In Silence is a Sense, Layla AlAmmar tells us the story of Rana, a refugee girl from Syria who arrives in England seeking asylum after a traumatizing journey across Europe in which she encounters rape, violence, disease, death, and discrimination. The trauma from this harrowing experience has left her mute and afraid of human connection. Now, she spends her days watching her neighbors from her apartment, learning their habits and their secrets, but otherwise never approaching them, never integrating herself into the community.
She speaks only through the articles she sends to a magazine, The New Press, where she goes by the byline “The Voiceless.” Here she attempts to bring awareness to the issues concerning the xenophobia found throughout the UK to which its residents keep turning a blind eye.
When Rana writes opinion pieces, her editor encourages her to give the readers more about her personal memories instead, to try to let the audience into her world, to help them better understand the refugee experience. When Rana does as she’s asked, describing in detail the more triggering details of her journey from Syria through Europe, nearly every second encountering death or violence, her editor informs her that the readers won’t find her pieces believable. Her frustration only grows as comments on her writings ask her to prove her pain and accuse her of not really being a Muslim.
Rana struggles to acclimate to her new life, to let anyone in or let any part of herself out. Her family’s scattered, some are likely dead, and she has no way or form of contacting them. So she leads a reclusive lifestyle, until the day when she sees The Dad, as she refers to the man in South Tower A, beating his wife again, and her next-door neighbor places a domestic abuse call to the authorities. Rana, soon after, runs into The Dad’s daughter, Chloe, who in a moment of desperation asks Rana for a safe place to stay. Chloe explains that she can’t go back home where her mother is already planning on taking her father back and dismissing the charges. Rana hesitantly gives her refuge in her own apartment where she has never before allowed anyone in for fear of disrupting the safe space she has created for herself there. Rana finds the intrusion by this almost stranger odd but not entirely unwelcome.
However, more forms of violence against Muslims are beginning to creep up in her neighborhood. When she becomes witness to acts that incriminate some of her neighbors, Rana is forced to relive the trauma she went through when she was trying to make her way to a place that promised her safety.
"So, instead I’ll say that most of the camps are bad. The sort of place you wouldn’t want the family pet living in. There is disease and filth and the violence of the desperate. The policemen that patrol are hideous men, capable of more than you would think a human is capable of. When there are moments of light—a child learning to read at his grandfather’s knee, an aid package overflowing with unexpected delights, a beautiful day where the sunlight plays in the trees—they are fleeting and have a dreamlike quality.
Most of the time, it’s an endless stream of shit.
Sometimes, quite literally.
Can you imagine what the conditions of home must be to render such an ordeal not only tolerable, but desirable?"
From the first page to the last, AlAmmar’s prose pulls at every heartstring. It’s one thing to imagine a refugee’s experience in the grand scope, but AlAmmar drives us right into the nuances, the terrors, the frustration of what it really means to have been through it. Stories so catastrophic that even when Rana tries to recount her first-hand experience she’s told it’s not believable.
There is irony in AlAmmar’s narrative as she tells us the same story Rana is trying to tell her audience. The Voiceless attempts to relay her account to an audience so comfortable in their ignorance that they can’t hold back their skepticism—too shocked by the gritty details that they debase a tale Rana was coerced into sharing. But for us, the real audience, AlAmmar has stripped Rana’s story of sensationalism, giving us instead, the details in the aftermath. AlAmmar’s narrative then becomes more credible than Rana’s because of the lack of details to which the majority of us could never relate and because we can see Rana’s silent frustration, the honesty of her unspoken pain.
AlAmmar weaves the folds of Rana’s present life into one intricate narrative, placing one within the other so that her novel becomes a microcosm for a story that can hardly begin to be told. We see Rana’s flashbacks right at the brink of leaving Aleppo, Syria. We see Rana as she attempts to pull her life together from the shreds that the trek of her escape left her with. We see Rana finding a way to express her ideas, only to have those ideas curtailed. We see Rana struggle to fit in a world that wants to claim to be her savior but do no more than that. We see Rana realize that even a person who has no voice must sooner or later find other ways to be heard, for the fight is never over.
Silence is a Sense is harrowing, shocking, and possibly one of the most vital pieces of literature existing on the refugee experience. The search for asylum is not a new concept. Nor is that of the terrors refugees encounter, not just on the journey to what they believe is safety, but even after they’ve arrived. Every day, in our world, so many suffer the same dreadful fate as Rana. But AlAmmar’s objective in this novel is much bigger and more nuanced. She’s not here just to tell a refugee story. Her aim is to expose the blind spots of those who have never lived this unique experience and will therefore never understand its many dimensions. She means to remind us that our inability to understand or empathize doesn’t automatically revoke the credibility of someone’s story, that the least we can do is have the civility to let victims speak their truth. AlAmmar meets the target of her aim flawlessly and with poetic fervor at that.
Silence is a Sense is for anyone who’s willing to listen, who’s not afraid to have their view of their world as they know it shattered, and who’s willing to make space for the stories of those who have for millennia been forced to live in silence.