A SHIFT FROM THE MARGINS TO THE CENTER: REINTERPRETING AND RECLAIMING IDENTITY IN KAMILA SHAMSIE’S BURNT SHADOWS

Abstract

The terrorist attacks of 9/11 have not only demonized and defamed the Muslim Americans but have also labeled the entire community as terrorists and extremists. The attacks have left a negative and detrimental image of Muslim Americans as terrorists, who till today are struggling and combating this stereotype and negative image. This paper explores the concepts of identity and identity crisis as they are communicated through Kamila Shamsie’s ‘Burnt Shadows’. These two fundamental concepts serve to be constructive lenses in the wake of the terrorist attacks of 9/11, as post 9/11 discourses have for the most part focused on Muslim American identity crisis, negative representation of the Islamic faith as fundamentalist Islam and representing Muslims as terrorists and extremists. The terrorist attacks of 9/11 will be represented as a site of paraxial engagement with both social and individual self-understandings and that representation of various aspects of identity in the aftermath of 9/11 allows for the processof identity negotiation which evolves phases of realization of the need to reinterpret identity and finally moving on to the phase of reclaiming identity. This paper will reveal how the identity crisis faced by the protagonist of the novel leads to an identity confusion surrounding the tragic incident of 9/11 and its aftermath where the convergence of fiction and reality presents the intricacy of defining the incident and of relating the self to the ruthless and inhuman hostility and eventually revealing the loss of a stable identity which leads to the protagonist’s struggle for reinterpreting and reclaiming his true identity.