Silence is My Mother Tongue: Language, Gender, and
Spirit in Displacement
1.
Sulaiman Addonia’s decision to adopt the name Sulaiman
Sadiya–Mebrat alongside his given surname is both a familial and diasporic
gesture, at once literary and existential. It reflects the layered negotiations
of identity across Ethiopian–Eritrean heritage, refugee subjectivity, and
British literary life. The surname Addonia, inherited from his Ethiopian
father, anchors him in tradition, while Sadiya–Mebrat, drawn from the names of
his mother and grandmother, inscribes a matrilineal bond of affection into his
authorial self. Such cultural naming practices are common within diasporic
communities, where identity is stitched together from fragments of lineage and
displacement.
Raised in a Sudanese refugee camp under the care of his
grandmother—his father killed in the War, his mother working in
Saudi Arabia—Addonia’s childhood was marked by maternal absence and matrilineal
protection. This biographical texture resonates with the novel’s feminist
orientation: the recovery of silenced female voices and the prominence of
matrilineal storytelling. In Silence is My Mother Tongue, feminist recovery and
maternal narrative modes are not incidental but constitutive, shaping the
novel’s very grammar of witness and survival.
2.
The ruptures and silences in Addonia’s relationship with
language—shaped by successive displacements from Eritrea to Sudan, then Saudi
Arabia, and finally London—are inscribed in the very choice of his novel’s
title. Born in 1974 in Umm Hajer, Eritrea, under Ethiopian occupation (1962
onwards), Addonia’s childhood unfolded against the backdrop of a long war of
annexation (1961–1991), marked by massacres, exodus, and refugee flows. One of
the bloodiest episodes was the Umm Hajer massacre of 1976, in which his
father was killed, forcing the family into a Sudanese refugee camp.
The Ethiopian regime’s prohibition of Tigrinya and
Arabic—languages of the local population—was a theft of mother tongues, a
linguistic annexation that mirrored political domination. When his mother left
for Saudi Arabia while he was only three, the child retreated into silence.
Attempts to learn Amharic in the Sudanese camp were fraught: it was the
language of violence and of his father’s death. Later, as a teenager in Saudi
Arabia, he rejoined his mother, and at fifteen arrived in England as an unaccompanied
minor, knowing not a single word of English. Learning Arabic and English
amounted to a process of erasure: each new tongue drove out the old, each
acquisition intensifying his estrangement from the past.
Yet over time, Addonia mastered English, pursued degrees,
and eventually, in Brussels, found the emotional maturity to translate
childhood trauma into literature. These linguistic wounds are refracted in the
novel through the figure of Hagos, whose condition is both “silent and
silenced.” Between Saba and Hagos, silence itself becomes a language: a private
lexicon only they can understand, a mother tongue forged from muting and
survival.
3..
The Umm Hajer massacre, which forms the historical backdrop
of Silence is My Mother Tongue, unfolded within the larger Eritrean–Ethiopian
conflict. Sudan, at that time, was both a battlefield and a geopolitical fault
line: a refuge for civilians fleeing Ethiopia’s “scorched earth” campaigns, and
a base for Eritrean liberation fronts (ELF and EPLF) to gather arms, mobilize
fighters, and conduct political activity. In the Cold War logic of “the enemy
of my enemy is my friend,” Sudan supported Eritrean rebels, while Ethiopia
retaliated by backing the SPLA insurgency in southern Sudan against Khartoum.
Ethiopia’s notorious scorched-earth policy systematically
destroyed the means of survival for civilians suspected of aiding
rebels—burning villages, poisoning wells, slaughtering livestock, and razing
crops. The military declared openly: “We want Eritrea’s land, not its people.”
The result was a “humanitarian desert,” a landscape emptied of sustenance and
saturated with terror.
It is from this devastated terrain, and specifically from
the victims of the Umm Hajer massacre of 1976, that Addonia’s characters emerge. The
refugee camp setting is not merely backdrop but the novel’s crucible: a space
where silence, pleasure, and survival are negotiated against the memory of
dispossession. The camp becomes both archive and stage—an archive of collective
trauma, and a stage where Saba, Hagos, and others enact fragile forms of
resistance, intimacy, and desire in the shadow of annihilation.
4.
Sudan, especially in its eastern borderlands, became dotted
with refugee camps that functioned as “little Eritreas”—spaces like Wad Sherif
camp, which served as the prototype for the novel’s setting (today part of
northern Sudan). As the novel reflects, these camps were not merely temporary
shelters but structured communities where tens of thousands lived for decades.
