Kobe University Repository : Kernel

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Nagasaki and Cosmopolitanism in Kamila Shamsie's Burnt Shadows(カミラ・シャムジー『焼けた影』における長崎とコスモポリタニズム)

Author(s)

Fu, Chun

Citation

海港都市研究,8:27-40

Issue date

2013-03

Resource Type

Departmental Bulletin Paper / 紀要論文

Resource Version

publisher

DOI URL

http://www.lib.kobe-u.ac.jp/handle_kernel/81004812

Create Date: 2017-08-11

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Nagasaki and Cosmopolitanism in Kamila Shamsie’s Burnt Shadows

The new is not a subjective category, rather it is a compulsion of the object itself, which cannot in any way come to itself and resist heteronomy. ––Adorno

Chun FU Kamila Shamsie’s Burnt Shadows (2009) can be seen, in a nutshell, as an unrequited cosmopolitan love between the German Konrad and the Nagasakian Hiroko Tanaka. Konrad comes to Nagasaki because he neither supports nor consents to the Nazis (18). The reason he flees to Nagasaki, instead of elsewhere, to write about the port city, presumably, is solely out of her reputation circulated in Europe. Namely, Japonisme the aesthetic trend much admired in Europe and Nagasaki the visible city. Hence, arises the need of a translator. Hiroko is reported to be his student of German. From the very beginning, reciprocity and a genuine interest in the other characterize their relationship. The prewar Nagasaki is depicted as an epitome of cosmopolitan world informed by principles of equity, exogamy and exchange, and above all, humanity and beauty. Their love cannot be consummated as they hope because Konrad is consumed by the explosion. His death makes Hiroko a translator without a source text to work with, on the one hand, and by the fact itself, as a translator she is destined to cross over cultural, linguistic and national borders. Throughout the rest of her life, Hiroko carries on her back war scars to wander five countries as historical tides toss her. This paper employs Nagasaki as a heuristic tool to examine the contention between cosmopolitanism and the nation-state. It also questions the raison d’être why Hiroko the hibakusha is made to be present in almost all the major conflicts worldwide for the rest of her life. Finally, this paper ventures to present a Nagasakian version of cosmopolitanism, partly thanks to the ever-encompassing process of globalization and various power fields at play within the subnational 　Leonard Blussé calls Nagasaki one of the visible cities in his 2008 Visible Cities: Canton, Nagasaki, and Batavia and the Coming of the Americans due to the ample archival records accumulated by the Dutch East Indian Company.

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ethnic, economic, and religious levels, to name just a few, that pluralize a uniform cosmopolitanism proposed by Kant. In his attempt to clarifying what cosmopolitanism is, Bruce Robbins directs our attention to rethinking monopatriotism, which according to Arjun Appadurai, is one that “directed exclusively to the hyphen between nation and state, and to allow the material problems we face. . . to define those social groups and ideas for which we would be willing to live, and die for” (7). This hyphenated identity is a highly contested one for it can easily tilt toward the weightier “material problems” and hence the situation between nation and state can be precarious, risky and unsteady. Thus, down-played is the influence of the nation-state, which is accordingly imbued with a postnational quality. Robbins further adds capital to the already intricate relation between cosmopolitanism and the state, “Under many circumstances capitalism needs the stabilizing powers of the nation-state and will work to build the state up, not tear it down.” Capital factors to and resuscitates the rival pair again: “For one thing, the two are historically intertwined . . . Thus cosmopolitics is by no means necessarily postnational politics”(8). However, while borders are increasingly loosened, he argues, “politics must be forced to include the variable power of sympathetic imagination to define collectivities of belonging and responsibilities in the absence of that long history of face-to-face interaction”(8-9). Here, “sympathetic imagination” is pivotal to understanding of linkage between Hiroko and Abdullah at the end of Burnt Shadows. Both are war-driven victims in New York, and paradoxically, the war displaced them is launched by the US. Subsumed in the US, they both refuse to pledge allegiance to the US. In her attempt to rescue Abdullah, Hiroko the hibakusha defies the bound of nationalism and shows an empathy toward Abdullah the Afghan. If, as Benedict Anderson argues, nation is imagined, then we can likewise speculate an empathy toward others be the basis upon which a love larger than self be built. To draw strength from Anderson’s analysis of “within the nation and beyond” through print-capitalism, Robbins extends the notion that “cosmopolitanism is clearly an outgrowth or ideological reflection of global capitalism” (7-8). Be it of print-, electronic-, and/or –digital in form, the relation between capitalism and cosmopolitanism becomes increasingly difficult to disentangle, since capital can freely move beyond borders and give momentum to the historical process of cosmopolitanism. Nevertheless, Robbins caveats, “Capital may be cosmopolitan, but that does not make cosmopolitanism into an apology for capitalism” (8). The nation-state as a viable economic unit is bound to be obsolescent, as capital penetrates borders to weave an interdependent world.


