Review of SILENCE IS A SENSE by Layla AlAmmar (New Release)

 4 Stars

The narrator is a young Syrian woman living in an unnamed English city.  Traumatized by her journey across Europe from war-torn Syria, she has been diagnosed with psychogenic mutism.  She isolates herself from the outside world; she admits, “I can go months without contact.”  She spends her time watching the residents of the apartment towers near hers.  She does write articles for a magazine in which she describes the refugee experience, but she is known only by a pseudonym “The Voiceless”.  Though she thinks “I was supposed to be safe here,” anti-Muslim sentiments appear in her neighbourhood and she has to decide whether to remain passive and voiceless or become an active participant in her community.

This can best be described as a fragmented narrative.  We learn about the young woman’s daily life and her thoughts and feelings but we also read parts of her articles; in addition, her memories and nightmares serve as flashbacks to her past in Syria and her travels as a refugee.  These flashbacks are not in chronological order but move back and forth through time.  The narrator understands that people “try to construct narratives . . . [into] a structure that makes sense . . . trying to stitch it all together into a coherent pattern – a beginning, a middle and an end,” but she cannot mold her memories “into something easy to digest . . . [because] The structure of narrative has collapsed; imprecise in my own mind, with jagged pieces it takes so much to screw together.”  The fragmented narrative, therefore, is appropriate.

This fragmentation, however, challenges the reader to piece together the different components of the story to make sense of it.  Personally, I had difficulty with three chapters, all entitled “The Eye.”  I understand that the Syrian government had sophisticated surveillance systems which were used against its citizens:  “There are eyes everywhere.”  The actions described in the chapters, however, are not clearly explained.  Are they just symbolic nightmares? 

Much is not fully explained.  Exactly what trauma the narrator endured is not described in great detail but sufficient information is given that the reader can infer what happened to her and people she loved:  “friends shot on their way to work . . . babies going to school and bombs falling from the sky . . . Desperate voices in dark basements.  Confined spaces.  Ahmed, tiny hands bound, eyes and mouth taped shut, a bullet in the head. . . . Cold, hungry, always thirsty.”  Of the trip to England she writes:  “the hot and overcrowded bus through Turkey and the camps in Greece and the little toe that became so infected I thought it would fall off like a rotten piece of fruit.  I wrote about guns to my head in front of the open backs of freezing trucks and that afternoon when we swallowed tear gas and dodged rubber bullets on the Macedonian border.”  For me, the most chilling is her mentioning that “between my legs . . . I can no longer distinguish pain from pleasure” and waking up “in dark, cold town squares in Germany or by railway tracks in Austria . . . sore with a taste like sewage in my mouth and a few euros in my pocket or stuffed down my shirt.”  More description would be overwhelming.

Considering what she has experienced, it is not surprising that the narrator has retreated from the world and has difficulty coping.  She wonders “if there was anywhere in the world that I belonged.”  She describes herself as “cornered by memories, caged in by recollections.  I feel persecuted by the things I remember and by what my mind chooses to hide from me.”  She doubts that “there could possibly be anyone in the world I can rely on.”  She feels danger is everywhere:  “We are not safe anywhere.  Not really.  From the moment you’re born, the moment they slap your bottom and you draw breath, the vigil begins.  Whether it’s bombs . . . or bullets . . . or a man telling you to just relax and it won’t be that bad, there is peril everywhere.  Peril for men.  Peril for women.  For children and fighters and lovers.  Peril everywhere, for everyone.”  It is not difficult to understand why she believes, “’There is only fear . . . There’s nothing else in life.’”  A medical report about the narrator when she first arrived in England is telling; it mentions her lack of trust, imagining everyone has malicious intent.  The final sentence of that report is chilling:  “Physical examination and medical history indicate that this is not an entirely irrational response.”

Clearly, the reader cannot be a passive reader.  And that ties in with the message that people must not remain passive but be like one man who befriends the refugee:   “’No one is truly voiceless, he whispered, either they silence you, or you silence yourself.’”  The narrator is amazed at this man’s actions:  “Who is this man, defending people he has no personal connection to, defending them simply because it is the right thing to do?” 

The one thing that bothered me is that the narrator seems to make little effort to find her family.  She wonders if her family arrived in Alexandria as planned:   “Did they all make it?  Do they know I think of them even though I don’t want to?  Do they think of me?”  Because she hides behind an alias, she doesn’t think family members could recognize her and find her through her articles.  Yet in the same breath, she acknowledges that “you’d be surprised where you can get a wifi signal” so why doesn’t she use the internet to try and contact family members like “cousin Mahmoud in Belfast” and try to find her parents?  She knows that her sister Nada arrived safely in Alexandria even before she left Syria, but she was given no contact information for Nada? 

This book is an intense read, but one that should be read.  The book will stay with the reader long after it’s finished.

Note:  I received an eARC from the publisher via NetGalley.  The book will be released on March 16.