by KAMILA SHAMSIE
PHOTO/Zackary Canepari
Captivated by an image of an atom bomb falling on Japan, Pakistani novelist Kamila Shamsie asks American writers why, “Your soldiers will come to our lands, but your novelists won’t.”
A disquieting thing happened to me in 2004. I had just finished my fourth novel and, unaccustomed as I was to any space of time in which I didn’t know what I would write next, I found myself searching for the single image which would lead me into a novel. Somewhat bewilderingly, instead of a single image I found myself thinking about the atom bomb falling on Nagasaki. There were a number of reasons for this—or at least, I have a number of theories about why this was so. But at the time the only thing which seemed relevant was the fact that I didn’t know anything about Nagasaki other than that a bomb fell there, yet somehow that falling bomb was getting in the way of my ability to alight on the image from which a novel would emerge.
“Of course you’ve read John Hersey’s Hiroshima,” a friend of mine said when I mentioned that atom bombs had taken up residence in my mind. I hadn’t. But I went and found it in a bookshop; it was appealingly slim enough to buy and bring home. As I read it in a single sitting I found, on page forty-six, this image of Hiroshima minutes after the bomb fell:
“On some undressed bodies, the burns had made patterns of undershirt straps and suspenders and, on the skin of some women (since white repelled the heat from the bomb and dark clothes absorbed it and conducted it to the skin), the shapes of flowers they had had on their kimonos.”
…
Last year, John Freeman, the editor of Granta Magazine, was interviewed about the journal’s “Ten Years Later” issue. Here’s what Freeman had to say about books written on some of the great historical events of the last decade:
“Between 2004 and 2006 an avalanche of 9/11 books hit stores. Histories of Pakistan and the Islamic jihad; tales of the hunt for bin Laden; political memoirs; essay collections. I read dozens of them and, in an awful way, it felt good. I took comfort in having so many places to turn to for answers to my questions. Who exactly were our allies? What did they do in our name? Why were young men in Egypt and Pakistan willing to die simply to take an American life? All of my questions were American questions, though, by which I mean they were questions conditioned by my citizenship. My dollars, my country, our soldiers, our allies. Even when I was trying to read my way out of the parochialisms of being American, I often read right back into them. The book that broke this habit for me was Anthony Shadid’s Night Draws Near, a chronicle of the invasion and occupation of Iraq, as seen through the eyes of everyday Baghdadis. Mothers and children, people whose refrigerators were blown open during shock and awe. For the first time since 9/11 here was a book without a filter, a book that didn’t assume war was a good solution. Ever since I finished Night Draws Near I’ve often bristled at the way our cultural pages assume we’re Americans first, humans second. We read less about the world and more about ourselves—instead of reading about the places we are invading, we read about our invaders… It’s a natural instinct, I suppose, but in terms of empathy it feels like a closed loop.”
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