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Under this circumstance, Pheng Cheah inquires, “If nationalism as a mode of consciousness and the nation-state as an institution are both undesirable and outmoded, it is not entirely clear what the alternatives are and whether these alternatives actually exist or are capable of being realized” (21). He posits that “cosmopolitanism is no longer merely an ideal project but a variety of actually existing practical stances (21). To replace cosmopolitanism as something already exists for one to be achieved seems to solve the cul-de-sac for the time being. What’s worth of pursuing becomes what these practical stances refer to. He then traces back to the original idea Kant germinated prior to the founding of the modern nation-state in the eighteenth century Europe, which provides him with a grounding for the analysis of the complicated intertwining between nationalism and cosmopolitanism. While he acknowledges that “the opposition [between nationalism and cosmopolitanism] is even more volatile with the loosening of the hyphen between nation and state,” Cheah regards it as “a form of right based on existing attachments that bind us into a collectivity larger than the state” (23-4). Here, his observation is particularly crucial to a reading of Burnt Shadows, in which Shamsie’s characters can be seen as a collective of war victims, sharing a common fate of homelessness. While they hop between borders, they pose challenges to the “existing and normative power structures” (Khan 2). The cosmopolitan idea epitomized by Hiroko the hibakusha is not quite the same as the previous discussion in that it has a unique experience of its own and it is of central importance in the discursive formation of Nagasakian cosmopolitanism. The atomic bomb explosion and the incurred unfamiliarity are best rendered in the repeated question of “What is that?” in Nagai Takashi’s The Bells of Nagasaki. The instant the bomb exploded it obliterated everything known to human beings. In Nagai’s description of the spur moment, everybody was shocked by the unknown. The attempt to grasp the unknown relies completely on an analogy to the known. Epistemology of this kind can be limiting as will be discussed later. Shamsie describes the post-explosion scene as “the earth has already opened up, disgorged hell” (28). Then, Hiroko chooses to leave the city of sadness and eventually develops her hibakushahood into something new. In his discussion of abstract modernity and new art, Theodor Adorno puts, 　「八月九日上午十一點二分 , 於浦上中心位置的松山町上空五百五十公尺處 , 有一枚原子彈爆炸了 , 那巨大的能量以每秒兩千公尺的風壓瞬間粉碎並颳掉地面上所有的一切。」(38) 　　Shamsie has never openly acknowledges that Nagai Takashi inspires her, but her description of the Ground Zero bears a striking similarity with that of Takashi.「這是地獄 ! 這是地獄 ! 這簡直是沒有一絲呻吟聲的死後世界。當橋本摀住眼睛時 , 周遭變得昏天黑地 , 即使睜開眼睛轉頭環顧四週 , 也是一片死寂 , 沒有一絲光影的黯黑世界。」(19)

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That the category of the new cannot be brushed off as an art-alien sensationalism is apparent in its irresistibility. . .[and] the shudder is a reaction to the cryptically shut, which is a function of that element of indeterminancy. At the same time, the shudder is a mimetic comportment reacting mimetically to abstractness. Only in the new does mimesis unite with rationality without regression . . . The new is a blind spot, as empty as the purely indexical gesture “look here.” (26-7)

