Silence Is a Sense

January 25, 2021
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.

February 15, 2021
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.

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April 1, 2021
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.

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