“Life is for the living”: Surveillance and gender freedom in the refugee camp’s non-place in Sulaiman Addonia’s Silence Is My Mother Tongue

Abstract

ABSTRACT While most contemporary refugee fiction explores the difficulties of relocation to the industrialized Global North, Sulaiman Addonia’s autobiographically inspired Silence Is My Mother Tongue gives a new direction to the African refugee novel with its gendered exploration of life in an Eritrean refugee camp in Sudan. In that non-place governed by silence and similitude, where both time and law are suspended, the teenage girl Saba and her mute queer brother Hagos paradoxically gain voice and agency. This article demonstrates how the siblings’ growing resistance against the camp’s state of exception is aimed less at the absent sovereign’s necropolitics than at the way in which the refugee community itself uses the camp’s panoptic surveillance to enforce traditional gender norms. In Addonia’s unique refugee novel, the camp becomes a most unusual feeding ground for gender identities and relations that circumvent the community’s patriarchal and heteronormative traditions.