1

Sadia Nazeer, 2Dr. Mohammad Muazzam Sharif, 3Shumaila Ashee, 4Dr. Mujahid Shah

Turkish Online Journal of Qualitative Inquiry (TOJQI)

Volume12, Issue10, December 2021: 6164-6171

Burnt Shadows: Transnational identities, Linguistics Consciousness and Hybridity

‘Open the Universe a Little More!’: Transnational identities, linguistics consciousness
and Hybridity in Burnt Shadows

1Sadia Nazeer, 2Dr. Mohammad Muazzam Sharif, 3Shumaila Ashee,

4Dr. Mujahid Shah (Corresponding)

1
Assistant Professor, English, Shaheed Benazir Bhutto Women University, Peshawar, PhD Research
Scholar, IIUI, sadianazeer33@yahoo.com
2
Lecturer in English, Abdul Wali Khan University Mardan, sharifmuazzam@gmail.com
3
Lecturer, English, Shaheed Benazir Bhutto Women University, Peshawar,
shumailaashee@gmail.com
4
Assistant Professor, Department of English, Abdul Wali Khan University Mardan,
mujahidshahum@gmail.com

Abstract

This paper argues about the processes of negotiating and re constructing identities in
Kamila Shamsie’s Burnt Shadows, particularly by the two main characters Hiroko Tanaka, a
Japanese language teacher and her son Raza Konrad Ashraf. Drawing on Rushdie’s concept
of migrants as translated men and women, imaginary homeland, Diaspora and identity, I aim
to see how the cultural identities are shaped and reformed in a transnational dimension
through linguistics consciousness, concerning different social and cultural conventions like
gender, race, religion and national belonging. I argue that Hiroko Tanaka and Raza Konrad
Ashraf are multi-lingual transmigrants who constantly migrate and negotiate their identities
through the different languages they know, thus challenging the traditional notions of nation,
home, community and sense of belonging; and even then keep their individuality having
multi-linguistic abilities. I also take into consideration how these two characters are different
from other characters in the novel; and the challenges and conflicts they are faced with during
the course of the novel in re shaping their identity.
Keywords: Diaspora, Imaginary homeland, Migrants, Translated men.
Introduction
Burnt Shadows is a story of a Japanese woman, Hiroko Tanaka, with whom, moves
the tale from 1945 Nagasaki, World War II to 1947 Partition in the Subcontinent, briefly in
Turkey and then straight to the Post-9/11 United States. Hiroko, the survivor of the Nagasaki
atomic bomb moves to pre partitioned India and is welcomed by Anglo-German step sister of
her German fiancé who has died in the 1945 American attack. There she meets, develops her
trust in and falls in love with Sajjad Ashraf, her Urdu tutor whom she marries afterwards.
Living the most terrible times of post partition in Turkey with her husband, Hiroko moves to
Pakistan unexpectedly when Sajjad is denied going back home (India). The last phase of the
story is, however, set in the United States, where ironically Hiroko finds escape from the
atomic conflict between India and Pakistan. It is here that she witnesses the 9/11 event. She
and Sajjad have a son Raza, named by her as Raza Konrad Ashraf, who, thanks to his

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mother’s multi-linguistic powers becomes the same. His Japanese, Indian, and Turkish
ancestry enables him to pass as a Hazara Afghani, with unexpected effects. Knowing many
languages help him secure a job of a translator in CIA. Both the mother and the son act as
Rushdie’s ‘translated man and woman’ and thus keep on re constructing themselves in
relation to their lived experiences through their journeys. All these historical events have
shaped their physical relocations and they keep on re-negotiating their identities through a
process of adaptation.
Analyzing the novel from the perspective of Salman Rushdie’s Imaginary Homelands
helps bring out the transnationalism and Hybridity in the characters of the novel. Imaginary
Homelands explores the notion of “homeland” within the context of transience and
flexibility. It is a collection of essays written during 1981 to 1992 about the controversial
issues of the decade. It covers the experiences of Rushdie as well as his contemporary time
period.
Research Methodology
This is a qualitative research and it highlights the events and incidents of the novel
being the first hand information, through the technique of close Textual Analysis, with the
novel as a primary source. Different secondary sources like books, Journal articles and
websites have also been used.
Moreover, to explore the novel I have used the concepts of migrants, translated men
and women, and hybridity by Salman Rushdie in his Imaginary Homelands.
Literature Review
The novel offers multiple interpretations and perspectives such as sociological,
political, ethnic, moral and psychological etc. Many researchers have mentioned about the
struggle and trauma that the protagonists go through in their life journey. Many articles
discuss the symbolism in the novel

Sandrine Soukaï in her article ‘The Hybridity of Partition Novels in English:

Reshaping National Identities in Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines and Kamila
Shamsie’s Burnt Shadows’ writes about 1947 partition that led to the creation of two
countries Pakistan and India, and how the effects of this partition are highlighted in the works
of the above mentioned authors. But this research is more about the techniques employed by
these writers to show their own multiple identities. It lacks the characters’ transitivity.

