ABSTRACT
This chapter considers how dissidence is enacted by women martyrs. The chapter analyses three novels: Yasmina Khadra’s The Attack (2005), set in Palestine/Israel; Atiq Rahimi’s The Patience Stone (2008), set in Afghanistan; and Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire (2017), set in Pakistan and Britain. The chapter critically considers how each text depicts the act of suicide bombing—either literally or analogously—as it takes place within their specific sociopolitical and/or national context. In so doing, it traces how the act of martyrdom by each female protagonist represents an act of ‘corporeal testimony’—a means of communication which, when words fail, is witnessed affectively and viscerally. This ‘corporeal testimony’ characterises an expression of dissidence that confronts the national and/or political contexts within which it occurs, and the chapter consequently argues that the female protagonist in each novel, in the process of dying, embodies a resistant subjectivity.
