Silence Is My Mother Tongue
A Novel
-
-
5.0 • 3 Ratings
-
-
- $9.99
Publisher 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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Addonia (The Consequences of Love) chronicles the lives of two siblings in a Sudanese refugee camp in his darkly poetic second novel. At the center is a young woman named Saba, whom the reader glimpses through the eyes of various other characters. The first of these is close friend Jamal, who has fashioned a makeshift theater in the camp using a bedsheet. At the book's outset, Saba is about to be placed on trial by a "court" administered in the camp for the spurious charge of incest with her mute older brother, Hagos. The remainder of the novel consists of short, loosely arranged flashbacks and occasional returns to the present narrative. Saba is inseparable from Hagos, and her circle also includes a fearful mother; a menacing character known only as "the midwife"; and Saba's confidante, Zahra, with whom she shares poetry and her deepest hopes. A businessman named Tedros arrives with his son, Eyob, and wagging camp tongues conjecture that Tedros plans to marry Saba, who is heartened when Eyob befriends Hagos. Against a background of desperation, poverty, and constant abuse, Saba dreams of education, escape, and a life free from oppression. The author maintains a strong voice with vibrant lyrical imagery, but the shuffled structure and murky chronology can puzzle more than enlighten. Still, Addonia casts a consistent spell on the reader.
