Silence is my mother tongue (2018)
Sulaiman Addonia
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Compelling and written with tenderness and fury, this beautiful novel will resonate in readers’ minds with its clarity of vision, empathy and depth of insight. It is likely to become a classic for its undeniable literary stature.
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Addonia’s novel has the following dedication:
To the girls – my playmates in our refugee camp: we had no toys but only our imagination to play with. Our playfulness was our painkiller in that place of scarcity. I thought of you, and the childhood friends we saw buried, whenever I came close to giving up. This book is for you.
The novel (his second) took him ten years to write; the text is a work of narrative art drawing strongly on the visual arts of cinematography and painting and, as the cited dedication indicates, a transformation and reincarnation based on – while transcending – the author’s childhood life in a refugee camp. In the book blurb and in interviews, Addonia has mentioned that he had an Ethiopian father, but when he was about two years old (at the time of the protracted war between the neighbouring countries), his Eritrean mother took him and his siblings to a camp in Sudan, where she left him with his grandmother (when he was three). The little boy fell silent at that abandonment, and this makes both the novel’s title and the character of Hagos – the older, mute brother of the main focaliser, Saba – probable derivations from the author’s own memory. Addonia later on obtained early education in Saudi Arabia, prior to arriving as an unaccompanied minor in the UK, where he obtained degrees from leading universities. At present, he resides in Brussels, where he has founded and leads organisations assisting artists with issues of displacement and refugeeism. Both of his novels are widely acclaimed, and a third is due out in the foreseeable future.
Addonia uses the framing device (in several senses of that adjective) of a single young man, Jamal, who used to work in a cinema in Asmara, the gracious capital city of Eritrea, and who uses the simplest of materials – strung-up white sheets, cardboard boxes – and his imagination to construct both “TV” shows and a “cinema”. Saba understands his achievement:
But this cinema was another way to tell a story rooted in their tradition, their life. What she was watching was reality, not a film made in the West. What was unfolding before her eyes in the compound she was staring at through the cinema was part of her own life, made in the camp. (185)
This significantly titled Cinema Silenzioso consists of a square opening cut in a white sheet; it has two “sides”. In the above citation, we look with Saba from “behind” the sheet to gaze – as Jamal has done for ages, mainly at Saba herself in even her most secret moments – at a central part of the camp (from up on the hill where Jamal lives). In other scenes, Jamal’s (non-paying) cinema patrons are seated close to but on the camp side of the square hole in the sheet, behind which various volunteering camp dwellers take turns to perform, narrating stories from their lives verbally or in performances (mime or dancing). Saba’s description, of course, alerts us to how Addonia transforms homogenising descriptions of life in a refugee camp (as a story primarily of dull boredom, deprivation and isolation) into a compelling account of diverse lives, of complex histories and of maintained traditions, but also of individuals challenging the rules by means of larger aspirations, or because they find in customary conduct a prison to their full selves and self-expression. Like Jamal, Addonia enables readers to see the beauty and originality of lives lived even in these bleak and barren surroundings.
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Addonia, throughout, evokes lives in their fullness, paying attention to bodily, emotional, imaginative and intellectual aspects of the experiences of the camp dwellers, as they encounter one another and go through changes – drawing on beautiful or harrowing memories and dreams.
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Addonia, throughout, evokes lives in their fullness, paying attention to bodily, emotional, imaginative and intellectual aspects of the experiences of the camp dwellers, as they encounter one another and go through changes – drawing on beautiful or harrowing memories and dreams. “Scandalous”, allegedly “unmentionable” acts like female masturbation, less “usual” and therefore forbidden sexual or erotic encounters and relationships, fluid sexual orientations and so on, are deeply repressed and fiercely hunted down, in terms of rigid rules of sexual conduct (applied mostly to women and girls, with males’ gender-based violence and heterosexual promiscuity and adultery generally left unpunished). These rules are upheld by both the imam and the priest, as well as the midwife, who, as the only person with curative skills in the camp, is given great moral authority. Saba’s free spirit and fierce defiance of disciplinarian persecution lead her to make alliances with a minority of camp dwellers who are in several ways kindred spirits. However, the great majority of those consigned to camp life comply with the “rules” of the unappointed “authorities” – among whom the judge (who is actually a former senior judge who was ousted by the “revolutionary”, authoritarian “dergue” who came to power under threat of war between Ethiopia and Eritrea) plays an important role. He summons camp dwellers who are accused of misconduct to trials over which he presides, with a court clerk appointed to keep record of these events. These trials contrast with the performances, shows and exhibitions observed in Jamal’s “cinema” and “television”, where there is no question of punishment meted out to those enacting or narrating “forbidden” dreams. Nevertheless, there is an occasion when one of the camp’s bullies, a muscular young man named “the athlete”, tears up the paper silhouettes of the cardboard figurines Jamal has created to “act out” a risky relationship between a young Italian woman (a “remnant” of the former colonial forces in Eritrea) and a young local: a cross-racial, bireligious and politically transgressive bond considered (even as represented by cardboard cut-outs!) unbearably offensive to the sensibilities of the athlete and his cohorts.
