Book Review: Silence is a Sense by Layla AlAmmar

 

There is nothing but silence that makes sense in trauma. When the succession of events of your life are overwhelming, the right answer is silence. The silence when faced with death, existential disruption, loneliness, misunderstanding. The depression comes last. But first is the silence because being thrown into a new situation against your will and unable to do anything to change the situation leaves us without words. And then, ´silence is a sense´.

Silence is a Sense by Kuwaiti writer and academic Layla AlAmmar dares to change the literary trends based on stories of dislocation from Syria. I had enough to read and heard about the same story over and over again - both in books and in the media: poor refugees embarking on a dark journey to Europe, smuggled or surviving storms on boats, living in refugee camps at the borders with Germany or Austria, beaten by the border police in Hungary, Croatia or North Macedonia. The good happy refugee enjoying his or her life in the ´free world´, working hard to integrate and learn the language and accept menial works like cleaning and carers but hoping one day their children will be academics and ingineers and maybe doctors.

The woman character of the book lives in an unnamed British city, is mostly silent and sometimes sents articles signing the ´Voiceless´. Her editor is keen to read her stories about being caught at the border, about her journey, about being ´refugee´. As being a ´refugee´ is a mental or chronical sickness, a condition you carry with you for the rest of your life. As the refugee should have only a past as a refugee and a future as a refugee. A victim of history, maybe, but unable to be more than a victim. An eternal victim, with a before and after calculated based on this vague past.

But being ´Voiceless´ is not her choice. Is what society, Western societies particularly, expected her to be. She is a ´Voiceless´ writing articles, remembering her past before being a refugee. Her memories of her life in Syria, flowing to her while she is avidly watching the life of her neighbours, are memories of intellectual encounters and thoughts about revolution. They are not struggles to fight against religion opression, but inserted in the everyday social life. I guarantee that people in the Middle East have more social and political issues to talk about. 

Those people we randomly label as ´refugees´ are not necessarily poor - actually many of those escaping are rather middle class, people able to afford the costs of the journey - non-educated/illiterate. They are people with their own intellectual stamina and sometimes twice as educated as the official processing their asylum application. 

Silence is a Sense is not criticizing all this, but rather tries to open up and offer an alternative story. It offers a different narrative, written poetically, that may give a voice to the ´Voiceless´ whose name is revealed at the end of the book. It´s an intellectual journey reversing with the strength of the word everything we may be convinced to think about due to the overuse of the simplicity principle.

Rating: 5 stars