Burnt Shadows

Though Raza is only featured in Parts 3 and 4 of the novel, he emerges as the second most important protagonist after Hiroko. Raza is also marked by Hiroko’s experiences in Nagasaki and is ostracized—first subtly, then more openly—by the neighborhood in Karachi for his half-Japanese features and for the assumption that Hiroko’s radiation exposure could cause physical defects in Raza and any of his children. Teenage Raza is desperate to fit in and desperate to please Sajjad, who longs for Raza to achieve the law career he once aspired to. Raza, like Hiroko, is a polyglot and learns, teaches, and translates even more languages than his mother. Harry notes that Raza’s gift for secrecy is innate, not only practiced, and Shamsie links this ability to Raza’s fear of not belonging. Raza’s desire for belonging is so strong, he pushes Abdullah into the mujahideen camp rather than risk Abdullah discovering his real identity. This act of selfishness comes to define Raza, who blames himself for the subsequent death of his father and spends his adult life attempting to find Abdullah and right the wrongs of the past. Ultimately, Raza achieves redemption, sacrificing himself to help Abdullah escape back to Afghanistan from New York.

Raza’s name is deeply symbolic, combining ideas of conquest and cosmopolitanism. Raza comes from Razia, his father Sajjad’s favorite Turkish-Muslim warrior queen, and Konrad references his mother’s first idyllic love. However, far from displaying nationalism, Raza’s conquest is an interior one, as his crisis of identity hinges on self-acceptance and self-forgiveness. He longs to please Sajjad and Harry, his two father figures, but is only able to self-actualize after losing them both. His German namesake is a frustration for Raza, who sees his middle name as another reason why he doesn’t fit in. Yet, it also hints at Raza’s inherent compassion for others and his refusal to participate in the most violent aspects of his work in secret intelligence. Raza is often in counterpoint to Kim, as they are both Americans of the same generation but with vastly different upbringings, backgrounds, and experiences. Raza and Kim create the final pairing in the multi-generational, cross-cultural story of the Weiss-Burtons and Tanaka-Ashrafs, and while both are compromised by the mistakes of the past, Raza proves to have more of Konrad Weiss’s idealism in him than Konrad’s great-niece Kim. 

Sajjad represents Shamsie’s most optimistic character and is a testament to the endurance and adaptability of the human heart. Sajjad is deeply loyal to his friends and family and has a strong sense of home in Delhi, yet his love of home never devolves into fanaticism or nationalism. Even as Sajjad is forcibly separated from his ancestral home, he finds a way to build a new life in Karachi via his openness to others and focus on his family. Shamsie uses Sajjad to interrogate colonialism in contrast to the imperialism experienced by Abdullah or the militarism experienced by Hiroko. As Sajjad learns to value his own culture over the imposed socioeconomic values of the British colonizers, he is empowered to define his future on his own terms, especially after James’s advice costs him his Indian citizenship. The mild-mannered Sajjad also allows Shamsie to explore a more secular relationship to Islam, as Sajjad’s participation in Muslim traditions is more guided by custom than piousness. Not quite as rebellious as Hiroko, Sajjad still reproduces some stereotypical parental pressures, namely hoping Raza will attain the career he once aspired to himself. In the end, however, Sajjad is even able to relinquish his dreams of class mobility out of genuine love for his son. Sajjad’s early insistence that his life will remain unaffected by political forces becomes a sad irony when he is murdered by a rogue CIA agent.

Harry Burton, bearing the signature red hair of the Weiss family, represents the effects of a lifetime spent justifying violence in the name of ideals. Harry’s arc is one of disillusionment, both with father and with country, as Harry prefers both his Urdu teacher Sajjad to James and America to England. Harry’s own sense of home is shattered by his abruptly concluded childhood in India, yet Harry finds welcome in New York City and quickly grows enamored of America as a nation of many peoples.

While Harry is inspired by his uncle Konrad’s cosmopolitan ideals and genuinely loves the country of his childhood years, Harry chooses the adventure of a life in espionage over his personal relationships. Harry’s entrenchment in the slippery ethics of covert operations also conditions him to justify all means by their ends and to excuse violence in the name of the perceived greater good. Unfortunately, as Harry ages and grows more cynical, the greater good becomes aligned merely with the goals of his employers, rather than his own ideals. Still, Harry is morally intact enough to be troubled by his own choices, even expressing fear that his daughter will discover his history of violence. In Harry, Shamsie explores the inherent incompatibility of cosmopolitanism with war, suggesting that no violence is truly justifiable and positioning pacifism as an ideal moral global philosophy to support cross-cultural relations.

Harry Burton’s daughter and only child, Kim Burton is first introduced as an angst-ridden, rebellious teenager and grows into an anxious, if well-meaning, adult. As a teen, Kim primarily represents the family and relationships that Harry sacrifices to pursue his dangerous career in secret intelligence. Shamsie also has Kim dye her red hair—a hallmark of the Weiss family—black, literally making her the “black sheep” of the family and indicating Kim’s lesser capacity for cross-cultural understanding.