Jamal spends most days (and nights!) gazing at Saba in her downhill home, where she lives with her tradition-minded mother (with whom the “wild” girl is often at odds, especially in her determination to complete a tertiary education and qualify as a doctor) and the mute, serene, beautiful Hagos – the older brother with whom Saba shares a deep love, each protective of and generously helpful to the other. Jamal is non-judgemental; he is fascinated by and could be said to “approve” of Saba’s every action. He is also tolerant of all the camp dwellers, many of whom gave him shelter when he first arrived in the camp, poor, hungry, lonely and homeless. He states:
It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say it was their merciful solidarity that kept me alive [initially] …. Some families allowed me to share their children’s beds and their few spare items of clothing, so that at night both their children and I slept naked as our clothes dried outside. Our limbs intertwined, sweat glued us together. (18)
Clearly, Jamal is aware of but tolerant towards the full spectrum of the camp’s inhabitants: pimps and prostitutes, caringly unselfish people and nasty gossips. His attitude, and the “cinema” in particular, presents a compelling illusion of freedom, for which some of his performers pay dearly: a boy who divulges his sexual fantasy about an uncle’s wife is beaten unconscious; a girl about to be married off to the young man of her parents’ choice admits the identity of her “true love” (15) and is disowned by her family. There are no actual police here, but the confinements of a deeply conservative ethic are strongly upheld – Jamal calls it “the unwritten law of silence, of family honour, of solidarity among the dispossessed”, and cites an exchange between an unnamed girl of 15 and Saba. The girl said (presumably with bitterness) that “even God has been fooled by us”, but Saba replied: “But since God is of our making, we are only fooling ourselves” (19). Jamal adds the information that this young girl died in labour – having been impregnated by a rapist (apparently unpunished). Addonia, “through” Jamal’s and Saba’s thoughts and experiences, conveys to us the fully normal spectrum of human life as it continues even in the bare setting of a makeshift refugee camp in the Sudanese wilderness.
Addonia’s fairly brief novel is presented in the form of 36 intense chapters, each named to indicate the main event depicted in it, or to evince a stage in the broader narrative. These chapter titles serve in a shorthand manner to indicate the flow of this narrative: “The trial”, “The arrival”, “The mosque in the sand”, “The expired sardines”, “The open toilet”, “The midwife”, “The television”, “The blood”, “TV: Liberation of a man”, “The new blanket”, “The second-hand clothes”, “Disgust is an acquired taste”, “Rice”, “The Committee of Elders”, “The businessman”, “Men are easy to read”, “The prostitute”, “The mother’s name”, “Sharing”, “The razor”, “Women dying like men”, “The shop”, “Meat”, “The first virginity test”, “A woman”, “The broken language”, “Free love, fenced”, “The white cloth”, “The dance”, “The goat”, “Cinema Silenzioso”, “The map of the country”, “The wedding”, “Freedom: The double price”, “Love shared” and “The departure”. At 30 pages, the opening chapter is relatively long; it previews much later events, whereas nearly all the other chapters follow a chronological sequence and are short. The chapter “The mother’s name” consists of a single word (!), Mehret (136), which is the name of Saba’s mother, but which is given here for Saba’s best friend’s rebuke when Saba refers to her as “the mother” (135). The first chapter, “The trial”, refers to the second time Saba is placed on public trial, which is held in the “cinema” complex in the space where Jamal lives, as it is the only place sufficiently large to accommodate the huge, diverse population of the camp, all summoned to attend the trial. This actually occurs at a much later point in Saba’s narrative, but it provides initial glimpses of this young woman’s unconventional, daringly compassionate nature. It also provides readers with the first indicators of the midwife’s brutality and of Jamal’s obsessive voyeurism (though it is more than that) with Saba, whom he describes masturbating. The chapter ends with a hint of the accusations of sexual “looseness” and incest ascribed to her, and points forward to much later developments. Jamal observes that “Saba was the woman who had dared to live by her own rules, who they would now bring back in line through a trial”. However, he adds further, sceptical remarks to this observation:
But no one had asked how it was possible that Saba was still a virgin after many months of marriage. Why hadn’t she and her husband consummated their vows? Or, perhaps, everyone had known the answer but had kept quiet in the hope that what was not uttered out loud lost its power to destabilize. (30)
Saba, her mother and Hagos (her mute brother) are driven to this camp (along with other refugees) by a kind Sudanese lorry driver. They are the first arrivals in a “camp” where hardly any facilities are provided, except for some small hut-like dwellings. The family fled Eritrea and the incursion of war, and arrived in Sudan after a harrowing journey, each of them with only a jute sack of a few chosen belongings. Saba had to leave all her beloved books behind; and never will the camp authorities build the school they promise repeatedly to establish.