They became sites of ethnic intermixture between eastern Sudan and western
Eritrea, even amid political rivalries.
Yet the camps were also subject to surveillance and control.
Sudanese law and the shifting interests of the Khartoum government imposed a
“cinematic” model of security—an unblinking eye trained upon the refugees. In
Silence is My Mother Tongue, this surveillance is dramatized in Saba’s trial,
where morality committees, ostensibly defending national and cultural identity,
enforce patriarchal codes with severity. The camps thus become microcosms of
the very structures of domination the refugees had fled: spaces where
patriarchal authority and moral policing replicate the oppressive values of the
homeland, even in exile.
5.
Silence Is My Mother Tongue (2018) is a semi‑autobiographical
novel written in a poetic register. It portrays the “forgotten” refugee lives left in the wake of the Eritrean struggle for
independence. By centering on the inseparable siblings Saba and Hagos, Addonia
expands the refugee experience beyond mere survival, framing it instead as a subversive
struggle to preserve identity, negotiate gender differences, and discover
“silence as a private mother tongue” amid the ruins of war.
At the axis of this resistance stands Saba, a character who
enacts a kind of role reversal against gendered expectations. While her brother
Hagos embodies a “feminine” stillness—absorbed in cleaning, fetching water, and
preparing food—Saba relentlessly pushes against the suffocating boundaries of
gender in the Sudanese refugee camp. She immerses herself in reading, thinking,
and study, activities coded as “male” pursuits. The memory of her lost
schooling is felt as a wound, as though something had been cut away from her
body; books become her weapons. She cannot submit to the camp’s law that
prescribes marriage and motherhood as the sole curriculum for women.
6..
The novel opens with Jamal’s imagined cinematic vision
(Cinema Silenzioso), a “view” of camp life that functions as a framing device.
Into this frame enters Saba’s body, the object of Jamal’s fascination, which
makes the device more than structural—it becomes thematically charged. Jamal
is, in one sense, the “cinema eye”: the gaze of surveillance itself. At the
same time, he is a voyeur, seeing women’s bodies as mere objects of sight and
consumption, stripped of agency or desire. The novel underscores that patriarchal
violence is enacted not only through physical wounding or rape but also through
the gaze—the male gaze as a process of domination.
Against this surveillance, Saba’s secret but habitual self‑pleasure
becomes a doubled act of resistance. It refuses both the mutilation of the body
and the reduction of the female form to image. Her clandestine discovery of
pleasure, Samhiya’s bold desires, Nesnet’s humiliations as a sex worker, Zhara’s
pervasive fear, and the midwife’s cruel
enforcement of patriarchal codes together mark the contradictory world of
femininity in Addonia’s novel. Pleasure exists, but
always under the shadow of threat; tradition survives by disfiguring the female
body through mutilation. Each woman embodies a different negotiation—compromise
or struggle—for survival and desire within patriarchal violence.
7.
For both Saba and Hagos, memory is the site where wounds
originate. Their uncle is not merely an enforcer of sodomisation but also the
one who compels silence, muting their testimony and extending violence into
language itself. He becomes an agent of negation, doubling his domination
through violation of the body and erasure of speech.
The bond between Saba and Hagos is thus “queer” not by
virtue of sexual orientation but in the sense of resisting systemic cruelties.
It is a solidarity of violated bodies, a trauma‑bonded intimacy that defies moral
codes and patriarchal law. Their shared memory becomes resistance against
enforced muteness.
In this sense, the uncle functions as a dark mirror of the
midwife. Where the midwife imposes mutilation in the name of tradition, the
uncle weaponizes silence to preserve patriarchal secrecy and bodily domination.
Together they embody two faces of negation: the mutilation of the body and the
muting of language. Against them, Saba and Hagos forge intimacy as survival,
reclaiming memory as a counter‑archive to patriarchal violence.
8.
Saba stands trial under the accusation of an incestuous bond
with Hagos. Yet the “community eye”—the panoptic force of fear and
conformity—does not intimidate her. The midwife, the most threatening presence
in the camp, embodies this social eye in corporeal form: guardian of
patriarchal values, enforcer of virginity tests, and executor of female
mutilation. For refugees, danger is not only the scorched earth of the
Ethiopian military but also the internal cultural burning that corrodes from
within.