As an adult, Kim’s primary motivation for being an engineer is her desire to control for all possible variables. This need also means that Kim has a lower tolerance for cultural differences than her father, Harry, or her grandmother, Ilse, possess. Kim does espouse liberal American values and makes attempts to be culturally sensitive but falls into a nationalist paranoia after the 9/11 attacks that is only worsened by Harry’s murder at the hands of an Afghan man. On more than one occasion, Kim displays a lack of consideration for global events and focuses only on tragedies that personally affect her. Though Kim is horrified by Hiroko’s accusations of bigotry after Kim reports Abdullah, she feels justified in her decision, and Shamsie uses Kim to close out a pattern of white characters—most prominently James and Harry—who seek to justify the violence they do to others by the assumption that others want to do even greater harm to them. Kim represents the mindset and unconscious biases that serve as obstacles to the cosmopolitan dream of her great-uncle Konrad Weiss. Kim struggles to accept Raza’s decision to turn himself in and ends the novel in a state of extreme guilt.

Ilse Weiss is the striking, red-haired half-sister of Konrad Weiss who forms a lifelong friendship with Hiroko. Ilse Weiss is first introduced as Elizabeth Burton, having adopted an Anglicized name to suit her British husband and hide her German connections during World War II. Ilse is immediately kind to and protective of Hiroko but still deeply classist and suspicious of Sajjad. In Ilse, Shamsie creates a character who is both limited by her existing prejudices and persistent in addressing them, evincing some of her brother Konrad’s natural tendency toward cosmopolitanism. In contrast to her husband, James, Ilse proves capable of transcending her prejudices and growing her understanding of and appreciation for cultural differences. Understanding that Hiroko has chosen to follow her heart, Ilse makes a present of her diamond necklace set to the newly married Tanaka-Ashrafs, indicating her understanding of how to use her wealth to benefit the other couple without falling into the paternalism of her husband.

Later in the novel, Ilse struggles with her estrangement from her son, Harry, sad that Harry’s job in covert operations prevents them from greater intimacy. Ilse is deeply attached to her granddaughter, Kim, but worries that Kim’s need to control everything around her will prevent her happiness. Ilse is shown to be funny and at peace in her late life, and Shamsie uses Ilse as an example of someone who is able to grow and change over time due to her ability to liberate herself from repressive cultural forces. Ilse’s death in Part 4 signifies the transition from generation to generation and the end of the narrative of moral certainty in war frequently depicted as typical of World War II.   

Ilse Weiss’s husband and Harry Burton’s father, James Burton appears as a point-of-view character only in Part 2. James is an attorney but prefers the social aspects of his job to the actual work. Shamsie uses James to portray typical attitudes of colonization; James is culturally insensitive, explicitly racist, paternalistic in his relationship with Sajjad, and deeply classist. Although not intentionally cruel, James cannot see beyond the social and cultural norms of the British Empire. His total submission to social convention renders him incapable of intimacy, as he prefers to maintain stoicism and total authority within his household. James’s inability to be vulnerable inhibits his friendship with Sajjad and dooms his marriage. Shamsie uses James to explore the isolating repression of the British Empire and also to demonstrate a through-line from the British Empire to American imperialism by tracking the evolutions of James’s prejudices in Harry and Kim. James’s reported disdain for both modernism and Americans indicates the difficulty of some in older generations to adjust to a rapidly changing world and to accept globalization with a mindset of cooperation rather than domination. 

Raza first meets Abdullah as a 14-year-old Afghan refugee living in Sohrab Goth, a neighborhood of Karachi, Pakistan. Abdullah is full of bravado, angry and hurt over the devastation of his home in Afghanistan, yet still carrying the insecurities of the child he is. Abdullah helps to smuggle weapons from the CIA/ISI into mujahideen training camps and is convinced by Raza to join the mujahideen along with the rest of his brothers. Abdullah turns in Raza on the suspicion that Raza is with the CIA, and, not understanding that Raza has lied about his ethnicity, lives with guilt over betraying who he thought was his Afghan friend. Abdullah is initially introduced as driving a truck painted with the image of a dead Soviet, yet his actual capacity for violence is small. Although he remains passionate about his Muslim faith, Abdullah leaves the mujahideen after the Cold War, unwilling to support the Taliban in Afghanistan, and becomes a taxi driver in New York. Abdullah represents both Kim Burton’s nationalist paranoia and Raza’s hopes for redemption, as his flight from the FBI (which has identified him as an undocumented immigrant) signifies to the white, American Kim that he is untrustworthy and to the Pakistani Japanese American Raza that he is afraid. Abdullah also allows Shamsie to explore the state of mind of Muslim Americans post-9/11, as Abdullah alternately fears for his own safety and is frustrated by those who have no other context for Islam than extremism.