Saba’s mother is rather feeble and very much under the thumb of her friend, the midwife. In this, she is very different from her headstrong daughter and her own, impressive mother, of whom we learn (through Saba’s fond recollections) that the grandmother had:
… found a way to communicate her desire for her neighbour by planting flowers against the wall separating them. Although her trader grandmother grew up without parents, she taught herself to read and write, founded a business before she turned twenty, and travelled from one country to another, from one lover to the next. Her longevity owed itself to tej wine, khat and sex. (39)
Clearly, Saba inherited not only her grandmother’s bedroom (in their old home), but this ancestor’s free-spirited nature and entrepreneurial spirit – though she will follow her own course. Saba had a photo of her grandmother, one of a woman freedom fighter, and an impressionist painting of a nude white woman bathing, on the walls of this bedroom, but it is Hagos (she discovers later) who secretly brings this painting with him to the camp. Saba’s books included works in local languages, such as “History in Tigrinya [and] translated Russian novels in Amharic, [as well as] poetry in Arabic”. Saba had been sent to school very young, after a doctor had told her parents that Hagos could not benefit from schooling, since he was incurably mute. Hagos was terribly humiliated at this replacement by his sister, and was initially resentful of her, whereas Saba so immersed herself in her studies that she all but lost her connection with her brother, though she was appreciative of the latter’s acceptance of doing housework (including cooking, cleaning, preparing her school lunches and ironing her uniform). Their circumstances in the camp apparently “revives” their deep and tenderly protective love of each other (their father left the family when Saba was quite little, exhausted by his wife’s melancholia).
In the camp, Saba is soon befriended by a cheerful girl of her own age named Zahra. “Zahra had come to the camp with her grandmother. Her mother [a major] had stayed back in the trenches, fighting the independence war” (46), leaving her daughter with the promise (or hope) that they would soon be able to return home. A glamorous girl named Samhiya of about the same age, very conscious of her beauty and attractiveness to boys (particularly the athlete, who is evidently the leader of the pack in the camp), comes to chat to them. Upon seeing Hagos, Samhiya artlessly exclaims: “Are you sure you are a man? I mean, you are so beautiful, that’s what I meant,” stammering in embarrassment when “the boys behind [her] sniggered” (47). Samhiya is at the river – some distance from the camp, but its only water source – when Hagos (followed by Saba, out of concern for her brother) dives into the water to retrieve the precious water bucket of a fellow camp inhabitant, as the stream takes it away. She asks Hagos whether he would teach her to swim, since it is he who taught his sister, and Saba agrees on his behalf, eager for the lonely, isolated young man to make a friend – even (possibly) a “girlfriend”. Noticing the elegance with which both her mother and her brother eat the meals that Hagos prepares from their meagre camp rations and some herbs he brought from home, Saba realises that these fine table manners signal her “difference”:
It was a skill Saba had failed to inherit. The invisibility that a woman ought to inhabit. Saba was heard and seen. She argued. Talked. Laughed. She left traces of her presence everywhere. At home, for not being girl-like. At school, for being the best. Even at the market, where she fought back. Once she’d squeezed a man’s bottom, to repay the compliment, she said. The man, an off-duty policeman steeped in tradition, slapped Saba for stooping so low, and for turning, he said, our culture on its head. (58)
These are the qualities that appeal to Jamal, whose “voice” may be ventriloquising Saba’s narrative.
Saba and Hagos share the same blanket at night, sleeping top-to-toe together in unashamed physical intimacy, as they have no mattresses and their mother needs to sleep alone on their only other blanket. Hagos chooses Saba’s dresses and often adds make-up, head scarves and jewellery to her outfits. Saba sees this as compensation, “giving” him her skin, since she has “stolen” his opportunity (as she sees it) for intellectual advancement. She attempts to share what she learns with him, occasionally witnessing his heartbreakingly unsuccessful attempts to speak. He has balked at her attempts to teach him to write and read, though much later on, when she has started getting English classes from one of the camp’s aid officials, she persuades Hagos to become literate in this language with her, since they can start at the same “level” from the very beginning. By the end of the novel, both siblings are able to express themselves in broken but understandable English, and hence are able to record their thoughts, feelings and experiences. Saba is constantly assuring Hagos of her love for him in both words and tender touches, and he evidently depends on their physical closeness at night in his lonely, isolated life, not being one to join the other youngsters in rough games. Saba believes that she can read his thoughts in his eyes, and perhaps she can, but she remains frustrated by their inability to communicate their ideas and emotions verbally.
