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Silence Is My Mother Tongue
Silence Is My Mother Tongue: A Novel | Sulaiman Addonia
2 posts | 2 read | 6 to read
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.
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Hooked_on_books
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Pickpick

Saba is a young woman in a refugee camp in #Sudan, but the location doesn‘t prevent her from being repressed by the people around her. She longs for an education and to become a doctor, but, of course, any way she asserts herself brands her a whore. I actually thought the beginning of this book was a mess, but I loved the second half.

#ReadingAfrica2022

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Jari-chan
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This book shows us western people a life the most of are lucky enough never to have: life in a refugee camp. We feel sorry for those people, but we do not know about their struggles, their thoughts, their dreams. The author has his own and poetical way of describing his characters and what they go through. He gives those camps a face, a voice, a soul.

@TheAromaofBooks #BookSpinBingo

TheAromaofBooks I love this title!! 3y
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