ERITREA

silence is my mother tongue

by sulaiman addonia

“The night Saba’s trial was announced by the camp’s court clerk, I was sitting on a stool in front of my cinema screen. Cinema Silenzioso.”

So begins this extraordinary novel set in a refugee camp in Sudan. The opening scene is narrated by Jamal, a young man who had worked at the Italian Cinema Impero in Asmara, before escaping the conflict in Eritrea and fleeing to the refugee camp in Sudan. Jamal constructs his Cinema Silenzioso by stringing up a large white bedsheet between two wooden poles, with a square cut out in the middle of the sheet. This opening serves as the “screen” through which life in the camp is reflected and from his hut on a hill, Jamal watches the silent action of the every day comings and goings around the camp. “I placed it near the crest of the hill on top of which my comp0und was located. Many thought I had done so to let the full light of the stars and the moon cascade over the performers on the open screen, the camp behind them existing in isolation. Like a mural, an artifice of a bygone era.” But this is not the only reason Jamal has chosen this site for his screen. “The real reason, though, was different. From the hilltop, looking through the screen when the light was right, you could see into Saba’s compound… I could watch her all the time, her world a part of mine.”

And so we are introduced to Saba, a young woman who has come to the camp from Asmara with her mother and her brother, Hagos. Saba guides us through her days as a female refugee waiting, and waiting, and waiting, for her life in this new, strange country to begin.

Addonia has crafted an extraordinary novel around the idea of silence. Saba’s brother Hagos is mute, and Saba and he live almost a single life. Without words, Hagos is unable to negotiate life on his own, and so he takes care of many of Saba’s domestic needs, while she goes to school, speaks for him, protects him, and brings the world to him through her experience. But the silence in this book is not only physical, it is something thrust upon so many of the people through tradition and religion, because of gender, sexuality, ideas of societal roles, and through language.

Saba’s and Hagos’ close relationship and interdependence gives them both a strange, unexpected freedom that allows them to slip through and across gender lines, tradition, and social expectation, and challenge their cultural and societal ideas of how boys and girls are different and how they should live. This freedom comes at a cost and the siblings must make hard choices in order to protect and support one another. When we do finally hear Hago’s voice, through the written words in the strange language Saba has a taught him, we discover the depth of his love for his sister and his awareness of what she has sacrificed to keep him safe, and loved.

Behind each word of this beautiful novel is the parallel story of the author’s own experience living in a Sudanese refugee camp as a child. Addonia’s author’s note is so moving as he acknowledges his mother—“Sadiyah: I thank you for taking me out of the refugee camp and saving my life”. And his grandmother—”Mebrat: thank you for bringing me up, … for allowing me to be quiet when I didn’t want to talk as a child. You saw that silence was my mother tongue.”

From beginning to end, this book was a pleasure.