It is under a premise of this nature that Hiroko the hibakusha emerges as a kind of her own. To put Japan into the tense nexus of capital, nationalism and cosmopolitanism would engender a rather curious consequence unforeseen at least by Cheah. Despite the fact that Kant’s idea was developed before the founding of modern nation-states, that nationalism that precedes (the realization of) cosmopolitanism is what matters under the context discussed. In his rather curious analysis of “The Enviable but Inimitable Rise of Japan” in From the Ruins of Empire, Pankaj Mishra points out that at the end of the 19th century when Persia was suffused with a xenophobic ambience, an Ottoman frigate visited Japan in a good-will mission (though whether or not it arrived at Nagasaki is to be clarified). Japan was then under the sway of what Tokutomi Soho’s thought that while the West subjugated (colonized) by force the South Asia and the hostile wave was moving eastwards, Japan should stand strong. “The Ottoman frigate’s mission,” Mishra concludes, “was evidence of how Asians everywhere were beginning to be transfixed by the amazingly rapid and unique rise of Japan.” (127) So, “in 1885, Fukuzawa Yukichi had proposed that since Asian countries were hopelessly backward and weak, Japan should ‘escape Asia’ and cast its lot with ‘the civilized nations of the West.” (128) Elitist opinion such as this, coupled with the 1885 defeat of China at sea, the consequent “Treaty of Shimonoseki,” and defeat of Russia in 1905, to Mishra, emboldened the Japanese imperialists (140). The turn-of-the-century rise of Japan (hence the chapter heading) prepares a breeding ground for Japanese imperial nationalism. It is also a bleeding ground for casualties and victimhood in the sense that it prophesizes that war never ends. Naoki Sakai cogently associates the vision of the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere of the Japanese imperial nationalism with “a violent institutional cosmopolitanism” (Cheah, 30). That is, nationalism precedes and takes precedence over cosmopolitanism. Might it be possibly this backlash force that impedes the realization of the Nagasakian cosmopolitanism? It seems that we are back to where we were with the rivaling pair of nationalism and cosmopolitanism. This


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repetition, however, is one with difference on the ground that the atomic bomb explosion on 9 August 1945 remains the central reference point at play. That marks the end of home to Hiroko and the beginning of her being “at-home-in-the-world.” Gohan Karim Khan gives Burnt Shadows a feminist reading: “The Western nationalism is inscribed as a predominately masculine sphere which leaves its indelible marks on Hiroko, in the form of the hideously compelling bird-shaped burns on her back. . . [and] she bears the brunt of this monstrous and destructive form of nationalism for the rest of her life” (6). Free movements of various characters in Burnt Shadows, albeit testify to the transnational phenomenon and the consequent annulment of national borders, cannot be dissociated with the spectre of the nation-state, i.e., the violence par excellence. After all, the nation-state is founded by the use of violence, to overthrow the feudal lords. In other words, their movements are forced, rather than out of their own will. Since the end of the WWII, Hiroko makes her presence in various conflict zones: the 1947 Partition, the Afghanistan fighting against the Soviet in the Cold War period, and the attack on the US on September 11, 2001. My speculation for a plot arrangement such as what Hiroko and her likes are made to go through is never devoid of a social responsibility on the novelist’s part. Though compelled, Hiroko offsets her displacements with a positive intervention. James Burton, for example, is deeply perplexed when they first meet in New Delhi. Hiroko asks James,

“Can’t women travel alone in India?” “Well, there’s no law against it if that’s what you mean.” James was oddly perturbed by this woman who he couldn’t 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? (47-8)

It is perfectly understandable, given the social milieu he is exposed to, that James would respond with an inconvenienced feeling. As a colonial in India, he is far from ignorance. The way he feels about Hiroko, nevertheless, can be regarded as he is subject to a limitation and blindness of existing epistemic categorization simply because Hiroko acts as a deviant, posing as the shock of the new and challenging the norm. Paradoxically, her reduced humanity can now be regarded as and

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compensated by something more. In her critical analysis of science enterprise and its ecology of practice in the voluminous Cosmopolitics, Isabelle Stengers argues the general guidelines used in scientific research are also applicable to social sciences. More specifically, in “The Curse of Tolerance” Stengers distinguishes the obligation of practice, which serves the power, seeking its endorsement, from that of requirement. Obligation, on the other hand, which may engender risks along the endeavor, Stengers contends, should be of no presumption whatsoever, as intellectual quest should not be tainted with any bias, even at the cost of subversion of established knowledge. So Stengers’ “curse of tolerance” spells well out the attitude one has at the encounter with the unknown other: Not only should one not discriminate, but the least bit of tolerance curses. Therefore, “hell and death” in Blake’s poem she uses to demonstrate the tenor of such a practice suggests closedness, limitation and hence an imminent end. What she advocates is knowledge that does not succumb to dictates and prescription set down by power. My reading of Burnt Shadows employs the tenor abstracted out of science turf as a conduit to the formation of a Nagasakian cosmopolitanism. In this light, the presence of Hiroko poses questions and problematics even, an indeterminate of pharmacological nature, as Stengers calls it, leading to difficulties to description, a situation reminiscent of and resemble to James’ first sight of Hiroko. Her presence in conflict-inflicted zones, in fact, not only calls attention to the notion of home shattered by war, but puts to center stage war violence and human atrocities. That is, her presence epitomizes the negativity of war. Above all, Hiroko’s deviance (the shock of the new), her constant straddling between borders, can be regarded as an outright refusal of the nation-state and its violence. In Pakistan where her husband Sajjad becomes a muhajir, Shamsie portrays Hiroko’s indifference toward the idea of nation-state with a slight touch of reserve.

