Exploring Female Agency and Resistance in Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire

Abstract

This research article investigates identity struggles, familial obligations, and resistance movements while depicting the multidimensional nature of female empowerment in the late 2000s in Kamila Shamsie's novel The Narrative of Home Fire (2017). The three main characters, Isma, Aneeka, and Parvaiz, face challenges because of political unrest and Islamic duties together with personal goals in British Muslim society. The research evaluates feminine characters who battle for freedom and resist conformity in Home Fire by utilizing visible and invisible ways of defying established norms in their contexts. Through pursuing education in America, Isma displays quiet defiance, which opposes the expected roles in her family. In contrast, Aneeka conducts open resistance against both family rules and state Muslim identity discrimination during her fight to retrieve her late brother's body. Through her female characters, Shamsie establishes an analysis of resistance that showcases personal sacrifices while exposing social control among religious institutions and political systems that seek to dominate Muslim women. The book delivers a feminist rebuke of the simplistic Islamic woman stereotypes by showing their dynamic roles in handling both personal and public aspects of their lives and their drive toward independent choices. The character perspectives in Shamsie's work investigate both the philosophical framework of resistance and the factual expense that resistance creates.