Eritrea - The Consequences of Love/ Silence is My Mother Tongue

Country: Eritrea      
Book: The Consequences of Love/ Silence is My Mother Tongue
Author: Sulaiman Addonia
Publication Year: 2008/2018
Genre: Fiction

The Consequences of Love is not Girls of Riyadh. Yet as discussed in the previous entry (see: Saudi Arabia), the two novels are not mutually exclusive, despite PR copy declaring The Consequences of Love “a corrective to Rajaa Alsanea’s recent novel Girls of Riyadh.” It is not a corrective, but rather a different window from which to observe Saudi Arabian society.

Which isn’t to say The Consequences of Love isn’t altogether the bleaker of the two novels. Stonings and public beheadings. Sexual exploitation and child abuse. Repression and authoritarian control. All are depicted in uncompromising detail in Sulaiman Addonia’s debut novel.

Addonia was born in Eritrea and spent much of his early life living in refugees camp in Sudan. We’ll return to this period of his live when considering Silence is My Mother Tongue. Like Nasser, the first person narrator of The Consequences of Love, Addonia and his brother relocated to Jeddah in Saudi Arabia, where his mother had previously gone to find work. Much of what he experienced and saw there informs the book’s narrative.

The main through line of the novel is the blossoming romance between Nasser and Fiore, a woman in full burqa, identifiable to him only by the bright pinks shoes she wears.

The near total repression of women in Saudi Arabia means the pair can only communicate in letters Fiore drops at Nasser’s feet. Later Nasser finds himself employed as a assistant to a blind Iman in order to use his bag as a dead letter drop. But love, like life, finds a way and the lovers are soon able to meet in secret and consummate their relationship.

Yet against this scene of young love is a cavalcade of the bad actors you find in most fiction. The restaurateur and fellow refugee who pimps Nasser out to his male customers. The religious policeman who likewise pursues Nasser for sexual favours.

I don’t know. It’s almost as if you effectively ‘disappear’ women from a society, male sexual desire persists and they instead turn to boys and young men. See also, classical Athenian society, all prisons and the Roman Catholic Church.

The euphoria of first love cannot last, especially in anywhere as repressive as Saudi Arabia, and the final act of the novel plays out in brutality, damnation and the slight, unresolved hope of redemption. As with Atiq Rahimi’s A Curse on Dostoyevsky (see: Afghanistan), there is more than a hint of Dostoyevsky in The Consequences of Love’s final chapters.

Many of these same themes play out in Addonia’s second novel, Silence is My Mother Tongue, published ten years later in 2018. Societal repression of woman. Sexual abuse. More consensual forms that ‘dare not speak their name’ as the thankfully and increasingly obsolete phrase goes.

Here we are firmly rooted in the refugee camps of Sudan. Camps that have existed for long enough that individual family plots have been fenced in and become compounds.

Saba, the novel’s protagonist, is subject to the same pressures and conventions brought to bear on women whenever we have turn to with fiction and non-fiction located in Africa and the Middle East. Accusations of impropriety. Arranged marriage. FGM.

Saba is strong willed and able resist tradition and societal norms far longer than her contemporaries. Yet as the novel opens, she is on trial for allegedly sleeping with her brother, who has come to live with her and her new husband. The truth is far more complicated.

From there, the story moves back in time, as told by Jamal. He has grown up in the camps with Saba (a thinly disguised avatar for Addonia himself) and made his own cinema in the camp. Although the cinema is little more than a pinned up white sheet, behind which people perform in silhouette. The cinema also doubles as a court house, as in the trial of Saba.

By turns, the book rearrives at the time and place in which it started, moving beyond that starting place. As with The Consequences of Love, the characters of Silence is My Mother Tongue exist in a liminal state, which is ether Limbo (the inert first circle of Dante’s Inferno) or Purgatory, where redemption can only be achieved after unending suffering over millennia. And only then by finding a way off the island.

Unlike Dante’s afterlife, there is no way up for Addonia’s characters to the plateau occupied by Alsanea’s Girls of Riyadh. For Nasser, for Saba, for most people in the world, the only allowable direction of travel is sideways. Which isn’t much, but it might at least mean they end up somewhere where filth isn’t raining down from above with the same level of intensity.

No one chooses to be a refugee. No one puts their family in a dinghy and risks a treacherous channel of water unless they have little or no choice. Even the Saxon, Angles and Jutes that came to England, forcing the Britons out in the process, were refugees. But there is a certain connotative dissonance found throughout the world, where the previous groups of migrants to a country denounce the next group, using the same dehumanising language in the process.

Sulaiman Addonia became a UK citizen in 2000, ten years after being granted indefinite leave to remain. “Home. “ he said in a 2016 interview with Eritrean Lowland League, “is just a thing that got taken away. At least that’s my experience of it.”

Addonia’s mother eventually returned to Eritrea. Which raises a question we previously discussed: What is a country? Eritrea was once part Ethiopia and didn’t become an independent state until 1991, the year after Addonia and his brother arrived in the UK. Nations rise and fall. South Sudan was the last nation to be recognised by the UN in 2011. It will be miraculous if the same number of countries exist at the end of this project as there were at the start.

Independent nationhood doesn’t guarantee peace. Relations between Eritrea and Ethiopia have remained tense since Eritrea gained independence. The Tigray War, which lasted between 2020 and 2022, killed hundreds of thousands of people (estimates vary wildly from 150,000-600,000), creating a new humanitarian crisis in the process. All of which led to more refugees fleeing to Sudan, which itself suffered a military coup in 2023, leading to more violence, like throwing grenades into the path of people fleeing a fire.

The Consequences of Love is a towering achievement and might be the best book I’ve read during this project. It’s up there with Black Rain Falling (see: Grenada) and Human Acts (see: South Korea). Silence is My Mother Tongue isn’t quite as good, but still compelling and well written. To be honest, though, I would rather live in a world where such books are no longer necessary, except as historical documents to remind humanity of how far it has come. Sadly, we have a long way to go to reach that point in our evolution. 

Sulaiman Addonia