She would always be a foreigner in Pakistan––she had not interest in belonging to anything as contradictorily insubstantial and damaging as a nation––but this didn’t stop her from recognizing how Raza flinched every time a Pakistani asked him where he was from.

　　Here is the six lines Stengers quotes from William Blake to demonstrate her point. “He who mocks the infant’ s faith/Shall be mock’d in age and death./He who shall teach the child to doubt/The rotting grave shall ne’er get out./He who respects the infant’s faith/Triumphs over hell and death.” (310)


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In a pas-de-deux Hiroko and Elizabeth rehearse their antagonism against national violence, and it is significant to have Konrad’s ghost looms large in the background. Toward the end of the British Raj, these two women reminisce Konrad’s cosmopolitan ideal. Hiroko reveals to Elizabeth,

I always assumed I knew why Konrad was so obsessed with discovering all he could about the lives of the Europeans and Japanese in Nagasaki . . . So determined to see a pattern of people moving toward each other—that’s why he kept researching his book instead of writing it, you know? He was waiting for the war to end and the foreigners to come back and give him triumphant ending. He thought the war was an interruption, not the end of the story . . . 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. . . Imagine hoping to find that separate world in Japan. (69-70)

Korand and Elizabeth have virtually nothing in common, but one thing they commonly share is that the idea national identity does not necessarily equate with one’s allegiance and unquestioned acceptance of what the nation-state inflicts upon the wretched of the earth. Thanks to Konrad, Hiroko also seeks “home” outside of her Japanese home; and establishes “home” in a foreign country. That the novelist renders her to have physical intimacy with foreigners is not without reasons. The idea of home is then redefined as it can be founded transnationally as well as through exogamy. She tends to see her departure for the world as a matter of time and eventually she would return to Nagasaki when the prewar order is restored. However, as time moves on, she is farther displaced from that order. It is paradoxical that the farther away she moves from Nagasaki, the further backward in time she is dragged into: “Hiroko could not find a place for herself in any talk of tomorrow—so instead she found herself, for the first time in her life, look back and further back”(98). That is, her engagement with the memory of Konrad is intensified as she is placed amidst various war-torn areas. This juxtaposition is meaningful in the sense that Nagasaki always remains the ultimate reference in her life. All her beautiful memories of Nagasaki

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are associated with language exchange and learning. These language exchanges can be the first step “of people moving toward each other” (69). Sajjad teaches Konrad and Harry (Henry) in their childhood; Konrad and Hiroko exchanges language lessons; their son Raza also exchange languages with Abdullah. It is interesting to note a loop is formed in these exchanges, which is studded with romance, care and attempts to enlarge one’s perspective. However, the biggest irony of all is that war destroys all these good intentions. In Karachi, Hiroko witnesses in Raza a religious belief carried away into extremism, which she associates with the wartime emperor and Japan. This parallel renders evident the novelist’s critique of Japan for its role in perpetrating the Greater East Asian War. She sees Pakistan undergoing Islamization comparable to the prewar Japan, whose ideology is to expand and “escape Asia” in the wake of the defeat of Russia in the Russo-Japanese War (1904-5). Again, it is the nation-state and its dominant ideology that propel the forward movement away from homeland. In other words, loathed to live in a belligerent atmosphere, she seeks elsewhere for something amiable and beyond the nation-state. However, in Karachi Hiroko is deeply inflicted with homesickness. Again, Hiroko talks to Elizabeth about the incongruence between the past and the present.

