Fiction contests Islamophobia by leaving temporal parallels for readers to discover

Evidence

The novel is blocked around significant crisis points, including pre-Partition India, Zia’s Pakistan just after the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, and the post-9/11 moment of the war on terror. Flashes of memory fill in the intervening years for characters and the reader. Indeed, the novel has a particular interest in time, something indicated in the opening pages, where a fragment of prologue offers us a proleptic snapshot of the novel’s end, with a shackled Raza awaiting his inevitable transfer to Guantánamo Bay. This foreshadowing continues with the first words of the novel proper: “Later, the one who survives will remember that day as grey.” These words immediately throw us into the future beyond an as yet unnamed tragedy. They work with the central symbolic image of webs and shadows to establish a delicate interconnectedness buoyed by memory. But they also gesture toward the slipperiness of the past; we are then told that the weather was actually sunny on August 9, 1945, the day of the Nagasaki attack. Viewed from a retrospective vantage point that takes in the more recent moment at which the novel ends, the idea of a cataclysm descending from clear blue skies calls forth images of New York on Tuesday, September 11, 2001. This link is not stated for us. Rather, the temporal resonance—like others, such as that between Japanese wartime mistrust of Europeans and post-9/11 Islamophobia—is left for the reader to pick up on. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 419

Categorization

• XREF: Directly feeds the reader’s hinge project: Shamsie’s implicational technique (leaving the Nagasaki-9/11 parallel unstated) is a method they can test against how Hamid and Naqvi handle 9/11 resonances.
• ADDENDUM: The ‘cataclysm from clear blue skies’ bridging Nagasaki and 9/11 parallels the sacrificial-grief imagery discussed in the sacrifice essay — catastrophes framed as fate descending on the innocent.