Summary
Part-Angel Warriors (Pakistan, 1982-3)
"Part-Angel Warriors" begins 35 years after the conclusion of "Veiled Birds" in Karachi, Pakistan. Hiroko and Sajjad have been married for 35 years. They are very content and have found a lasting peace in their relationship and in their lives. They have one son, Raza, who is sixteen years old. Raza gets along well with the other boys in his school; however, he feels as if there is a difference between them because of his Japanese mother, who is unlike any other mother in their neighborhood. Sajjad is working as a general manager at a soap factory and has higher aspirations for his son, who he hopes will soon become a lawyer. His Delhi dreams of becoming a lawyer are now on Raza's shoulders.
When "Part-Angel Warriors" opens, Raza is about to take his final exams at school. Sajjad gives him a cashmere jacket, which he tells Raza to wear that evening as they go out to dinner to celebrate the completion of his exams. Several weeks later, Hiroko is shopping at a bookstore in a neighborhood called Saddar which has transformed quickly through the year. Raza picks up Hiroko in the car. While he is driving, he tells her that he failed his Islamic Studies exam, which means he can't graduate. For some reason, the questions shifted on the page as soon as he sat down and he could not bring himself to answer them. Hiroko is shocked but consoles her son. She tells Sajjad at home and tells him to go easy on Raza. They conclude that all shall be well—Raza will retake the exam in a few months and pass with still enough time to enter university.
Harry Burton (James and Elizabeth's son, who is now fully grown) touches down in Karachi. He is a CIA operative who is living in Pakistan due to the US's involvement with political unrest in Afghanistan. His cover is that he is working as a consular officer at the American embassy in Islamabad. Harry is in Karachi searching for a semblance of his childhood in Delhi. This has brought him to Sajjad and Hiroko's house. Sajjad is overjoyed to see Harry again. In catching up with the family, Harry learns that Raza has failed his exams for the second time. His friends in the neighborhood have started to treat him differently in light of his failure, and Raza feels discouraged. Though Sajjad is determined that Raza retake the exam in a few months, Raza believes it is time to start thinking about a different path for his future.
Harry, Sajjad, and Raza go to the fish harbor together very early in the morning. Raza is still asleep, so Sajjad and Harry leave him in the car while they shop. Sajjad takes off Raza's rubber-soled shoes and gives them to Harry to wear, as Harry's leather shoes would have gotten ruined in the market. Sajjad and Harry catch up. Sajjad tells him that his oldest brother, Altamash, was killed in the Partition riots. His other brother, Iqbal, moved to Lahore but his wife and children died when they tried to follow him. Sikandar is the only brother that stayed in Delhi, but the government took his home, leaving him and his family (as well as Altamash's family) living in terrible conditions.
As Sajjad and Harry shop, Raza wakes up in the car. He assumes his shoes have been stolen and steps tentatively out of his car, where he sees a man perched on a truck. Raza starts a conversation with him in Pashto. The man asks Raza if he is Afghan; Raza says that he is and that he comes from the Hazara people. The man introduces Raza to Abdullah, a young Pashtun boy. Abdullah asks Raza where he lives since he's never seen him in Sohrab Goth, a neighborhood where many Afghan refugees live. Harry and Sajjad return from shopping and Harry returns Raza's shoes by kneeling down on the ground so that the boy can put them on. This gesture from an American man shocks Abdullah.
Harry's daughter, Kim, visits him in Islamabad. She notices that her father is happier there than anywhere else he's lived. She also reveals to her father that she knows he's in the CIA, though he denies her accusations. Harry talks to Kim about Hiroko, Sajjad, and Raza but he doesn't take her to meet them. Harry muses on the construction of his American identity as an adolescent—he moved to the U.S. from England feeling like a "foreigner" and soon realized that the United States was where foreigners and immigrants could mix together. It is this idealism that inspired Harry to join the CIA.
