Silence Is My Mother Tongue
Sulaiman Addonia · 2019
A refugee camp in Africa where a brother protects his mute sister. Addonia's second novel represents the most underrepresented literary geography (the refugee camp as place) and treats its characters with full complexity and dignity.
The case against
Addonia opens with a trial staged in the camp's makeshift cinema, then drops it for a long flashback that never quite circles back. The novel moves in lyric tableaux rather than scenes, so plot arrives late and thin, and the taboo-breaking around bodies does work that character development should be doing.
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