Silence is My Mother Tongue

In a time of war, what is the shape of love? Saba arrives in an East African refugee camp as a young girl, devastated to have been wrenched from school and forced to abandon her books as her family flees to safety. In this unfamiliar, crowded and often hostile space, she must carve out a new existence. As she struggles to maintain her sense of self, she remains fiercely protective of her mute brother, Hagos—each sibling resisting the roles gender and society assign. Through a cast of complex, beautifully drawn characters, Sulaiman Addonia questions what it means to be a man, to be a woman, to be an individual when circumstance has forced the loss of all that makes a home or a future. Sulaiman Addonia was born in Eritrea. He spent his early life in a refugee camp in Sudan having survived the Om Hajar massacre in 1976, and in his early teens he lived and studied in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. Having arrived in London as an underage unaccompanied child refugee without a word of English, he went on to degrees from SOAS and UCL.