The camp contains “many dialects and idioms” and many, many “tribes”, so that Saba wonders: “Was it possible for a whole country to have evacuated to a camp? Was it possible for a land bombed day and night to seek rest elsewhere, along with all its inhabitants?” (50). Addonia conveys that a refugee camp like this can have people from the same country, region, village or city, ranging from those with revolutionary aspirations and fighting spirits to those nostalgic for colonial times – contrasting experiences of loss and a yearning for entirely dissimilar ideals – a diversity of emotional and ideological orientations noticeable also and even within a tiny family like Saba’s, with her mother and her brother. Saba’s friend shares a memory of one kind:
As they trudged back home [bearing heavy bundles of wood from the forest, wood being their only source of fuel] Zahra told the story of the day her mother had left for the trenches. “I was eight,” she said. “It was early morning, my mother and I hadn’t slept all night long. My mother sat against the bed and I rested my head on her chest and cried. When the morning came, I had never hated the sun as much as that day. I hoped it would disappear, that our life would be one long night.” (68)
Contrasting with her friend’s poignant memory is a conversation (on which Saba eavesdrops) between two old men reminiscing about Asmara. One of them focuses on what life was like under various colonial regimes – Britain’s and fascist Italy’s. Accused of an implicit ideological preference for life under Italian rule, his companion replies that with one’s age, one’s memory becomes selective – but, as he explains, under the other old man’s somewhat badgering and challenging questions, favoured and more vivid memories are not a question of political preference (at least in his own case). When the first man insists bitterly: “Like our land, our minds and memories have been franchised between the different European countries. That’s our problem,” the other man responds by saying that preferred memories are of tender, personal encounters, telling his companion of how he thought his heart had died when he saw what the Italians did to his father. But an older woman, whom he was attempting to console after learning that she had been abandoned by her husband, gave him an unforgettable insight: “Madam Hadith, though, understood. That love can come from unexpected places and in its tide one can drift. We kissed. I was fifteen, and she was about fifty” (73). On reflection, Saba can now understand that “freedom … means different things to different people”. In her own case, she would not feel confined in the camp if there were a school for her to further her studies and keep alive her dream of studying medicine, whereas “Zahra wanted to help her mother with her quest to free a country, while Hagos didn’t need an independent country or a school or a job. He was as carefree in the camp as he was back home” (81). To her, Saba knows, Hagos is “an ideal brother”, for “around him she was free. Unlike her friends back home, she had never had to report her every move to the man in the house.” But then, Saba starts worrying that this “perfection” (both Hagos in his gentleness, and their beautiful relationship) cannot last. She is likely to move on eventually into a new, different life, while he would then be left behind: “an old, sexless, loveless, lonely Hagos trailing [someone like] the youthful athlete” (83–4). She dreams of persuading the gorgeous Samhiya to fall in love with Hagos, and, realising this is unlikely, she goes to Samhiya for an erotic encounter (which her friend is happy to indulge in) so that she can (as she believes) bring the sensations back to her brother to share. It is at this point (in the chapter named “The blood”) that one learns of one major source of the siblings’ unusually close relationship. When they were children, the similar shapes of Hagos’s male chest and Saba’s pre-adolescent flat front obsessively concerned their uncle. On one of their last visits, the uncle asked both children to take off their underwear “to make sure of their gender”, and that night he came to lie between them in bed. “That’s when Saba realized that … their society turned every child … mute” (87). He made both children turn on their stomachs before anally raping them both and smearing the blood of one child upon the other, planting not only “doubts, fear, anger and pain” into them, but “seed[ing] a bond between them” – both now “mute[d]” (88).