Humaira Sarvat in her article Cultural Hybridity in Kamila Shamsie’s Burnt Shadows
also writes about the hybridity in culture reflected in the novel. This research focuses on the
cultural hybridity within the field of Postcolonial studies. The writer writes about different
cultures like Indian, Pakistani, English and American. Her area of research is the legacies of
colonialism on cultures by applying Homi Bhaba’s theory of ‘Cultural Hybridity’. This
research does not cover the aim of my research.

‘Burnt Shadows: “Home”, “Cosmopolitanism” and “Hybridization”’ by Shazia Babar

also discusses the hybridization of identity within the protagonists from Bhabha’s
perspective. The article reflects upon the process of developing hybrid identities in the novel.

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Wahid Pervez in his article ‘Critical Study of Kamila Shamsie’s novel Burnt Shadows
in the light of Post-Colonial Theory’ also discusses the novel’s story from the perspective of
Post-Colonial Theory.

Another research article ‘The Performance of Identity in Kamila Shamsie’s Burnt

Shadows’ is written by Daniela Vitolo in which the researcher discusses the processes of
identity construction enacted by the main character Heroko in the novel Burnt Shadows by
Kamila Shamsie focusing on the performative relationship existing between agency and
identity. The aim is to explore the ways the author portrays the relationship between relevant
political events and the dynamics of identity formation as they take place in a transnational
dimension. This research partially sides with my intentions of carrying out a similar research
but I take into consideration the character of Raza also and represent the mother-son duo
through the lenses of Rushdie’s critical attitudes towards nationalistic ideas of national
belonging.

These and many other studies have not only enhanced my understanding of the novel,
but also have allowed me to work for the gap in this research area. Therefore I apply
Rushdie’s Imaginary Homelands and look into the two major characters, Hiroko and Raza
critically to highlight their Diasporic identity.

Text Analysis
According to Rushdie, migrants are translated men and are expected to adapt the ways
of their adopted homelands. This concept of Multiculturalism and transnationalism is seen in
Hiroko and Raza’s characters. They represent a homing desire rather than a desire for
homeland as both are strangers at home. Hiroko and Raza recreate their home wherever they
move or stay and adapt to the places’ languages and cultures with the help of the gift of
languages they know “for language came on very easily as if [they are] retrieving some
forgotten knowledge. …” (Shamsie)
The word ‘translation’ Rushdie points out, comes from the Latin for “bearing across,”
and “having been born across the world”, he says, we are “translated men”. It is normally
supposed that something always gets lost in the translation but Rushdie clings to the point
that “something can also be gained.” As he writes in his essay on John Berger, “the migrant is
not simply transformed by his act; he also transforms his new world.” (Rushdie) One such
gain is the tremendous potential for reinvigorating both the language and the culture.
Languages spoken by the particular character serve as markers of both history and identity.
For Hiroko, the languages she speaks reflect her experiences and place in the world. For
example, her use of language with Konrad, her first love, is shaped by both their relationship
and their separate identities: “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 19) The ease and
skill with which she masters different languages help her dwell successfully in different
cultures. She has already thrust herself forward to experience the new possibilities of cultural
hybridity. Interestingly, Hiroko not only carries their languages with her, after Konrad’s
death, she also learns Urdu and teaches her son Raza to speak German, in addition to Urdu,
English and Japanese.
Thus Shamsie traces the complex and interconnected web of relationships that Hiroko
develops through her languages during her journeys. Identity, as Gilroy puts it, actually
involves “an ongoing process of self-making and social interaction” (2000, p. 103). Hence
wherever she travels or stays, Hiroko is able to adapt to that particular land and nation;
society and its language and customs. Doing so, she still retains her individuality and is not

