Silence is My Mother Tongue, Sulaiman Addonia
Silence is My Mother Tongue, Sulaiman Addonia
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Silence is My Mother Tongue

Author: Sulaiman Addonia

Narrator: Adjoa Andoh

Unabridged: 7 hr 5 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 09/10/2020

Synopsis

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.

About Sulaiman Addonia

Sulaiman Addonia spent his early life in a refugee camp and went on to earn a master's degree from the University of London. His novel The Consequences of Love was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and has been translated into more than twenty languages.

About Adjoa Andoh

Adjoa Andoh was born on January 14, 1963 in Bristol, England as Adjoa Aiboom Helen Andoh. She is an actress and writer, known for Invictus (2009), Casualty (1986) and Fable (2004). She has been married to Howard Cunnell since March 2001. They have three children.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Andrew on August 22, 2022

Saba is an intelligent girl who is doing very well at school and dreams that one day she’ll qualify as a medical doctor. But when she is forced to leave trouble torn Eritrea she leaves behind not only her schooling but also the comfortable family home. Instead she is delivered across the border to a......more

Goodreads review by Monika on May 18, 2021

The act of physical growth was perhaps connected with the most frequently asked of all questions. What is your mother tongue? There used to be limitless answers, to each child, their own. As an adult, however, there is but only one. SILENCE!! Silence is a lack of presence; it is the absence of an ind......more

Goodreads review by 8stitches 9lives on October 25, 2018

Silence Is My Mother Tongue is Sulaiman Addonia's second novel and it's an impassioned one at that. It perfectly highlights the sheer power books can have on those who choose to pick them up and the impact and indelible imprint they can leave on their readers. I feel that one of the reasons this nov......more

Goodreads review by Inderjit on August 11, 2019

The reverberations of  life in the refugee camp in which 'Silence is My Mother Tongue' dominate the novel; the feeling of suffocation as the characters are stifled by the never-ending feeling is misery and poverty. This is coupled with, however, Addonia's deep-rooted sense of humanity and powers of......more

Goodreads review by Erik on April 03, 2021

Silence Is My Mother Tongue is a moving story of bucking the traditions that tie us in place. Saba and her family are refugees in a camp just across the border from Eritrea, a country torn apart by civil war. Her brother, Hagos, is mute, but she finds herself united with him as she pursues her drea......more

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