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Summary
Summary
"Lyrical, moving, and revealing."
--Tracy Chevalier, bestselling author of Girl with a Pearl Earring
A transfixing and beautifully rendered novel about a refugee's escape from civil war--and the healing power of community.
A young woman sits in her apartment, watching the small daily dramas of her neighbors across the way. She is an outsider, a mute voyeur, safe behind her windows, and she sees it all--the sex, the fights, the happy and unhappy families. Journeying from her war-torn Syrian homeland to this unnamed British city has traumatized her into silence, and her only connection to the world is the column she writes for a magazine under the pseudonym "the Voiceless," where she tries to explain the refugee experience without sensationalizing it--or revealing anything about herself.
Gradually, though, the boundaries of her world expand. She ventures to the corner store, to a bookstore and a laundromat, and to a gathering at a nearby mosque. And it isn't long before she finds herself involved in her neighbors' lives. When an anti-Muslim hate crime rattles the neighborhood, she has to make a choice: Will she remain a voiceless observer, or become an active participant in a community that, despite her best efforts, is quickly becoming her own?
Layla AlAmmar, a Kuwaiti-American writer and brilliant student of Arab literature, delivers here a complex and fluid book about memory, revolution, loss, and safety. Most of all, Silence is a Sense reminds us just how fundamental human connection is to survival.
Author Notes
Layla AlAmmar is a writer and academic from Kuwait. She has a master's degree in creative writing from the University of Edinburgh. Her short stories have appeared in the Evening Standard , Quail Bell Magazine , the Red Letters St. Andrews Prose Journal , and Aesthetica Magazine , where her story "The Lagoon" was a finalist for the 2014 Creative Writing Award. She was the 2018 British Council international writer in residence at the Small Wonder Short Story Festival. Her debut novel, The Pact We Made , was published in 2019. She has written for The Guardian and ArabLit Quarterly . She is currently pursuing a PhD on the intersection of Arab women's fiction and literary trauma theory.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Alammar's evocative second novel (after The Pact We Made) delves into the world of a traumatized, mute, and unnamed journalist who has escaped civil war in Syria for England. There, amid recollections of the violence, she occupies herself with her work as a journalist for an English magazine, and in spying on--and occasionally interacting with--neighbors in her apartment complex. The narrator, whose journalism is published under the pseudonym The Voiceless, muses about religious differences among Muslim people in Syria and her fellow immigrants. However, her editor, Josie, wants her to write more about herself to boost her audience. Though Josie initially understands the narrator's perspective toward her fellow Muslims, she later insists the narrator is "glossing over the very real, unequivocal violence" committed by extremists. Meanwhile, tensions grow at the narrator's mosque, and a "Unity Feast" is invaded by white supremacists who are angry at the presence of Muslims in the country. Though the pacing is slow, the conflicts over immigration and racism are brilliantly distilled, and they dovetail seamlessly with the narrator's lyrical, increasingly defiant narration. Patient readers will find much to ponder. (Mar.)
Guardian Review
The unnamed narrator of Silence Is a Sense is a Syrian refugee who has been so traumatised by conflict and her perilous journey across Europe that she no longer speaks. Living in a nameless English city, she spends her days watching the residents of the estate she has come to call home through her window, and writing columns for a news magazine from a "refugee perspective" under the pseudonym "the Voiceless". Her editor keeps pushing her for more memories, but she is unable to provide them: "We try to construct narratives - what happened before the blood came? ¿ to stitch it all together into a coherent pattern." Layla AlAmmar is a writer who understands trauma, how it fragments the memory and turns people into startled animals. The narrator recognises these behaviours in those around her: "the guy in the shop holding himself a little too rigidly ¿ the young mother whose eyes are constantly scanning the street". Trauma rejects conventional narratives, a fact that Home Office interviewers still fail to understand. In order to be granted asylum, migrants have to be prepared to unfurl their horrors for inspection; like our narrator, many refugees find themselves unable to stitch it into a coherent pattern. At times, the reader shares the editor's feelings of frustration: just tell us what happened, you want to say. This is cleverly deployed; are we being unreasonable in demanding an organised narrative? AlAmmar offers trickles of information that are just enough to hint at the terrors of war ("The smell of meat and burning is strong in the air, but nothing is cooking") woven in with shrewd observations about Britain and immigration. Some people respond to the narrator with kindness, including the bookshop owner who lets her take books for free. Others are racist and aggressive. She feels the pressure to be a "good" immigrant. "Everyone here wants a story," she says, "a nice little packet of memories." AlAmmar is pursuing a PhD on "the intersection of Arab women's fiction and literary trauma theory". If you know about literary trauma theory, you'll know that it examines how psychological trauma challenges the limits of language. This and other theoretical threads (collective experience, disassociation and fragmentation) can be traced through the novel, meaning that at times it feels like a work constructed to respond to the theory of trauma, rather than trauma itself. To readers, this choice may manifest in a certain failure of characterisation. The picture of this woman, like her memories, is cloudy. Despite this, the use of several cliches and some dialogue that doesn't ring true, I admire this book. It is an intelligent, insightful novel that asks vital questions about how we can begin to express trauma, and in what form. It faces up to its linguistic challenges. It doesn't quite meet them, but perhaps no words, however they are deployed, truly can. That, after all, is the nature of trauma.
Kirkus Review
A young Muslim woman watches her neighbors as she comes to terms with her own tragic history. In AlAmmar's second novel, a young woman has arrived in a quiet English town after months of difficult travel. Having fled her native Syria, the woman, who goes unnamed, journeyed through much of Europe before arriving, nearly catatonic. Now somewhat recovered, she sits and watches her neighbors through their windows: An old man eats alone; an abusive husband terrorizes his wife and children; a young man exercises obsessively. The contradiction at the heart of this lovely and intense novel is that the young woman, who doesn't speak aloud--she allows her neighbors to think she's deaf--narrates the novel. No one hears her voice but the reader, and it is a strong, formidable voice. In fact, she has so much to say that she begins writing a magazine column under the moniker "The Voiceless." AlAmmar's narrator may be a voyeur, but she is frankly critical of the voyeuristic tendencies of her editor, Josie, who asks that she write less often about politics and more about her own memories. "In [Josie's] emails," the narrator tells us, "she assures me that such articles are always topical, and it's all people are wanting to read about given the state of the world, and could I tweak this and that before she publishes it." It's a smart, sharply constructed critique. So is the narrator of this fine book. But it isn't a perfect novel: Not all the characters cohere into three-dimensional figures, and there are dream and memory sequences that can be difficult to follow--particularly an erotic one involving Edgar Allan Poe. Still, the narrator's accounts of her own trauma, and the way that she is increasingly drawn into the life of her community, feel moving and fresh. Beautifully wrought even if marred by minor discrepancies. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
The Voiceless. That is how Syrian refugee Rana signs the magazine articles she writes from her messy flat in an unnamed English city. She has not spoken aloud since the tragic events that followed her flight across Europe, and although her editor keeps asking for her personal memories, some remain too terrible to share. It's remarkable, Rana finds, how much she can hear when she does not speak. Ruth, a woman in her complex, has been telling the residents that Rana is deaf. She has been watching them: the abusive husband and his wife and daughter, the health nut she names the Juicer, the vacationers who come to stay. As the local mosque and Muslim-owned store in the neighborhood face threats, she gets to know some of the apartment residents better, becoming part of the stories she had only watched through her windows. With gut-punching clarity, Alammar unpacks the complicated identity of a refugee discovering that safety is not what it seems, as she learns to find her voice in a new home.
