Tragic Form in Kamila Shamsie's Home Fire

This paper examines Kamila Shamsie’s adaptation of Sophocles’ Antigone in Home Fire (2017), a novel focused on Muslim identity, Islamophobia, and citizenship rights in contemporary Britain. It demonstrates that this novel is a multimedia work full of theatrical traces: a literary archive that preserves the dramatic quality of Sophocles’ play but also encompasses multiple other forms of media and performance, from theater and television to social media. The paper focuses not so much on how Shamsie has adapted the plot of Antigone but on her reworking of tragedy’s formal features or structures, such as dialogue, the chorus, and the messenger speech. Such multimedia theatricality facilitates in the novel something that Greek tragedy itself (especially Antigone) produces: a contestation of multiple voices for audiences to hear, critique, and put against their own. Shamsie’s manipulation of tragic form thus contributes to Home Fire’s political import.