Frontier Stories: Burnt Shadows and an Alternative Ethic of Narrativizing Violence

The attack on the twin towers of the World Trade Centre on September 11, 2001 and its hyper-visual aftermath has led to a new paradigm in Euro-American collective consciousness. This new paradigm is marked by an almost obsessive reliance on the image of the moment and the image as the ultimate source of or rather the absence of meaning. Kamila Shamsie's fiction Burnt Shadows exemplifies a point of departure from what has become an almost salient feature of Euro-American narrative on violence, its representation, and historicity. This paper explores how Shamsie forges an alternate interpretative apparatus that resolutely refuses to give in to the singularity of a moment (and its image) as a defining trope of terror and its representation. Instead, Shamsie's novel weaves a complex pattern of other stories gleaned from across time and from the frontier spaces of present-day Afghanistan and Pakistan that have remained largely unrecognized in the Euro-American cultural landscape. Emphasizing the relevance of the vast topography of catastrophe and continual human wreckage woven in Burnt Shadows this paper considers Shamsie's approach as a necessary and timely intervention that reformulates violence and its historicity beyond the delimiting scope of a singular, overarching trope.