Burnt Shadows

“What prompted this falling-off of love? How to explain to the earth that it was more functional as a vegetable patch than a flower garden, just as factories were more functional than schools and boys were more functional as weapons than as humans.” 

 Shamsie presents war as a force that destroys beauty and humanity and damages one’s sense of home. Shamsie personifies the natural world in this early passage, establishing violence and oppression as forces of human creation that must be explained rather than as inherent to the natural functioning of the world. In setting up “weapons” and “humans” as antithetical entities, the author philosophically aligns the novel with pacifism.

“As ever, their conversation moves between German, English, and Japanese. It feels to them like a secret language which no one else they know can fully decipher.” 

Shamsie often connects fluency in foreign languages with intimacy, suggesting that each individual person speaks a kind of language of the self. Here, this idea is extended to relationships, as Konrad and Hiroko’s love is imagined as a kind of private language. Shamsie equates the time and effort spent learning another language to the work of understanding and loving another person.

“Discarded clothes as a metaphor for the end of Empire. That’s an interesting one. 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.” 

Spoken by James, this quote evinces the limits of intimacy within a given hierarchy. James is comfortable in his cross-cultural friendship with Sajjad only as long as he remains in a position of power. Shamsie implies that James’s personal relationship with Sajjad is a model for the greater relationship between the colonized India and the British Empire: inherently unequal and therefore incompatible with true cosmopolitanism.