I keep thinking of Nagasaki. You said to me once that Delhi must seem so strange and unfamiliar, but nothing in the world would ever be more unfamiliar than my home that day. . . My father, Ilse, I saw him in the last seconds of his life, and I thought he was something unhuman. He was covered in scales. No skin, no hair, no clothes, just scales. No one, no one in the world should ever have to see their father covered in scales. (100)

All that unfamiliar surrounds her is comparatively less unfamiliar than Nagasaki and home consumed in that instant. That is the ultimate unfamiliarity. This combined feeling of familiarity and unfamiliarity continues to afflict her in a way only sensible to those who have lost home. “But until you see a place you’ve known your whole life reduced to ash, you don’t realize how much we crave familiarity,” Hiroko voices. Psychologically she longs for familiarity, but physically she chooses to stay away from Nagasaki. Caught in-bewteen familiarity and unfamiliarity seems to be the fate of the hibakusha cosmopolitan.


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I want tea that tastes the way tea should taste in my understanding of tea. I want to look like people around me. I want people to disapprove when I break the rules and not simply to think that I don’t know better. I want doors to slide open instead of swinging open. I want all those things that never meant anything, that still wouldn’t mean anything if I hadn’t lost them. . . I want Urakami Cathedral. I used to think it ruined the view, never liked it. But now I want to see Urakami Cathedral, I want to hear its bells ringing. I want to smell cherry blossom burning. I want to feel my body move with the motion of being on a street-car. I want to live between hills and sea. I want to eat kasutera. (100-1)

Only a few seconds she adds, “I don’t want to go back to Nagasaki. Or Japan. I don’t want to hide these burns on my back, but I don’t want people to judge me by them either. Hibakusha. I hate that word. It reduces you to the bomb”(101). Then, a minor character is introduced to comfort her. Rehana, born in Karachi and raised in Abbottabad, is married to a Japanese and has lived in Tokyo for twenty years only to return to Karachi to set up an automobile plant with her Pakistani husband. Rehana’s life trajectory forms a meaningful contrast to that of Hiroko. The role of Rehana may be contrived, but her advice is inspiring to Hiroko: “I’m at home in the idea of foreignness” (143). Later, at the height of Indo-Pakistan conflict and when Pakistan’s development of nuclear weapons is known to her, Hiroko finds she could no longer live in an ambience associable with the bombed Nagasaki. Once again, she is unmoored by the potential violence of nuclear bombs. From Japan, India, Pakistan and then the US, Hiroko is constantly on the move so much so she could be said to live in the crack between countries. As if hibakusha can be contagious and hereditary, her son Raza is also traumatized as “a bomb-marked mongrel” (193). The relation between the violence executed to the interest of realpolitik and Hiroko the hibakusha’s quotidian condition is marked by (un)familiarity. The unfamiliarity she encounters heretofore is never comparable to the shock and loss of home as Nagasaki evaporates in an instant. Violence deprives her of home and drives her to roam from one country to the next: “The momentum of a bomb blast that threw her into a world in which everything was unfamiliar, Nagasaki itself becomes more unknown than Delhi? Nothing in the world is more unrecognizable than her father as he died. . . So the story of Hiroko Asharaf’s

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youth was not a story of the bomb, but the voyage after it.” (227; emphasis mine). The road she is compelled onto leads her to more unfamiliarity; it’s a road no return. Her physical experience of the atomic explosion, the consequent (and constant) loss of home, and her borderline existence, or “interstitial space” as Homi Bhabha has it, constitutes her as one of a kind. Not knowing where to place her, as James’ perplexion well expresses, is to admit one’s ignorance at the emergence of new. In this discrepancy emerges the Nagasakian cosmopolitanism. Hiroko the hibakusha’s ideal world, inherited from Konrad, as it were, cannot be complete without an additional dimension of “people moving toward each other” (69). Abdullah’s victimhood best exemplifies that war in Burnt Shadows is portrayed as a developing monster devouring and ravaging what is. He is engaged in language exchanges with Raza against the background when Americans fought Russians in Afghanistan at the expense of innocent and defenseless Afghan civilians like himself. He is hence characterized as homeless, one without father or native tongue, suffering from a war that is not his own. To learn a foreign language presupposes one’s genuine interest in people and cultures other than one’s own. One is moving closer toward the other in the learning process. Hiroko’s experience well demonstrates the endeavor pays off.

