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Regardless of whether the United States was justified in dropping the
atomic bombs, the American’s unconditional support for his country
and his reflective protection of national interest irrespective of others’
suffering foreshadows that of Kim six decades later. After learning
what Kim has done to Abdullah and her son, Hiroko says to Kim in
despair, “[R]ight now, because of you, I understand for the first time
how nations can applaud when their governments drop a second
nuclear bomb” (370). It is, however, not the United States
per se
that
Hiroko criticizes but rather the strategies of imperial and colonial
differences adopted in dividing the world. Like her father, who is seen
by their neighbors as a “traitor” for his public criticism on the Emperor
and Kamikaze (7), Hiroko is critical of Japanese nationalism and
imperialism as well. In wartime Japan, she dreams of the day when
“the war ends there will be a ship to take her and Konrad far away into
a world without duty” (16). Years later when she lives in Pakistan, she
even compares “[r]idiculous” Islamic religious tests required of all law
students to Kamikaze’s loyalty to “Japan and the Emperor, during the
war,” for both manifest “[d]evotion as public event, as national
requirement” (147). From the marginal perspective of a Japanese
victim and a diasporic migrant as self-critical as Hiroko,
Burnt Shadows
manifests the importance of reflexive self-problematization as well as
border thinking in developing a critical sense of cosmopolitanism from
below.
Burnt Shadows
concerns not only how a self-critical individual
like Hiroko develops critical cosmopolitanism through the tool of
border thinking but also how human beings, beyond identities, are
connected by the commonality of their trauma experience in an age of
imperial expansion and globalization. Shamsie represents various
historical and personal traumas in different places, as revealed most
simply and evidently in the titles of the four chapters: “The Yet
Unknowing World: Nagasaki, 9 August 1945,” “Veiled Birds: Delhi,
1947,” “Part-Angel Warriors: Pakistan, 1982-3,” and “The Speed
Necessary to Replace Loss: New York, Afghanistan, 2001-2.” The four
chapters revolve around WWII, Partition, the Cold War, and the War