

Engaging Politically from the Margin 289
character [Vivian] so representative of this contemporary obsession
into an historical novel, Shamsie posits the colonial moment as a
precursor to the clashes in its wake” (n.d.). Despite her elite,
Westernized, and avowedly secular background,
9
Shamsie, a feminist
and a migrant writer living in London, can be seen to be distancing
herself from progressive Western feminists and, at the same time, she
continues to actively engage in local feminism in Pakistan, which she
spares no effort to advocate, starting with her earlier works. As Ruvani
Ranasinha notes, Shamsie’s first novel “depicts a local feminist
campaign for illegally dispossessed widows,” and the fourth,
Broken
Verses
, embeds a familial narrative of an inspirational feminist activist
“within a larger story of the resistance to the rise of the Islamic right,
Zia ul-Haq’s military dictatorship and oppression of women” (2012:
203). It is without question that, as depicted in these earlier works,
“[w]hile Shamsie’s fiction depicts Pakistan as a deeply patriarchal
country, she is equally concerned to map the thriving women’s
movements that have campaigned against the social and legal strictures
against women” (Ranasinha, 2012: 203). Similarly,
A God in Every
Stone
contains both Zarina, with her “face uncovered” when she
“rush[es] into a street filled with men” (Shamsie, 2014c: 352), and
Diwa, who is “bare-headed” (257) when she is shot by the English, a
pair of Pashtun feminists who prove that Vivian’s Western feminist
ideology is wrong. In them are shown Pashtun women’s desires for
both social change and political independence.
The political and social activism of Zarina and Diwa challenges
some Western feminists’ emancipatory cosmopolitan projects, within
which hides a racist view of Muslim women as passive victims, as
evidenced in the novel by Vivian’s response. In the post-9/11 era, as
9
As Claire Chambers points out, Shamsie comes “from an elite
muhajir
family, her
mother’s relatives being
taluqdar
feudals from Lucknow in India, and the Shamsies
belonging to an eminent family of Syeds from Delhi” (2011: 207). Despite her
claim to be a member of the middle class, Shamsie received education in the
United States, and, having written several best sellers, she is able to profit as well
from the global political economic system that has enabled her to make homes in
multiple locales.