She [Hiroko] 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, overtaking the separatensss that would otherwise have defined their relationship. (203)

Language is both a catalyst to the marriage of Asharaf and Tanaka, and by extension, to marriage of cultures. From language exchange to war-incurred losses, Shamsie elevates her concerns to the planetary level. To begin with, an ideal cosmopolitan world is one painted with language exchanges and informed with a genuine respect and eager to learn from Others. Reading in this light, Hiroko’s arrival in New York will not be accused of embracing her enemy. It merits a narrative rational of its own: She is now more than 70 years old, widowed, while Raza is in Afghanistan fighting a war not his own. The closest relation to be found is Konrad’s half-sister, Elizabeth or Ilse, who lives alone in New York. What’s more important here is the American part makes room enough for the novelist’s further elaboration on the diabolic dimension of war. War is made to take on various forms: 911 and consequent War on Terror. The versatility of war machine also manifests its immortality. War never


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ends; it simply changes. After Sajjad’s death, the Indo-Pakistan nuclear standoff reminds Hiroko of Nagasaki. Whenever a memory short-circuit of this kind occurs in Burnt Shadows, it is time for the heroine to flee, as the metaphor of bird-shaped burns she bears suggests. Again leaving for unfamiliarity for somewhere totally strange seems to underwrite Rehana’s “at home in the idea of foreignness” (143). Familiarity and visibility are dialectically engaged in the sense that Hiroko becomes highly visible in Delhi, Karachi and Istanbul. Her foreign look speaks all of her stangerhood. In the American section she moves to New York, a truly global metropolis, where foreigners are everywhere, however, her foreignness, instead of physical resemblance, manifests in her idea. Her foreignness makes plain her staunch refusal to endorse the patriotic pro-war stance. Among the unfamiliar, Hiroko finds in an ancient globe something unchanged since time past: wars redrew boundaries between nations (255). What’s left unsaid here is: History is written by war. War is a constant: it is capable of development as an organism and of evolution of its own. Different from its predecessors in manifestations, the post-911 type of warfare seems to implicate and incriminate everyone. Kim is a trained structural engineer desperate to contribute something to the restoration of ravaged buildings, while her father Harry is a military-contracted private security in Afghanistan. At a first glance, war seems to provide jobs and boost economy. While everyone is subsumed in war, the contemporary economy can be said to be partly war-driven. It is particularly clear when Harry contemplates the new face of war, “Here was internationalism, powered by capitalism. Different worlds moving from their separate spheres into a new kind of geometry” (207). Nevertheless, ultra-nationalists still play a part in this “internationalism.” Raza inherits Hiroko’s most salient quality, that of translation. A seasoned traveler with multilingual talents amidst religious extremism, he is desperately sought after in the war-torn Afghanistan. Notwithstanding, what the afore-said qualities cannot reach to their bloom because the ambience is not propitious enough to fully embrace their kinds. The novelist short-circuits memories to accentuate that despite wars might take different forms, they share the same quintessential nature. That is, with Nagasaki as the central reference point, the novel delineates an inhospitable world and asks us how to live “amidst the shards” (106) when human atrocities abound. No matter in whichever name a war is launched—homeland security or Islamo-fascism—the fact that war memories are similar speaks unequivocally war repeats the same old atrocities. Shamsie acknowledges in an interview, “[in writing Burnt Shadows] I was interested in looking at the human cost of actions which are carried

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out by ‘legitimate’ governments, often with popular support (the bombing of Nagasaki, Britain’s games of Empire in India, Pakistan and Russia and America’s action in Afghanistan in the 80’s, the War on Terror” (Filgate). Bruce King observes that Shamsie’s diatribe against the oligarch Pakistan and the American imperialism is evident. Judging from the cosmopolitan concerns, however, the novelist places as much accusation upon ordinary people for their tacit and implicit consent to the use of violence against other people. Kim’s final weakness subverts all those good intentions that might lead to its realization. The senior accuses the junior, “Right now, because of you, I understand for the first time how nations can applaud when their governments drop a second nuclear bomb” (370). In the interview with Harleen Singh, Shamsie admits that “the first page of the novel is actually the last thing I wrote. . . It [Burnt Shadows] begins and ends with nation-states, and what they will do in the name of self-defense” (159). In a picture as bleak as this, one thing seems to be certain: Hiroko would fight the death to bring to light Konrad’s vision, albeit it might just be an impossible dream. Again, King keenly perceives that Shamsie may or may not be aware she follows the Islamic literature tradition of “writing about the desire for the unobtainable” (149). After the 911 attack, Hiroko wants to donate blood to save people, but the national wall is erected against her larger-than-the-self love simply because Pakistan is a malarial area. Yoshi Watanabe, disappeared for nearly 300 pages, can arguably be a flaw in plot, but his anti-nuclear position can unequivocally bring forth the novelist’s stance, or at least find an echo with that of the hibakusha. The end of Burnt Shadows marks a continuance of Nagasakian version of cosmopolitanism. The role of Hiroko the hibakusha is pivotal to the development of this brand of cosmopolitanism not only because the bomb used is dropped in Nagasaki, but because her message to the world is delivered at the intervening period between a postnational era is yet born and a universalism is yet formed. One is not sure how ephemeral this period would last, however paradoxical this may sound. Her alarming message to the world, embodied in her presence throughout major zones of conflicts in the world, be it weak in volume and in persuasion, marks her difference and hence the Nagasakian cosmopolitanism. Though Hiroko and her peers are constantly displaced by wars, their movements between and beyond national borders do not mean the demise of nation is in place. Regardless of the fact of their hopping between borders and the duration of their stay in a particular country/city, the plot is so arranged to make readers think their imminent departure is credible, if to trace back the ways they come along is meaningful. In other words, Hiroko and her ilk, thanks to the ravaging warfare, are bound to live between nations. Individuals with “interstitial existence”


