The Logic of the Nation vs the Logic of the Individual
The Logic of the Nation vs the Logic of the Individual is perhaps the largest theme in Burnt Shadows. Shamsie discusses this with Harleen Singh in a 2011 interview for Ariel Journal.
Shamsie: "Too many people think I'm making a particular comment on America, but really I'm talking about nations in wartime and the particular inhuman logic they start to follow when they decide what is an acceptable price for some other nation's people to pay. . . At the level of individual human interaction, of course, there's a different logic afoot. Where love and friendship are possible—and they are possible in the most unlikely places and combinations—then you have the opposite of an attitude of separateness which says 'I'll accept your suffering because it's in my own self-interest.'"
As the characters in Burnt Shadows live within their own particular political contexts, they forge connections across vastly different terrains of national and personal identity. Hiroko and Konrad, from the very beginning of the novel, for example, fall in love despite the strict social regimentation and public suspicion towards foreigners in wartime Japan. Later, the Burtons develop a decades-long friendship with Hiroko despite their different national, cultural, and political backgrounds. Hiroko and Sajjad fall in love despite these differences; their son, Raza, forms a close relationship with the Burtons' son, Harry. In New York, Hiroko befriends several taxi drivers, including Omar. She then decides to help Abdullah, an Afghan on the run from the FBI, because she intuits that he has a good character. Through all of this, these characters choose to see each other as individuals rather than as spokespeople for their nationality or class.
This is perhaps why the end of the novel, when Kim's nationalistic impulses obscure her perception of Abdullah, is so devastating. Her decision to follow the "logic of the nation" and turn in Abdullah goes against the pattern of behavior that the characters before her followed in the novel. The results are devastating: Raza allows himself to be arrested in Abdullah's place, and Hiroko and Kim's relationship is forever severed.
Changes Caused by War
We see many different wartime environments in Burnt Shadows: wartime Japan, in the moments leading up to the atomic bombing of Nagasaki; India in the months leading up to Partition and the end of English colonial rule; Afghanistan during the Afghan war with the Soviets in the 80s; and New York City and Afghanistan during the War on Terror.
In each of these environments, the characters reflect on how the war has affected their lives. Hiroko notes that in 1945, Japanese society has become more internally divided and suspicious of foreigners. The physical landscape has also changed: where there were once flowerbeds and gardens, there are now crops in order to combat wartime food scarcity.
In Delhi in 1947, Sajjad is affected by the religious conflict between Muslims and non-Muslims, where previous social bonds are suddenly being tested. This is a moment of tension and uncertainty; people are uncertain of which country they will be living in in just a few months' time. It leaves Sajjad feeling stuck, uncertain of where his life will lead: "It was hardly a time to consider a future career; everything was turmoil, every day brought news of further atrocities, and relationships that had seemed to be cast in steel disintegrated under the acid question: Are you for India or Pakistan?" (107).
Pakistan in 1982-3 has gained a growing population of Afghan refugees that are fleeing Afghanistan's war with the Soviets. Raza meets some of these refugees and forms a close relationship with a young boy named Abdullah. Eventually, Raza and Abdullah travel to a training camp for mujahideen (a band of guerrilla fighters intending to fight the Soviets). Raza notes how the Afghan presence in Karachi has changed the demographics of the city, as more and more people look like him. Additionally, there are more Americans in Karachi during this time, like Harry Burton, who are CIA operatives supplying mujahideen with weapons to aid their war against the Soviets.
Finally, New York City and Afghanistan in 2001 are incredibly different landscapes, though each is reeling from the War on Terror. Following 9/11, New York City (and America as a whole) undergoes a surge of patriotic sentiment. Many Americans, including Kim, develop a xenophobic fear of the "other," which leads to suspicion of Muslims and Middle Eastern immigrants. In Afghanistan, the American military is conducting wartime operations, including a bombing campaign that leaves towns and villages ruined.
Through all of this change, the characters in Burnt Shadows think fondly about the past, which seems out of reach. They also express hopes for the future, when peace and stability might someday come. However, the concept of "home" is forever out of reach—for Hiroko, who cannot return to Nagasaki; for Sajjad and Harry, who cannot return to Delhi; and for Raza, who, at the end of the novel, is an outlaw and cannot return to the United States to mourn Harry's death.
Intimacy Through Language
In Burnt Shadows, language has the power to bring people together across enormous divides. The multilingual characters make connections with others outside of their home cultures via language. Raza reflects on the "weight" attached to language via his mother's story: "His mother would never have met Konrad Weiss. . . if she hadn't taught German to Yoshi Watanabe's nephew. And she would not have gone to India to find the Burtons if not for Konrad Weiss. In India, it was language lessons that brought Sajjad and Hiroko to the same table, overturning the separateness that would otherwise have defined their relationship" (203).