Another of the abuses Saba suffered was when the midwife found out that Saba’s mother had not had her daughter “circumcised” as tradition required, because Saba’s grandmother had threatened to behead her if she had the cliterodectemy inflicted on her beloved granddaughter. But Saba’s mother is too weak to resist the midwife’s insistence after the old woman’s demise. The ritual mutilation is nevertheless prevented when the blanket the midwife places over Saba catches fire – causing terrible burn wounds to Saba’s thighs, which remain discoloured after her recovery. Saba’s independent spirit remains unsuppressable, and she continues to pleasure herself sexually. At night, when there are no gossips or posturing youths on the streets, she can walk about freely, though she notices Jamal quietly following her – “her shadow by night … her dark side” (101). During one of these walks, Saba discovers that a woman is running a bar for men to drink secretly; this woman also enjoys taking the occasional customer into her bed. There are other transgressors in the camp, she sees. Her mentor (an Ethiopian schoolteacher) comforted her before the family fled, saying “a new place always offered … a fresh start”, but the camp’s “Committee of Elders” merely perpetuate the gender-skewed ethos such men have always upheld – sentencing a raped girl to “bear her sin upon her back” (emphasis added). This grotesquely unfair decree (to which the victim’s mother objects, only to be slapped and accused in turn by the father) means that the girl has to carry a man double her weight:
The girl’s back bent. Yet … she didn’t wince. Girls, [Saba] thought, are used to carrying things: firewood, water, … their brothers and sisters … as well as themselves and their own sorrows. No amount of weight can crush a girl. … But Saba also knew that this girl’s real punishment was the reputation inflicted on her. From now on, she would be confined to the backroom of life, to a place where she would be forgotten. … This girl, Saba thought, would be a moral ghost story for generations to come. (108)
Soon after, Saba (on her way to fetch water from the distant river) encounters an elderly man. Although he at first (after complimenting her growing beauty) attempts to “persuade” her to have sex with him, he leaves her with healing words, saying that after previously experiencing war and exile, he has “learned never to leave [his] desires behind in the ruins” and not to confuse “being a refugee with the end of life” (110).
A change comes to the camp when a large and “different” group of refugees are brought there, along with their possessions. They are of the same nationality, but have lived for years in the Sudanese capital as businessmen, tradespeople and professionals. Out of the blue, the local government decided that as foreigners, they should be confined to the camp with their compatriots. Bewildered by this utterly unforeseen change in their circumstances, the newcomers can only resign themselves to camp life. A wealthy businessman, Eyob, has been assigned three huts for himself and his brutish son, Tedros – so blatant an imbalance, under circumstances where large families have been crowded into single huts, that it causes an outcry. But Saba sees the possibility for improving her and others’ circumstances and prospects in the arrival of this man, along with boxes and boxes of goods for sale – goods of which the older camp dwellers have been long deprived. Ever enterprising, Saba goes boldly to the man’s place and asks him whether he could employ her as assistant when he opens a shop. But instead, the man asks her to come and do housekeeping work for him and his son; since Saba wants to earn and save to fund her dream of further studies, she agrees at once. She thinks she will thus be more like her mother, who did domestic work to pay for Saba’s schooling, and for once find favour in her mother’s eyes, for her mother and the midwife disapprove of the fact that in their home, Hagos does the cooking and cleaning and care work for their rather sickly mother. When her brother comes by the dozing businessman’s home while Saba is washing clothes, he splashes cold water on him – perhaps deliberately, Saba thinks; maybe Hagos is jealous of her doing “outside” work. But, it seems, Eyob has noticed the young man’s exceptional beauty. He visits the family’s home that evening and reassures Saba that he (unlike his rude son) saw no insult in what happened. He then asks Mehret (their mother) whether he might take Hagos with him for company on his hitherto lonely evening walks – despite his muteness. He tells Mehret enigmatically that “silence can make company even more interesting”. Saba is greatly pleased for her brother: “Hagos was no longer invisible, she thought. People could see him now that he walked beside the businessman” (122).
The midwife, bossy and (in her own eyes) all-knowing as ever, is delighted at the new links between Saba’s family and this rich widower. She “corrects” Saba’s mother’s perturbation, Mehret having been informed by another mother that the whole camp gossips about Eyob’s “suspicious” fondness for her son. “That man told me my son is … I can’t even say it,” Mehret laments. The midwife, for her part, responds complacently:
“We don’t have these things in our culture. Eyob is a man of God. He was married and he has a son. How can he do that if he goes with boys, ah? But people in this camp are jealous of your son and you.” The midwife laughed. “Listen to this carefully. Men, my dear, are easy to read. The businessman is in love with Saba and he is waiting for her to become a woman.” (126)
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How perfectly this captures the tone and thinking of such a blind, self-appointed “moral guardian”.
