{This post published early by mistake, so some of you may have seen it before. Apologies for the misclick.}
Sulaiman Addonia‘s Silence is My Mother Tongue (2018) tells the story of Eritrean refugees displaced into a camp in the Sudan. The novel is hard to categorize: it’s not a love story, despite it being a story of several loves, and its focus is far more on how life evolves in the refugee camp than on any part of the conflict that brought people there.
There is a lot of misdirection in the narrative: it opens with a chapter focused on what turns out to be a minor character, but one who observes life in the camp as if it were a movie being projected on a white sheet behind his hut, which is a pretty inventive and neat image/framing device. The true focus of the story are two siblings who have, in essence, traded their culturally approved gender roles. The sister is brilliant, strong-willed, and–before being sent to the camp–on her way to a level of academic success pointing towards medical school, an almost unheard of height for young Eritrean girls, even in the capital city of Asmara. Her brother is mute, delicate, and happiest in the strongly coded feminine cultural roles.
The success of this reverse mirroring is highest when Addonia is writing about the young woman, capturing at different points of the narrative, her insight, intelligence, and motivations with a clarity that is compelling and impressive. It is, predictably perhaps, at its weakest when he calls outright attention to their roles, sliding too far towards the tell side of the classic show, don’t tell dictum.
The gendered critique of the social order of the camp, and Eritrean/Ethiopian culture in general, is pointed and biting: the struggle of the sister to be more than an object of exchange, a thing to be moved around between men, dictates most of the major plot points. Her future is mirrored between the comparative behavior of a conservative midwife (conservative in the sense of traditional, seeking to preserve cultural traditions–including a thwarted attempt at genital cutting) and a prostitute in the camp are, which drift, again, perhaps towards being a bit too “on the nose.”
Still, there are images in Silence is My Mother Tongue that will stay with the reader for quite some time, and the voice of the young woman refuses to be silenced. Additionally, the sketch of the refugee camp, as a place of normalcy, of social structure, of conflicts that are solved through established community processes, is very much worth the read, especially as a counterweight to the usual media presentation of such spaces.
#WhatIWishICouldDo
I love the sister’s voice, and think Addonia’s ability to inhabit a precocious teenage perspective is quite compelling. She is never trivialized or dumbed-down, while still retaining some of the age-appropriate impulsive recklessness.