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bound by any societal pressures. She is a multi-lingual transmigrant, who is undergoing

constant flux in terms of migration. We see that Hiroko’s own people become strangers for
her after the atomic bombing of Nagasaki. Among her people she feels alienated. She
becomes a victim of their indifference. Her identity is reduced only to a survivor of the
atomic bomb attack, i-e, ‘Hibakusha’. As Shamsie puts it, “It was a fear of reduction rather
than any kind of quest that had forced her away from Japan. ... To the Japanese she was
nothing beyond an explosion-affected person; that was her defining feature.” (Shamsie 49)
Hence she is forced to move to Delhi due to estranged behavior of her people. She
moves in order to find solace with step sister of her dead fiancé as she thinks, “there was
nowhere else for her to go.” (Shamsie 48) In India, she feels at home when she meets Sajjad
Ashraf . His open and welcoming attitude makes Hiroko reveal her heart in front of him and
she compares her identity with his as she says; “It seems to me that I could find more in your
world which resembles Japanese traditions than I can in this world of the English.”(Shamsie
90) She even finds Urdu easy to learn. Gohar Karim Khan argues that interestingly Hiroko
does not allow language barriers or cultural differences to stand in the way of her relationship
with nations and their people. She adapts to “foreigness” with unbelievable ease. She spends
time with Sajjad and shows interests in knowing him through his language Urdu rather than
in English. In an exquisitely poignant scene in the novel, Hiroko explains to Sajjad how, after
the blast, she found a rock on which a large shadow was imprinted. Believing it to be
Konrad’s shadow, she rolled the rock to a cemetery and buried it. Sajjad replies, “there is a
phrase ... in English: to leave someone alone in their grief. Urdu has no equivalent phrase. It
only understands the concept of gathering around and becoming ‘gham-kaur’ – grief eaters-
who take in the mourners’ sorrow. Would you like me to be in English or Urdu right now?
There was a moment’s hesitation, and then she said, ‘This is an Urdu lesson,’ and returned to
sit at the bridge table, pen poised to write the word ‘ghum-khaur’.” (Shamsie 55) She could
even trust him in showing him, her ‘Bird back’ and telling him that she will remain single all
her life. Her marriage with Sajjad is also a “series of negotiations” according to Hiroko
(Shamsie 132). Hence [Her] “identity is at once plural and partial.” (Rushdie 15)
Languages also play a very important role in Raza’s life. He adopts the profession of a
‘polyglot’ and thinks that “through this he will be able to play with words in every language.”
He further reveals his heart to his mother, “I think I would be happy living in a cold bare
room if I could spend my days burrowing into different languages.” (Shamsie) This flexibility
and comfort with the words and languages suggest that he has received the same versatility
and quickness as his mother to adopt any language in the world and be comfortable with it. A
hybrid child and a gifted linguist from an early age, he readily absorbs new languages from
those around him:
“In his decade in Dubai, … , he sought out as many nationalities as possible, acquiring
language with the zeal of a collector – Bengali and Tamil from the hotel staff; Arabic from
the receptionists; Swahili from the in-house jazz band; French from Claudia – the most
consistent of his many lovers; Farsi from the couple who ran the restaurant at the corner of
his street; Russian from the two hookers who lived in the apartment next door to his studio …
; and beyond this, a smattering of words from all over the globe. The more languages you
learned, he discovered, the more you found overlap: ‘Qahweh’ in Arabic, ‘gehve’ in Farsi,
‘café’ in French, ‘coffee’ in English, ‘kohi’ in Japanese . . .” (Shamsie 193)

This linguistic diversity and exploration also points towards multiculturalism and
hybrid identity. He possesses linguistic consciousness of belonging to different cultures of the
world. He combines the traces of almost five cultural forms in his identity. He is in a position