This is the power of language in Burnt Shadows: it "overturn[s] the separateness" between characters and allows them instead to form intimate bonds. Being able to speak the same language allows the characters in Burnt Shadows to create their own worlds where they speak a "secret language." This strengthens the bond between Hiroko and Elizabeth, for example: "Together they walked back to the firelit gathering, neither remarking that from the moment Hiroko had mentioned Konrad they had started to speak in German, and that doing so felt like sharing the most intimate of secrets" (71).
It is this intimacy that will bring the women together decades later, in different periods of their lives, in New York City. It is a similar intimacy that Hiroko found while speaking German with Konrad in Japan, that Raza finds when speaking in Japanese with his mother, and that Raza also finds with Abdullah while they speak together in Pashto and, eventually, English.
In contrast, the loss of language can signal the loss of intimacy between characters. For example, in the midst of their failing marriage, Elizabeth no longer speaks to James in German: "'Leibling' appeared underlined, and struck both of them as an accusation. She used to refer to him by that endearment—in the days when German was her language of intimacy. Which went first, he wondered? German or intimacy?" (74).
Difference
There are many instances in Burnt Shadows when characters are marked as foreign or different within their political environments. In "The Yet Unknowing World," Konrad is socially ostracized because he is a foreigner. In "Veiled Birds," Hiroko stands out in Delhi and crosses between the strict social divisions in Colonial India. Her presence is so uncertain that it makes the Burtons and their English friends uneasy. Her presence as an outsider "disrupt[s] all hierarchies," leading to a tense conversation between Sajjad and the Burtons (84). Later, in "Part-Angel Warriors," she is also an outsider in Karachi, where she is different from every mother in the moholla because of her race, nationality, and the way she chooses to dress. Raza expresses anger at his mother's difference, demanding that she dress in the traditional shalwar kameez and asking, "'Why can't you be more Pakistani?'" (132).
Raza holds a complex social position within his moholla because he is not an outsider but is nevertheless marked as different. Because his mother is Japanese, he looks different from all of the other boys in his neighborhood. This causes Raza to adopt a "studied awareness" in presenting himself to others, making sure never to speak in Japanese in public: "Why allow the world to know his mind contained words from a country he'd never visited? Weren't his eyes and his bone structure and his bare-legged mother distancing factors enough?" (141). When Raza is rejected by his girlfriend, Salma, he feels as if his fears about his difference have been confirmed: "he realised that 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).
As more Afghans migrate to Pakistan to escape the Afghan war with the Soviets, Raza is often misidentified as an Afghan. One day, Raza decides to lie and say that he is, "and he felt the rightness of the lie press against his spine, straightening his back" (167). This lie, born from Raza's desperate urge to feel completely accepted in his community, will eventually have disastrous consequences. Raza will escape to a mujahideen training camp with his newly-made Afghan friend, Abdullah; Sajjad, in his desperate quest to find his son, will give away the identity of a CIA-affiliated man who will then shoot and kill him. At the end of the novel, Raza and Abdullah meet again after almost two decades and Abdullah tells Raza that he is an Afghan in spirit. Finally, Raza gets the belonging he has been looking for his whole life—right before he is taken away by the police and sent to Guantanamo Bay.
Prayer as Transcendence
In "Part-Angel Warriors," while Raza is in the mujahideen training camp, Sajjad is desperately looking for him. In these emotionally fraught days, their experiences mirror each other through religion. Neither Sajjad nor Raza understands the Arabic words of their prayers. This makes prayer for both of them an act of rote memorization rather than an experience of true faith. As Raza reflects, "more often, prayer came to him from his mind, as memorised words with little meaning attached" (234).
However, due to their extraordinary circumstances, Sajjad and Raza find new approaches to prayer. As Raza prays with the mujahideen, he feels "a true sense of reverence" and the words of the prayer "enter his mouth from a place of pure faith" (234). Sajjad, on the other hand, connects the unknowability of the words to the unknowability of the God who put him in this situation: "He could not yell familiarly, familialy, at the Almighty and so he prayed to Him in a language he didn't understand, and felt the rightness of incomprehension when dealing with a power which showed no mercy" (240).
Raza and Sajjad transcend their lack of understanding of the words of their prayers to find meaning. Though father and son are apart, they are together in this religious experience.