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How perfectly this captures the tone and thinking of such a blind, self-appointed “moral guardian”. At the river, where she has gone to do the family washing (a few days later), Saba notices a young girl “whimpering” and goes to comfort her, discovering that “she had been beaten by her parents … when they found out she was working for a prostitute”. She had no idea that the woman was “a sharmota”, the girl says – describing Nasnet (as she is named) as “generous, full of joy” and with “a good heart”. Feeling that “she could do with some laughter”, Saba goes at once to Nasnet’s home and asks the woman to give her the job that is now vacant, persisting in her request despite Nasnet’s initial reluctance to employ her, since she now knows how her own occupation stigmatises anyone working for her (128–9). Although Saba (still naïve in many respects) imagines that Nasnet’s face should show “the pain, the unhappiness that a sex worker must feel” (130), nothing of the kind is discernible on her new employer’s visage. Still, the midwife and a few other friends of her mother’s are outraged, warning Mehret that the new job will compromise Saba’s chances of getting married to the businessman. Saba won’t budge, only telling her mother: “I am sorry I am not the kind of daughter you always wanted to have. I never will be” (132). When Nasnet, the next day, senses that Saba has been rebuked and reviled, she tells her to stay, but to take the day off, as she (Nasnet) wants to soothe Saba by giving her a scented bath so as to wash the midwife’s supposedly cleansing but foul-smelling herbs off her. Apologising in tears to Saba for her having been stigmatised, Nasnet tells Saba that “sometimes” she is “like a man, so forcibly charming”, and that she herself never “cho[se] for [her] job to be a secret”, but she adds with great insight that “society makes it so and then they try to oust you and ostracize you for the secret they have demanded and imposed in the first place” (133) – “but Saba returned home absent-minded. The happiness she experienced around Nasnet brought anxiety to her,” as she knows that the relationship will be interpreted as a “rebellion” (134) by her mother. When her friend Zahra turns up to visit Saba, she is gloomy, sulky and unwelcoming. Zahra exhorts her to retain perspective, reminding her that her own mother “carrying a gun does not make her stronger” or more admirable than Saba’s. When Saba refers disrespectfully to Mehret as “the mother”, Zahra rebukes her, saying that she expects Saba to recall her mother’s name when she next visits (135). Listening, one evening (with Hagos), to the judge once again “preaching” to the camp dwellers about the necessity for solidarity, Saba concludes that, along with Islam and Christianity, “tradition is the third religion in the camp” (137).
The businessman, some days later, while Saba is doing his and his son’s washing, is overheard by her (speaking to Tedros as if she weren’t present) giving a less “traditional” meaning to how the refugees can support and aid one another, than the judge and the Committee of Elders do. “My younger self [he says] is finding a new life in a refugee camp, [… adding:] It is never too late to be who you truly are. Hagos taught me that” (138). He informs his son that, despite earlier insisting that he wanted to return to the city, he now wants to settle down in the camp and open a shop with the goods he brought with him. He does so, but the venture is a failure, as the camp dwellers are saving whatever money they may have for their eventual (hoped for) return to their former homes. The shop falls to ruin, but not long afterwards interesting alternative possibilities (as Saba immediately realises) arise when there are unexpected new arrivals at the camp. They are a small nomad family with a large herd, and she sets off to inform the businessman, suggesting that (in partnership with the nomad, Hajj Ali) the businessman could be a middleman – or at least benefit – if the new family can supply and sell meat, eggs and milk to the camp’s inhabitants. Not only does such a promising development transpire, but the agreement between the men is concluded in Mehret’s hut, with Saba requested to make tea for them and listening to what they say. In addition, Hajj Ali (the newcomer) is evidently struck by Saba’s beauty and her innovative spirit.
One evening, as she is visiting Nasnet, a pounding on the latter’s door alerts her to the arrival of a very violent client – Tedros, the businessman’s now drunken son – and Nasnet urges Saba to hide immediately under her bed. From here, Saba “witnesses” his brutal assault on her friend. She aids and comforts Nasnet after the oaf has left, by gently kissing and soothing her hurt parts, unafraid of breaking taboos and responding to Nasnet’s need.
