Silence is a Sense

Layla AlAmmar’s new book, Silence is a Sense, is a profound and riveting story that dives into the life of a Syrian refugee who has lost everything, including her will to speak.

A young woman sits in her apartment in an unnamed English city, absorbed in watching the small dramas of her assorted neighbors through their windows across the way. Traumatized into muteness after a long, devastating trip from war-torn Syria to the UK, she believes that she wants to sink deeper into isolation, moving between memories of her absent boyfriend and family and her homeland, dreams, and reality. At the same time, she begins writing for a magazine under the pseudonym "the Voiceless," trying to explain the refugee experience without sensationalizing it—or revealing anything about herself.

Gradually, as the boundaries of her world expand—as she ventures to the neighborhood corner store, to a gathering at a nearby mosque, and to the bookstore and laundromat, and as an anti-Muslim hate crime shatters the members of a nearby mosque—she has to make a choice: Will she remain a voiceless observer, or become an active participant in her own life and in a community that, despite her best efforts, is quickly becoming her own?

Our memory is a more perfect world than the universe: it gives back life to those who no longer exist.

AlAmmar sets up the story as a dual timeline. In the present we follow our unnamed 24 year old heroine as she navigates her new life in England where she watches the other occupants in the apartments surrounding her, and as she ventures out into the public world trying to expand her sense of safety in her new world. In the past we go back to her home in Syria and her somewhat happy life. From there we follow her journey to escape the war torn country and everything she had to do and endure to get out alive. However, we do not follow her escape from beginning, to middle, to end. Rather we bounce around through that time period in a haphazard fashion. She states that, “The structure of narrative has collapsed; imprecise in my own mind, with jagged pieces it takes so much to screw together.” We view her past through her memories, flashbacks and dreams. This may seem confusing to some readers, but makes complete and logical sense. Working through one’s past and grief rarely happens in a linear fashion.

I really don’t know how to use enough words to give a voice to how beautifully written this story was. AlAmmar has an evocative way with words and the ability to put me in the mind of our heroine/narrator from the first sentence. Her writing also affected me deeply as she took on the complex issues of immigration and melds them into the story with ease and clarity.

I loved how our narrator still had her strong and independent voice even though she could not bring herself to speak verbally and used her writing skills to bring a “voice” to her life and experiences. I found it interesting that her pen name was “The Voiceless” as she still had a strong voice in her publications, her views of the world around her, and how she became part of the community around her in England. This is the quality that instantly had me hooked to this story as she tells the sheer and utter rawness of her story.

This is and intense, emotionally driven, thought provoking, and heartbreaking story that will render you speechless. I highly recommend Silence is a Sense as we all need to understand what it means to be a refugee.

No one is truly voiceless, either they silence you, or you silence yourself.

Thank you Algonquin books for the gifted arc of this moving story in exchange for my honest review.