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Engaging Politically from the Margin 285
focused on is the possible reflexive self-understanding of not only the
subaltern but also the colonists. Such changes might be partly
accounted for by Shamsie’s dual citizenship and her settlement in
London, which appear to have affected the ways she addresses
Pakistan’s and Britain’s domestic politics as well as their interaction.
During the period between 2009 and 2014, when the novel was
written, Shamsie was living in London. Just as London gradually
became her main residence, its landscape, politics, and history were
also combined in the novel in a way rarely seen in her other works. In
“Tri-Sub-Continental,” Shamsie claims that England and the United
States were present in her earlier fiction “only because they are the
places from which people return to Karachi or to which people go and
become cut off from home or fear becoming cut off from home” (2002:
90). In
A God in Every Stone
, however, London and Britain play an
important role.
8
Shamsie herself makes it very clear that, being “the
first novel I’ve written in the time I’ve been resident outside Pakistan,”
A God in Every Stone
is “as much about the UK’s history as Pakistan’s”
(2014b: 8). Furthermore, she foresees an increasingly important role
for Britain in her future writing and life, as she is “interested to see
what happens in the next decade or two now that I’m living in the UK”
(8). With her settlement in London and growing interest in British
history and politics as the nation interacts with the world, Shamsie’s
critical cosmopolitanism concerns a dynamic relation between the local
and the global that, as Delanty (2006) has argued, may hopefully
transform and redefine the self-understanding of not only the
periphery but the center.
In
A
God
in
Every
Stone
, through Vivian’s traveling between
London and Peshawar, Shamsie represents the political and social
8
Several critics have noticed the importance of London and Britain in
A God in
Every Stone
, but not all are satisfied with the novel’s representation of the
transnational space. Michael Duffy, for example, claims that, “[f]or Shamsie[,]
England has always been a peripheral space where characters recoup or retreat”
(n.d.). Rajender Kaur (2014) likewise contends that Shamsie’s representation of
Britain is less detailed and thought-provoking than that of South Asia or the
Middle East.