Silence Is My Mother Tongue: A Novel by Sulaiman Addonia

 

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.