Saba’s English lessons (taught by the aid worker’s assistant known as “the Khwaja” because of his light skin) are proceeding well. She is not afraid to challenge her teacher’s suggestion that the West is superior in humanitarianism by reminding him that the bombs dropped on her people were supplied by America and Russia, who sold weapons to the brutal Ethiopian rulers as “aid”. Saba is slowly acquiring some English by means of her lessons, but is (predictably) suspected of having sex with the Khwaja, since she spends evenings alone with him in his hut for this educational opportunity. The midwife, perhaps even the instigator of the gossip, insists on subjecting Saba to a so-called “virginity test”, and Saba is compelled to submit to another violation of her bodily dignity – which, of course, confirms that she is a virgin. Not long afterwards, Saba has her first menstruation. Her mother ululates in celebration, but Saba finds it “bewildering” that “a woman’s passage into adulthood wasn’t through her intellect, her character, but through her vagina” (162). On learning of Saba’s physical “advance”, the midwife officiously announces that she is immediately going to inform the businessman, whom she has decided is Saba’s “intended”, having assumed, unasked (since Saba’s father left their family when she was six), the role and authority of the girl’s second parent. The midwife says there is “no time to wait, she is ready”, Saba herself (in the traditional way) being given no say. The news spreads fast, and several hopeful suitors have come to ask for Saba in marriage, when another one arrives unexpectedly. It is Hajj Ali, the nomad. “She is still as strong as an ox,” he says (unflatteringly) of his wife, “but age hit her here [pointing to his chest] … while the capacity to love in my heart swells with the passing of every day” (162). As Saba (who has been sent outside while Mehret speaks to Hajj Ali) sits with Hagos, it becomes clear that Hagos is extremely agitated. Saba senses not only her brother’s “fury” as he stabs the earth with a stick, but his intense desire to communicate something crucial to his sister at this point. So, she proceeds yet again to attempt to teach him to write and read, as this time his intense need will assist the process. She starts by showing him how to write their two names, together (164).
Not long afterwards, Eyob (the businessman) arrives, telling Mehret that “the midwife came to see me, but I think there is a misunderstanding, [adding:] Saba is still young and despite what you have heard, it was never my intention to marry her.” The crowd of bystanders gasp in surprise and demand to be told why, then, he befriended Hagos. With great dignity, Mehret asks for all to hear: “Mr Eyob, but you also need to understand that people have been talking. They see you come here every evening, bringing gifts, and they wonder why a middle-aged man, who is rich and from Asmara, would befriend a young man who is a poor countryside boy and mute” (164–5), adding:
“Saba is a woman now and I want to protect her reputation. Honour is what we have left. I urge you not to come here again.” [At this,] Saba followed the businessman’s eyes as they settled on Hagos. Hagos’s hair quivered in the breeze. It was as if the moon and stars shone only for him. It was as if everyone else vanished. Eyob took a deep breath. “Okay,” he said to the mother, without looking away from Hagos. “As you wish, I would like to ask for Saba’s hand.” (165)
But Hagos is deeply unhappy at the prospect. Saba works out at last that her brother is appalled by the thought of being separated from the sister he loves uninhibitedly – so much so that it is he who is probably the painter of the “Frenchwoman” bathing; he disguised his “scandalous” knowledge of his sister’s naked body by giving the woman in the painting a white skin. In her uncertain English, Saba records a wish for the future: “[O]ne day Hagos paint me/ as me is/ black with all wounds” (168). And she negotiates with Eyob that, instead of a dowry, she wants Hagos to live with them once she has married him. A hut is erected for Hagos, comfortably furnished and painted blue, and Saba asks the businessman to fence the compound to give them privacy – defying the indignant mutterings of the camp’s other inhabitants, who see the “exclusion” as insulting.
Hagos, Saba and Eyob are at peace with the plans, but it is revealed next that Tedros, Eyob’s awful son, claims to have been deeply in love with Saba and to be terribly hurt that the most serious of taboos will now place her (as his father’s wife) forever beyond his reach. This complicates matters for Saba – already mocked by men like Hajj Ali for marrying a man not “capable of doing anything except taking evening walks” (172). Tedros comes dragging a goat on a leash, which he declares he bought for the wedding, and when Saba tells him that she “no longer eat[s] meat”, he responds (sniggering nastily): “[Y]ou will soon be meat for my father” (176). He has taken to displaying a white cloth in his shirt pocket, telling everyone that he (as his father’s “best man”) will place it in the couple’s bed on their wedding night to test whether Saba is a virgin. Aware that Jamal, the filmmaker, is in love with her, Saba goes to him one night, aware that “his fantasy … [is] hers too”. As she lies on his body, naked like him, Jamal describes the moment of fulfilment lyrically, saying that Saba was:
… spreading her map of love over [him]. “This is our time,” she said. “This is my time.” I wanted to speak [Jamal states] but I was breathless. Saba caressed my face as I inhaled the scent of her, the scent of her history, the battles she had won and lost, her rage, her frustrated dreams, the violence on her thighs, the rivers of desire inside her womb. … She filled my mouth from her rivers, … riches invading me, … Saba erasing the boundaries that have separated us for so long. (179–80)
Tedros, the utter contrast to Jamal, continues to harass Saba, sneering at her that she is “marry[ing] an old man for his money” and exposing his genitalia to her, bragging (of course!) that Saba “will never see its equivalent” (181–2). She deals with him by mocking him, so he abandons his threatened anal violation of her, instead taking out his frustrated fury and jealousy on the hapless goat, slashing its throat and cutting off its testicles. These he tosses at Saba, saying, “Here, feed these to Hagos so he can get some balls on him” (182).