Harry, Hiroko, Sajjad, and Raza go to the beach. There, Hiroko tells Harry about Raza's current lack of direction and his difficulty taking exams. Raza has begun working at the factory with his father. Harry talks to Raza alone and tells him that he has advice on how to get through tests. He also tells Raza that he can help him get into a university in the United States. Raza is excited and determined to retake the exam and pass.
Back at home, Raza calls his secret girlfriend, Salma, on the phone. Salma is Raza's friend Bilal's younger sister. Raza tells Salma about his plans for going to university in America but she does not believe him. Raza doubles down that he is going and tells her that they should get married so that they can go together. Salma says that her parents would never let her marry Raza because of what happened to Hiroko—they don't know what Raza's children would be like due to Hiroko's exposure to the atomic bomb. Raza hangs up the call, feeling out of place in his neighborhood and even more determined to make it to the United States.
However, the next time Harry comes over for dinner, Raza reminds Harry of his promise to help him get into university (which also included, according to Raza, a promise to help him pay for it). Harry tells Raza that he is mistaken—he can help Raza get into university but he is making no promises. This upsets Sajjad, who accuses Harry of being just like his father: full of empty promises. Sajjad kicks Harry out of his house. When Raza tries to console his father by playing some music, he accidentally breaks his father's tape recorder instead.
This takes Raza to Sohrab Goth (where it is rumored you can get many different kinds of electronics for cheap) in the hopes of finding Abdullah and getting a cheap new tape recorder for his father. When Raza and Abdullah meet again, Raza keeps up the lie that he is Hazara. He tells Abdullah that he wants to drive the Soviets out of Afghanistan. When Raza asks Abdullah if he can help him find something, Abdullah misunderstands what Raza is looking for and instead lets him hold an AK-47. Raza feels as if this is an act of becoming a new person: Raza Hazara. Abdullah says that he and Raza Hazara are "brothers."
Raza returns periodically to Sohrab Goth to teach Abdullah and other Afghan residents English. In return, Abdullah promises that he will give Raza an AK-47 free of charge. Raza is living a lie with Abdullah and the others, but it feels good to have found community there and feel like he fits in. Raza retakes his exams and finally passes them. His dreams of becoming a lawyer return. One day, while hanging out with Abdullah, Abdullah tells him that he is now fourteen and his brothers had promised him that at that age he could go to the mujahideen training camps. Raza encourages Abdullah to go to the camps and says he will go with him—he thinks that it will be a short adventure with an easy journey home. However, as soon as they begin their journey to the camp, Raza realizes that he is in way over his head. Raza and Abdullah are brought to the middle of nowhere, where there are no phones or connection to their previous world.
Analysis
This section of Burnt Shadows investigates the theme of difference through Hiroko and her son, Raza. Hiroko and Sajjad have settled down in Karachi and built a life for themselves. Hiroko's position in their neighborhood is that of an outsider, though she has close community bonds with many of her neighbors. In the beginning, Hiroko and Sajjad disagreed as to how she would be received by their neighbors, with Sajjad arguing that "she would be welcomed by the people they lived among if she wore their clothes, celebrated their religious holidays" and Hiroko insisting "that they would see it as false and had to learn to accept her on her own terms" (134). In the end, Hiroko does not wear Pakistani clothing and instead wears dresses that show her legs. Nevertheless, the neighborhood accepts her, primarily thanks to her position as a school teacher, where she made friends with her students' mothers: "Through the children she won over the mothers, whose initial reaction towards the Japanese woman with the dresses cinched at the waist was suspicion. And once the mothers had made up their minds, the neighbourhood had made up its mind" (141).
Hiroko's difference does not bother her; in fact, like her friend Rehana, she feels "at home in the idea of foreignness" (143). Hiroko is suspicious of the idea of a 'national identity': It didn't bother her in the least to know she would always be a foreigner in Pakistan—she had no interest in belonging to anything as contradictorily insubstantial and damaging as a nation" (207). Hiroko's difference does bother Raza, however, who is upset that the neighborhood sees him as different via his mother. In his adolescence, he wishes his mother would assimilate and wear Pakistani clothing, asking "'Why can't you be more Pakistani?'" (135). Hiroko's difference, however, stretches far beyond how she dresses—she comes from a different country entirely and is a different race from everyone who surrounds her. On top of everything else, she is also marked as a survivor of the atomic bomb—a hibakusha—which means that she (and Raza) are seen as tainted by the bomb and biologically damaged.
