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BN Book of the Month: Silence is My Mother Tongue by Sulaiman Addonia
The relationship between Saba and her brother Hagos is another beautiful part of this book. It is the crucial part of one of the themes of humanity, which the author explores in this book. Saba wants freedom, she wants an education.
Silence is my Mother Tongue is a book written by Sulaiman Addonia, an Eritrean writer who fled his home country in his early teens, after the Om Hajar massacre in 1976.
Adonnia’s second novel takes us through what it is like to live in a refugee camp, through the eyes of Saba, the protagonist. Saba’s experiences are so vividly depicted that you’re right there with her in the refugee camp. You feel the violence, the desperation and even the hope of the people who have had their lives disrupted, as they attempt to start all over.
The relationship between Saba and her brother Hagos is another beautiful part of this book. It is the crucial part of one of the themes of humanity, which the author explores in this book. Saba wants freedom, she wants an education. You can feel it in every page; the author forces you to see what it means to be a human being living in those conditions, and what violence does to us as human beings. It is for this reason that BellaNaija has chosen Silence is My Mother Tongue as our Book of the Month for December 2019.
