[The following selection is taken from a critical analysis of the novels Resistance by Julián Fuks, Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie, and the movie Children of Men, directed by Alfonso Cuarón. For context, Resistance is a fictional novel, the narrator the youngest child of a couple fleeing 1970s Argentina, which had been couped by the dictator Jorge Rafael Videla. Home Fire is a retelling of Antigone with modern day British Muslims. Children of Men is a dystopian film set in a world where children are no longer born.]

In Resistance, Home Fire, and Children of Men, violence is enacted via the promise of “progress” and then the creation (or failure) of said “progress.” The future, or rather, the idea of the future, is always tinged with the threat of violence, be that physical or mental. In Resistance, this violence can be seen in Sebastian’s attempts to define his brother’s life in his novel, an inherently and self-admittedly harmful and limiting process. In Home Fire, Karamat Lone’s attempts to pull himself away from his Islamic background results in physical and mental violence as Eamonn is hurt and then unable to be saved from a terrorist attack targeted at the Lones. In Children of Men, the militia group known as the Fishes are fighting for refugees’ rights, but their promises are ultimately empty, as they are an auto cannibalistic group that kill to further their own political gains to no actual progress. It is not progress itself that necessarily causes violence, but rather these empty promises of progress that cause violence, promises that say “I can do this thing to create a better world” but that ultimately do not. The promises of progress seek to define, to shape, and to control, which is what ultimately causes violence as these promises come into conflict with reality.

Oftentimes, these promises are made with the assumptions that they will lead to something different from the past or that they themselves are already different from past promises. These are reactions to the past, as all things are, and as such must be subterranean trends. As [Saskia] Sassen (in her 2014 work Expulsions) says, these “new dynamics may well get filtered through familiar thick realities…and thereby take on familiar forms when in fact they are signaling accelerations or ruptures that generate new meanings.” Each of the reactions of the individual works are promising progress based on the past, a call to a bygone era that can never be achieved again, which is part of the reason they cause violence in such spectacular ways. In Home Fire, it is the draw of new problems that causes old problems to surface, and then the promise that one can be separated from both of these problems that causes violence. Karamat attempts to distance himself from Islam and his Pakistani background, an attempt at progress that tries to make it so that he is not Pakistani but instead just a politician, but he is unable to reconcile this desire with the reality that he lives in, leading to his inordinate rejection of immigrants in the UK, something that helps cause the death of his son at the hands of a terrorist bombing. Of course, to assume that this is merely a case of racism backfiring would be a mistake. Karamat is reacting to how UK politics (and broader culture) responds to Muslims and immigrants, an old problem, as well as the rise of terrorism, a new problem, to further his position in society, but this promise is doomed, as it alienates his family from him through his wife’s contempt and Eamonn’s rebellion.

Other moments of progress largely come from intentions to control a person or group of people to further one’s own goals, much like Karamat. In Resistance, Sebastian has to lie to himself to construct a story about his brother, saying that he is a “disappeared grandson” as it is easier than the truth, but in doing so he reduces him to the “single categorical condition” that he feared doing in the first place. It is not until the end that Sebastian realizes this impossibility that he must face, that he holds little right over his brother’s life even in the form of defining it, and the reader is left without knowing how his brother ultimately feels about his own definition within Sebastian’s book. Sebastian, throughout the novel and the promise (and self-admitted impossibility) of writing a book about his life in any encompassing way, is conflicted, creating a complex series of emotions and thoughts that leads him into mental conflict with himself. It is similar to the “social conundrum” that Sassen talks about, where “complexity [produces] brutality” on an extremely localized scale.

Largely, the characters in both books and the movie are promised or are promising to themselves a dream of freedom or autonomy. Sebastian’s imagination and book are a control over his own life and thoughts, which are in the end uncontrollable and unanswered. Parvaiz seeks the promise that Farooq has given him for meaning in ISIS, and Karamat seeks a better life for himself and his family. All of these promises are predicated on some form of control, however, which will always lead to conflict in some way, shape, or form. They are, ultimately, under the impression that they are controlling themselves, when it is some other force influencing their decisions, corrupting their autonomies. They are under the influence of “the romance of sovereignty…the belief that the subject is both master and controlling author of his own meaning” (from Achille Mbembe’s Necropolitics, 67-68). “Sovereignty” is, in this instance, defined by Mbembe as “the right to kill,” becomes dangerous; while sovereignty is a romantic ideal, it is also largely a reality for these characters, though mostly inflicted upon themselves. Much of the creation of their physical and mental spaces is through the process of extermination, with Karamat severing his ties to immigration and Sebastian picking and choosing just what it is he could define about his life in his manuscript. To create progress and to promise progress, things must be changed, and thusly, there must be “reorganization” or “radical surgery and hygienic intervention” (from Marcela Suárez-Orozco’s “The Treatment of Children in the Dirty War”: Ideology, State Terrorism, and the Abuse of Children in Argentina, 384-385). To have total control is an impossibility, however, and Sebastian’s parents even make a point of such, his father saying “Our children always transcend how we think of them” in response to Sebastian’s assumptions that his brother is too different from them. His promise is futile, as attempts to control eventually spiral away from the controller, leading to disaster through violent conflict. That which subverts the promise must be exterminated, lest the promise be broken, and many can only see progress as achievable through the displacement of people, whether that displacement be physical or mental.