Raza feels different from the other boys in his neighborhood, which causes him to affect a "studied awareness" from a young age so he can more easily fit in (141). There are things about himself, however, that he cannot change: he looks different from the other boys his age and he is also the descendant of a hibakusha, which means that he will have a hard time finding a wife in his neighborhood. Salma, his girlfriend, coldly tells him that he is marked by the bomb and that there is no way her parents would let her marry him. That Raza is marked by Hiroko's exposure to the atomic bomb confirms his fears about his difference: "he realized he had been waiting a long time for confirmation that he was . . . not an outsider, no not quite that. Not when he'd lived in this moholla his whole life, had scraped and scabbed his knees on every street within a one-mile radius. Not an outsider, just a tangent. In contact with the world of his moholla, but not intersecting it" (192). He ends up feeling dejected, like a "bomb-marked mongrel" who will never be truly accepted (194).
In the midst of feeling rejected by his community because of his difference (as well as because of the fact that he failed his final exams two times in a row), Raza finds acceptance in the community of Afghan immigrants that he befriends. Because he is half-Japanese, he is often mistaken for an Afghan. One day, while his father and Harry are shopping for fish, he meets an Afghan boy and lies that he is also Afghan. Telling this lie makes Raza feel good: "[he] felt the rightness of the lie press against his spine, straightening his back" (167). Raza enters the Afghan community by lying about his identity; this lie begins to feel natural the more time he spends with them. Eventually, he experiences a sense of becoming a new person entirely named Raza Hazara: "Raza Konrad Ashraf wiped his hands on his shalwar and stood up. But it was Raza Hazara who took the AK-47 in his arms and learnt how everything about a man could change with that simple act" (202). With his new friend, Abdullah, he finds brotherhood. It is this sense of brotherhood that causes him to suggest to Abdullah that they run away to a mujahideen training camp in Afghanistan. As a result, Raza's sense of community and belonging will cause him to risk his own and Abdullah's lives.
Beating in the background of "Part-Angel Warriors" is political change within Pakistan and political unrest in Afghanistan. Hiroko, Raza, and Sajjad all notice that Pakistan is undergoing "Islamisation" and becoming more and more politically religious. Hiroko is the most opposed to this political change, remarking that the atmosphere reminds her of wartime Japan: "Devotion as a public event, as a national requirement. It made her think of Japan and the Emperor, during the war" (147). As religion becomes more and more public, the way that people, especially women, dress changes: "So many sleeves all the way to the wrists instead of just part-way down the upper arm, and covered heads here and there" (185). As the Pakistani government begins to enforce religiosity more and more, Hiroko's difference becomes more and more apparent.
While "Veiled Birds" investigated England's colonial power in India, "Part-Angel Warriors" introduces America's imperial power in Southeast Asia. Harry Burton is in Pakistan on assignment with the CIA. The CIA is giving Afghanistan weapons via Pakistan so that they can fight against the Soviets, who are trying to invade Afghanistan and turn it communist. In this way, America is fighting a "proxy war" with the Soviet Union—an extension of the Cold War—via Pakistan and Afghanistan. Harry is proud of his American identity and considers his involvement in Afghanistan the right thing to do in fighting communism around the world. Harry believes that America is a good country because it accepts immigrants. As he tells his daughter, to be American, "all you had to do was show yourself willing to be American" (174). Later, he makes this promise to Raza when encouraging him to apply to universities in the United States: "in America, everyone can be American" (188).
Harry's ideas about America develop a sense of irony in the final section of the novel "The Speed Necessary to Replace Loss." In a post-9/11 world, not everyone is so easily considered "American" and many are placed under suspicion because of their nationality or religion. American xenophobia affects everyone, Raza included, and, as you will see, has disastrous effects.