Local vs Global Perspective
In "The Speed Necessary to Replace Loss," Elizabeth, Hiroko, and Kim are living in New York City just a few months after 9/11. The different ways that they process 9/11 show their different worldviews: while Kim feels as if the whole world has changed, Hiroko and Elizabeth understand 9/11 within a global context where similar disasters have also happened. Kim's local worldview frustrates Kim, who reminds her that Manhattan is not "'the world, it's just the neighbourhood'" (254).
Hiroko is empathetic about the destruction caused by 9/11, and she volunteers to help the community in the weeks following the attack. However, she knows this kind of grief is not local. Train stations plastered with missing person posters remind her of train stations in Nagasaki after the atomic bomb. For Hiroko, this means they are all living in a similar history: "In moments such as these it seemed entirely wrong to feel oneself living in a different history to the people of this city" (279).
Elizabeth is more empathetic to her granddaughter's struggles. When Kim tells Elizabeth that she "'just want[s] the world to be as it was,'" Elizabeth soothes her. She then tells her granddaughter, "'I've lived through Hitler, Stalin, the Cold War, the British Empire, segregation, apartheid, God knows what. The world will survive this'" (271). In this way, Elizabeth assures her daughter that the bad times end, and "the world" will return to normal in due time.
Kim's local perspective is partly due to her privilege as an American. She considers 9/11 to have changed the world because it is the only disaster that she has had to live through. Harry laments that 9/11 has filled Kim with fear. He muses, "In the valleys of Afghanistan, fear was necessary; he'd been trained how to use it. But what did Kim know of moving through the world with fear at your back?" (281).
Harry's reaction to 9/11 is ambivalent, as he employs both a local and a global perspective. While he found 9/11 "entirely unsurprising," he was also "stunned by his reaction" to 9/11, "the depth of his fury, the wish for all the world to stop and weep with him for the city which had adopted him when he was eleven" (276). He recognizes, however, that this kind of attitude is "disproportionate" to the kind of terror others experience all over the world, including the Democratic Republic of Congo where he is stationed and where more than two and a half million people have been slaughtered in a never-ending war (276).
Burnt Shadows encourages us not to view 9/11 as an isolated event. Not only does a global worldview acknowledge that similar devastation has occurred throughout history all over the world, the novel's plot also shows us how the United States government might have had a hand in this attack. As we discover in "Part-Angel Warriors," the American government funded jihadi (referred to in the novel as mujahideen) movements during their cold war against the Soviets. Shamsie touches on this historical connection in her 2011 interview with Harleen Singh for Ariel: "I was aware that conversation about 9/11 tended to treat it as though that date was the Ground Zero of history, as if it occurred in a vacuum, and as someone who grew up in Pakistan in the 1980s, during the U.S.-Pakistan involvement in Afghanistan and the political support given to jihad as an anti-Soviet tool, I couldn't possibly see things that way."
Allegiance
As Steve is accusing Raza of being involved with Harry's death at the end of the novel, he brings up "the question of allegiance" (310). He finds it easy to believe that Raza has collaborated with the Afghans who killed Harry because he is Pakistani and Muslim. Raza is innocent in regards to Harry's death, but though he has been living in the country for 10 years, his allegiance is not to the U.S. While trying to convince Kim Burton to help Abdullah, he refers to the U.S. as her country: "'He's an Afghan who ran from the FBI. These day's that's the kind of thing your paranoid nation thinks is evidence of terrorism'" (305). Kim is offended that Raza does not consider himself an American, considering "he'd lived in Miami for a decade and was a green-card holder in the process of applying for citizenship" (305).
Raza's lack of allegiance to the United States is easy to understand, however, when one considers that the country has little allegiance to him. As soon as Harry is murdered, Raza is under suspicion, despite the fact that the two men have been friends for many years. And, once Raza goes on the run, he knows that his nationality and religion will do him little favors: "He had never felt so sharply the powerlessness of being merely Pakistani" (314).
When Raza meets Abdullah's brother, the question of allegiance is explored further. Raza wants to know if Abdullah's brother supports the Taliban, but the other man refuses to give a clear answer. Instead, he says, "'I'm a farmer. I want to plant crops and harvest them. Do you understand? I need peace for this. I need security. In exchange for that, there's much that I'll give up'" (326). In other words, Abdullah's brother is willing to ally himself with whatever power will improve his life in a material sense and save him from the violence and destruction of war.
Kim, who has lived in the United States her entire life, has a hard time understanding this complex perspective on allegiance. She is overcome with nationalist sentiment following 9/11. Though she helps Abdullah cross the border, she grapples with this decision their entire drive together. It is her allegiance to the United States—rather than her allegiance to her family or to the Burtons' bond with the Ashrafs—that eventually wins.