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of this kind cast no trust votes to nation-states; they vote with their feet. In the interview with Mohammed Hanif, Shamsie explains why Burnt Shadows begins with Nagasaki: “Because there seemed to me something particularly horrific about the ability of a government to drop an atom bomb on a nation, see the devastation it caused and then, three days later, do it over again. It makes you realize there is no act of destruction that makes nations and armies stop instantly and say ‘never again.” Hiroko’s final attempt to rescue Abdullah at the end of Burnt Shadows can be regarded as an act of redemption. Besides, the ground shall be cleared first. In her response to the question of “the geographic and chronological sweep of the novel”, Shemsie explains conversation about 911 “tended to treat it as though that date was the Ground Zero of history, as if it occurred in a vacuum” (Singh 158). That Burnt Shadows begins with Nagasaki means literally it is page one; the bombing of Nagasaki sets the entire tone of the narrative. Given the hibakusha’s burns on her back and her sixty years in exile, Shamsie presents Hiroko as a fearless woman warrior fighting an invincible foe. It seems not until “collectivities of belonging and responsibilities” are mobilized into practical social intervention, we are one step away from that ideal.

Works Cited

Adorno, Theodor W. Aesthetic Theory. Trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor. London & New York: Continuum, 1997. Print. Blussé, Leonard. Visible Cities: Canton, Nagasaki, and Batavia and the Coming of the Americans. London & Cambridge, Mass: Harvard Up, 2008. Print. Cheah, Pheng. “The Cosmopolitical—Today.” Cosmopolitanism: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation. Minneapolis and London: U of Minnesota P, 1998. 20-41. Print. Hanif, Mohammed. “The Postergirl of Pakistan.” Hindustan Times. 18 April 2009. 11 November 2011. Khan, Gohar Karim. “The Hideous Beauty of Bird-Shaped Burns: Transnational Allegory and Feminist Rhetoric in Kamila Shamsie’s Burnt Shadows.” Pakistaniaat: Journal of Pakistan Studies 3.2 (2011). Print. King, Bruce. “Kamila Shamsie’s novels of history, exile and desire.” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 47.2 (May 2011): 147-58. Print. Mishra, Pankaj. From the Ruins of Empire: The Revolt Against the West and the Remaking of Asia.

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London: Allen Lane, 2012. Print. Robbins, Bruce. “Actually Existing Cosmopolitanism.” Cosmopolitanism: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation. Minneapolis and London: U of Minnesota P, 1998. 1-19. Print. Shamsie, Kamila. Burnt Shadows. New York: Picador, 2009. Print. ——. Interview with Michele Filgate. Quarterly Conversation. 12 September 2011. 12 October 2011. Singh, Harleen. “A Legacy of Violence: Interview with Kamila Shamsie about Burnt Shadows.” Ariel 42.2 (2012): 157-62. Print. Stengers, Isabelle. Cosmopolitics II. Trans. Robert Bononno. Minneapolis and London: U of Minnesota P, 2011. Print. 永井隆。《長崎和平鐘》。賴振南譯。臺北 : 上智 , 2003。

(Department of Foreign Languages and Literature at National Ilan University)

Kobe University Repository : Kernel

Kobe University Repository : Kernel

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