BOOKS FROM ERITREASilence Is My Mother Tongue : A Novel
Description:
A sensuous, textured novel of life in a refugee camp, long-listed for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction On a hill overlooking a refugee camp in Sudan, a young man strings up bedsheets that, in an act of imaginative resilience, will serve as a screen in his silent cinema. From the cinema he can see all the comings and goings in the camp, especially those of two new arrivals: a girl named Saba, and her mute brother, Hagos. For these siblings, adapting to life in the camp is not easy. Saba mourns the future she lost when she was forced to abandon school, while Hagos, scorned for his inability to speak, must live vicariously through his sister. Both resist societal expectations by seeking to redefine love, sex, and gender roles in their lives, and when a businessman opens a shop and befriends Hagos, they cast off those pressures and make an unconventional choice. With this cast of complex, beautifully drawn characters, Sulaiman Addonia details the textures and rhythms of everyday life in a refugee camp, and questions what it means to be an individual when one has lost all that makes a home or a future. Intimate and subversive, Silence Is My Mother Tongue dissects the ways society wages war on women and explores the stories we must tell to survive in a broken, inhospitable environment.
Reviews:
(3 months ago) |
28 Aug, 2024
The writing in this book is beautiful and evocative and it is clear that the author has tapped into his own experience as a refugee to accurately portray what life in a refugee camp is like. The lack of privacy, the communal toilets in an open field, the nosy neighbours, the suffocating feeling of living your life in full view of everyone else, are so eloquently described that there is no escape for the reader from this harsh reality. But this book is not bogged down by this. Instead it focuses on the fierce and unrelentingly live between Saba and Hagos, their coming of age in an alien and hostile environment and their determination not to let the traditions and ingrained misogyny of their homeland hold them back from being who they want to be.
Silence is My Mother Tongue gives a voice to the tens of thousands of people displaced by war, famine and disease. It sheds a light on their plight, their helplessness and the drastic actions they may resort to to keep their dreams alive. They say that to understand what a person is going through we need to walk a mile in their shoes. It's not always possible to do that. That's what books like this one are for.
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