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which denies any access to a single cultural identity. He always lives on the ‘threshold’ of the
well defined tropes of identity. He belongs to everywhere. The very name Raza Konrad
Ashraf has been taken from three different languages and cultures, Raza from Pakistan,
Konrad from German and Ashraf from Indian culture. Moreover he tells his name to a
fourteen year old Afghan boy Abdullah as Raza Hazara, thus adding another identity to his
multi lingual and multi cultural identities.
Given the recurrent references to various kinds of language translation, the
relationship existing between this kind of translation and the physical translation across
borders appears evident – ‘to translate’ means to transfer something across a line. It could be
said, to quote Salman Rushdie, that Hiroko is a ‘translated woman’ and Raza a ‘translated
man’. Linguistic translation is a productive process where a negotiation between the
languages involved, and the result is that ‘something can also be gained’ despite something
that is lost according to Rushdie. For Rushdie, Bhabha and Benjamin, translation is a notion
that means survival as a migrant is the person who has crossed the borders and must adapt to
the new environment in order to survive. For Hiroko as well, translation is survival in the
sense that it allows her to survive her loss by living on the borders of several distant worlds.
Using translation in her process of identity construction, Hiroko herself becomes a cultural
hybrid and shows her cosmopolitan attitude by performing translation as she uses the
languages she speaks to cross the cultural borders she comes across. Linguistic translation is
thus one of the mediums the character uses to actively build her subjectivity.
Rushdie’s concept of return to home is based on imagination. In his words,
… exiles or migrants or expatriates, are haunted by an urge to look back, even at the risk of
being mutated into pillars of salt. But if we do look back, we must also do so in the
knowledge- which gives rise to profound uncertainties – that our physical alienation …
almost inevitably means that we will not be capable of reclaiming precisely the thing that was
lost: that we will, in short, create … imaginary homelands, (Rushdie 10)
Thus it is impossible to return to the original homeland, it can only be re constructed in
memory. Furthermore his concept of homeland is not based on geography, it is rather spatial.
Past is a place of no return, as he says, ‘‘past is home, albeit a lost home in a lost city in the
mists of lost time.’’(Rushdie 9) Hiroko and Raza represent a true picture of this concept.
Hiroko has understood it very early in her life; when she leaves Japan; that returning to this
homeland will never be possible. Raza also has this in mind while leaving Pakistan for the
first time. This fact does not hinder in their future movement. They rather re construct their
identities through the languages they know. So Hiroko returns to her homeland in her
imagination when while in Karachi she meets the Japanese women, she uses her own
language, talks, jokes and laughs in her own language with the people of her own breed and
skin. Hence by cherishing Japanese festivities, cooking Japanese food at home and wearing
Japanese dresses she is able to relive her lost life.
According to Rushdie, sense of loss is transformative, it changes a person for the better, it
is positive and worth celebrating which can be clearly seen in Hiroko’s personality. For her
sense of loss is very strong but so is her adaptability. After the loss of her homeland and the
death of her father and fiancé, Hiroko cherishes every memory belonging to them, but does
not make these memories her only precious possessions and hence moves on. Her loss does
not hinder in her progression into the future. Hall (1996b) notes that
identities are about questions of using the resources of history, language and culture in
the process of becoming rather than being: not ‘who we are’ or ‘where we came
from,’ so much as what we might become, how we have been represented and how
that bears on how we might represent ourselves. (p. 4)

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Conclusion
Identity is therefore mediated by different representations, language practice,
memory, fantasy, and so on. Hence we see that Hiroko and Raza are multilingual
transnational and hybrid characters. They prove to be borderless persons and accept all
languages, cultures, nations, religions and societies with great ease. They may not have any
country to call it their own, but they have a home everywhere. For Rushdie, being an
immigrant is bliss. He says in Imaginary Homelands, “the immigrant who loses his roots,
language and social norms is obliged to find new ways of describing himself, new ways of
being human”. (Rushdie 66) This is how we see that humanistic values are cherished in
Shamsie’s Burnt Shadows. To put it in Chamber’s words,
Faced with a loss of roots, and the subsequent weakening in the grammar of
‘authenticity’, we move into a vaster landscape. Our sense of belonging, our language and the
myths we carry in us remain, but no longer as ‘origins’ or signs of ‘authenticity’ capable of
guaranteeing the sense of our lives. They now linger on as traces, voices, memories and
murmurs that are mixed in with other histories, episodes, encounters. (1994, 18-19)
Hiroko does not passively accept the various kinds of limitations that have been
imposed on her by events that are part of a nationalistic view, events that might have caged
her into a specific set of social as well as cultural, linguistic, and maybe geographical
limitations. On the contrary, she reacts to the occurrences that profoundly affect her life,
challenging the roles that social and political powers seem to have chosen for her. She enacts
a process of autonomous identity construction by crossing social and cultural boundaries as
well as frontiers among nation-states. As a consequence, she inhabits a hybrid space where
the never-completed process of identity construction develops through the negotiation of
several differences. Through such a discursive practice, the protagonist questions both social
norms and nationalistic ideas. Through the development of the story, questioning
nationalisms appears to be the trait d’union connecting the parts of the novel. Nationalistic
feelings and policies are indeed the reason that justify each of Hiroko’s movements from one
place to another, not only making her develop a transnational identity, but also prompting her
to sustain ideas of transnational solidarities.

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