Saba refuses the virginity test expected of a “good Eritrean
woman.” In a society where women are often reduced to transactional objects and
victims of forced marriages, she reclaims her body. Her relationship with
Tedros is not romantic fantasy but a calculated move to secure a future for
herself and Hagos. By assuming the role of protector, Saba fills the void left
by the absent father figure, in yet another gesture of overturning traditional
gender expectations. In a camp where boys are hunted as well as girls, her
efforts to shield her mute brother are read as a threat to the social order.
Even though their past is determined by geopolitical
catastrophe—the Umm Hajer massacre—Saba refuses to let the label “refugee”
erase her spirit. She walks “like a soldier,” disregarding the male gazes that
await her collapse. In a camp built from fragments shored against ruins, where
state and law have disintegrated, Saba’s defiance carries a clear message: old
gender binaries are not only irrelevant but themselves another prison. Her
resistance insists that survival must mean more than endurance—it must mean the
refusal of patriarchal confinement.
9.
The triangular relation of Saba–Tedros–Eyob exposes two
faces of patriarchy. Tedros embodies naked coercion and the objectification of
the female body, while Eyob cloaks the same patriarchy in the fragile veil of
romantic love. Against both, Saba’s silence becomes resistance: she refuses to
yield to the logic of the system or to grant victory to patriarchal scripts.
Through this refusal, her silence itself becomes triumph—a counter‑language
that preserves agency even in the midst of domination.
Eyob’s failure to recognize Saba as an equal partner reveals
how conventional notions of love, within the conditions of the refugee camp,
amount to yet another cage. In Addonia’s novel, silence is not passivity but a
subversive grammar: a refusal of coercion, a rejection of objectification, and
a denial of romantic confinement. Saba’s silence thus crystallizes as agency, a
counter‑script
that unsettles the patriarchal order from within.
10.
If Saba can be called the sword of the family, Hagos is its
shield. His muteness is not a limitation but a self‑chosen,
profound act of withdrawal that mirrors Saba’s
rebellion. In the hyper‑masculine, militarized atmosphere
of the camp, Hagos’ refusal to perform “manhood” is itself a revolution. By
embracing tasks coded as feminine—cleaning,
fetching water, cooking—he creates a protected space that
allows Saba to pursue intellectual life. Where Saba acquires “manhood” through negation, Hagos embodies
femininity through care.
In a world ordered by the noise of war and the discipline of
elders, his silence acquires the dignity of nonviolent resistance. Because he
cannot be reached, society cannot break him; his refusal of access makes him an
enigma to the community gaze that relentlessly pursues Saba. At the novel’s
end, Hagos’ self‑sacrifice enables Saba to escape the prison of female
obligation and secure a future beyond the camp. He offers his own body in place
of hers, paying the “heavy price” demanded by Haj Ali for Saba and Zahra’s release from human
trafficking. His final gesture—moving lips to whisper love in farewell—becomes
the ultimate validation of their shared life, a testament that silence itself
can speak.
11..
Beyond a narrative of survival, the novel’s conclusion plays
a decisive role in its evolution toward active recovery. Hagos’ final
act—surrendering his “manhood” position for the sake of Saba’s education and
intellectual growth—becomes the pledge of his own freedom in exchange for her
reclaimed agency. Saba, however, does not seek the conventional “Western”
asylum typical of African liberation projects. Instead, she longs to join the
Eritrean liberation army, transforming her identity from intellectual student
to fighter.
Breaking the limbo of refugee camp life, Saba achieves
freedom even before the nation itself, as Hagos observes. The novel insists
that personal emancipation from social and gender expectations must precede
political independence. Though physically separated, the siblings preserve
their dignity through the private language of silence, which shields them from
the camp’s surveillance gaze.
The recognitions advanced by the novel are clear: the
promises of traditional family security, embodied by figures like Eyob, are
hollow. Saba’s calculated transaction for freedom, and Hagos’ substitution of
his body to evade the midwife’s moral policing, reveal that true “family” is
not defined by gender roles or village laws. Rather, it is forged in the shared
weight of historical trauma and in the silent offering of love—a lighthouse
amid ruins. In the end, Silence Is My Mother Tongue insists that exile is not
only a story of endurance but of subversive recovery. Through Saba and Hagos,
Addonia shows how silence, memory, and desire become counter‑languages
that preserve dignity against the ruins of war and patriarchy. The novel’s message is clear: freedom begins not with nations, but with
the reclamation of agency in the most intimate spaces of life.