Looking down on Eyob’s compound one night when she is at the Cinema Silenzioso, having just been bizarrely and humiliatingly “serenaded” with a pathetic, drunken Tedros’s “love song” (for all to hear), Saba observes Hagos and Eyob, “two Habesha men gazing at each other, two Habesha men who intertwined their fingers as they kissed in Cinema Silenzioso” (185). It is this now fulfilled love that she has made possible that soothes her bruised heart at this point, one may surmise. Hajj Ali comes to visit Eyob (at least ostensibly so), but arrives (clearly deliberately) when Saba is there, washing clothes, able to overhear everything he tells Eyob. The information is evidently intended to entice Saba, since Hajj Ali is aware of her aspiration to continue studying and qualify as a doctor. There is, he reports, a village within reach (ten hours away on foot, eight on a cart) where they have a first-rate school. “Hajj Ali smiled at Saba” (187), well aware how intrigued she is. He draws a crude map to indicate where the village is. Hajj Ali – hardly subtle in his persuasive (one might say blackmailing) technique – divulges not only that he has already constructed a cart that can shorten the trip to the village, but that, because he is a Sudanese citizen, he can serve as the “permit” legitimising a camp inhabitant’s journey beyond the confined, designated area; and, moreover, he is the only man in the camp who knows the way. He only needs, Hajj Ali says, to be offered “something to excite [him]” to make him undertake the journey “on that inhospitable road”, telling Saba (when Eyob has left): “I will wait for you. … My price is reasonable when it’s your future that’s at stake.” But Saba stares silently at “the herder who could no longer distinguish between meat and her body” (189) – Hajj Ali having arrived earlier ostensibly to hand over the wedding gift of a bag of meat to Eyob. The other threat she has to negotiate remains in the compound: Tedros, who stations himself at the window of the wedding chamber as the guests are leaving, unable to hide his erection.
Eyob never touches Saba during their first night together, and the next morning, after she serves him breakfast, he picks up the food and drink, saying he is going to the blue-painted hut to share this meal with Hagos. Seeing her beautiful brother in the morning light, Saba concludes that he has “found his place. His paradise” (192) – but it is evidently not hers. Saba goes to see Zahra, whose grandmother greets the new bride with ululations, but Zahra is furious and deeply disappointed that her friend has ostensibly given up her dreams of education and a professional qualification in settling for mere marriage, despite always previously proclaiming that she would never wed. Saba tells Zahra that she has merely been practical, because it is clear that the promised camp school will never become a reality and that they are trapped and stuck where they are. “You are the last person I thought would marry,” Zahra says. “I know what you are going to say: I did it for Hagos. But the days we girls do things for our families are over.” She wants to “learn selfishness from [her] mother”, who left her at eight to go and fight for their country (196). Zahra is also sad because she feels that her mother has been killed, while she is stuck in a refugee camp. As the two young women sit chatting, now in Saba’s compound, Tedros and his macho friends show up, staring at the girls. Tedros orders Saba to make tea for the group of youths, once again loudly belittling her. Zahra, whom Tedros has “noticed” and whom Saba asks to leave for her own safety, refuses to leave her friend alone in such company, since Eyob and Hagos are out. She will sleep in the kitchen hut, she insists. Saba retires to her marital bedroom. Soon afterwards, she hears a terrible scream, and, rushing out, finds Zahra grievously hurt and bleeding on the floor of Tedros’s hut. “Help me,” her friend begs her (197). Saba does the only thing she can, running to Hajj Ali and offering him her body on two conditions: firstly, he may only enter her anally, because that is the only way she will allow a man who does not love her to have sex with her. Secondly, he has to allow her to take Zahra with them to the village hospital, otherwise her friend will die of her injuries. “But he set a heavy price,” Saba tells Hagos. It is her brother that Hajj Ali actually wants, and she cannot allow this to be done to Hagos. Yet, her brother insists. Saba’s last night in the camp is spent sleeping between Eyob and her brother, both men loved by her. The next morning, Saba leaves with Zahra, Hagos having made the terrible sacrifice – for her part, Saba is now resolved to take Zahra’s mother’s place on the battlefield. Hagos says (or perhaps, later, writes?) of her that Saba “freed herself before she freed her country”, also freeing him, and “freed love in our compound, in our camp” before setting off “to free a piece of land” (203).
Compelling and written with tenderness and fury, this beautiful novel will resonate in readers’ minds with its clarity of vision, empathy and depth of insight. It is likely to become a classic for its undeniable literary stature. Those reading the full text for themselves will discover much more to admire than what has been evoked and quoted above.