nomadic becoming is also closely related to the familial alliances forged due to the “potential of a vortical body in a nomad space” ([5], p. 24). These familial alliances are an act of rhizomatic horizontal becoming as in the case of Weiss-Burtons and Tanaka-Ashrafs. The alliance of Elizabeth’s family with Hiroko’s family is an act defined by the rhizomatic consciousness: an act of conjunction, of interbeing, not of subjugation or linearity. But this alliance is threatened or rather put to an end by Kim’s nationalistic revival which resulted in Raza’s arrest in the process of saving Abdullah. Raza’s final act of attempting to save Abdullah also manifests the revival of state’s efforts to control the ‘exterior’ ([5], p. 51)—the migrations and the nomadic movements, populations and paths. His final act is also an attempt at transformation from being a war machine of past nomadic imaginary to the nomadism of the postmodern nomadic imaginary. His final act of surrender to the state’s polis, the law, to save Abdullah is an act of Utopian re-vision and emancipation for Abdullah quite akin to Konrad’s faith in a Utopian “no-place” (Benhabib as cited in [3], p. 32), a belief in nomadism as a “visionary epistemology” ([7], p. 31) to challenge and subvert hegemonies and binaries imposed by nation-states. Ironically, this very act of nomadic salvation was rendered almost futile by the nationalistic spirit of Kim who acted as the allegorical representation of the territorial nation-state. She not only did put an end to Raza’s nomadic transformation from past to postmodern nomadic imaginary, she also doomed the spatial alliance of Weiss-Burtons and Tanaka-Ashrafs. Her nationalistic act was an act of subjugation, of hierarchy, of linearity, and a rejection of alliance and rhizomatic conjunction. Hence, the nomadic imaginary is overtaken by the national imaginary.

4. Conclusion

It can be safely said that Shamsie, in Burnt Shadows (2009), presents an allegory of nomadic becoming in global post-national setting. The presence of global deterritorialized forces of nomadism question the relevance of nationalism as a singular unitary perspective to evaluate the works of second-generation writers of Pakistani origin. Burnt Shadows (2009) cannot be labeled as a National Allegory as Shamsie situates her protagonists in a global deterritorialized world and their multiple dis/re-locations emphasize that they traverse borders and boundaries without being situated in a single national location. Moreover, even within the nomadic epistemology, Shamsie highlights the ambivalence through the protagonists’ identifications with the past and the present urban nomadic imaginaries. It emphasizes the gendered dimensions of nomadic epistemology, particularly in Hiroko’s and Raza’s cases where Hiroko’s nomadism led her to urban spaces while Raza’s nomadism led him to war-torn regions. Moreover, Kim’s refusal to identify with the nomadic epistemology that resulted in the shattering of the spatial alliance of Weiss-Burtons and Tanaka-Ashrafs also highlights that women cannot be labeled as a homogenous, non-chaotic nomadic group. The disruptions that exist within female subjectivity cannot be negated; rather Shamsie’s narrative reiterates the need to comprehend female nomadic subjectivity in all its multifariousness and complexity.