How do you see the relationship between refugee literature and romance? Similarly, what role do you think erotica plays in refugee narratives? For instance, in Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn, Eilis, an Irish Catholic immigrant, experiences shame and social rejection from her landlady after discovering romance. A similar undertone is present in The Seers; do you think there’s a moral grey area in how sexuality is perceived for refugees and immigrants that doesn’t apply to others?

I believe that literature about the refugee experience and romance, or literature in general related to refugees, has often been subjected to censorship and a paternalistic attitude. While this may have stemmed from good intentions, it’s hard to ignore the fact that it is based on significant misunderstandings and crude assumptions. I had to advocate for my books that focus on intimacy with publishers, agents, and industry insiders, as well as with people from similar backgrounds as mine. When I was writing Silence is My Mother Tongue, for example, some individuals I was working with at the time expressed concerns about the book’s focus on sex and sexuality – this was also the case with The Seers. It’s as if losing your home also strips away your desires. 

But people have intimate relationships, fall in love, and engage in heinous acts in refugee camps, like the two I lived in as a child in Sudan. It also made sense to me that actually the theme of sex centres itself in my books about refugees, because when people flee from wars, they often leave with few belongings and sometimes without their families. So, in exile, surrounded by loneliness and scarcity, their bodies become a focal point. Their skin tells stories of violence, scars, neglect, which some choose to heal with gentle touches, and by opening themselves to lovers. In The Seers, for instance, Hannah uses sex as a way to reclaim her humanity, especially as the asylum process seeks to disintegrate her and gnaw at her mind. Desire becomes a torch that she directs internally first to see the love she has within herself before sharing it with others.

Funny that you mentioned Tóibín. If I’m not mistaken, he was the one who said that the strength of Irish literature comes from its writers being able to confront taboos. I might be misquoting him, but I remember reading something along those lines. And I agree. In fact, a significant part of my writing career was dedicated to rewriting myself before writing my books. I achieved this by erasing the concept of taboos from my mind. In that sense, I have no grey zone, no borders of any kind. I surrender to my characters and go wherever they take me, even if these places are disturbing, confronting and disgusting. Learning to grant freedom to your characters is as important a technique as knowing how to show, not tell.

You wrote: ‘Xehay is highly literate in the anatomy of his desires.’ How does sexuality transcend language barriers (if at all)? 

The barriers to sexual freedom are not due to language but to tradition and patriarchy.

I often reminisce about my childhood in Sudan, where I was surrounded by people, particularly women, as I was raised by women, who couldn’t read or write but expressed deep love and affection. Their sensuality was evident in their gestures, smiles, and the way they carried themselves around men I suspected they liked.

Xehay embodies profound meaning in his silence. Readers of my second novel would recognise that silence is a language with a rich vocabulary of emotions and feelings. This is the power of Xehay. He is someone who feels, and even though he was not formally educated, he learned the language of emotions and carries its richness within him. He even attempts to teach his daughter how to feel in order to enhance her means of self-expression. I believe Hannah learned how to express her desires from her father, who, through how he opens up and surrenders to his wife, demonstrates that intimacy is a universal language everyone speaks, like the air we breathe. 

The Seers is where your apparent interest in sound intersects with sight. For example, you experiment with ‘Bina-Balozi’, ‘Bina-B’, and ‘O BB’ as these sounds grow more androgynous – something often noted. How much do you consider sound when writing? And how do you view the relationship between poetry, with its emphasis on sound, and novel writing?

I aspire to dance on the pages of my books with the voice of a poet.  

Instead of just reading novels and books, I decided to expand my reading to include the air, paintings, photographs, poets, and dancers. I was fascinated by Pina Bausch. I learned a great deal from observing her work and her struggle to create her own form of avant-garde. I often imagine writing in a way that mirrors her movements on stage in her piece Café Müller: erratic, moving here and there, her feet barely touching the floor as she dances between the tables, brushing against chairs, accumulating new wounds and new creations. Can my sentences convey the spirit of Pina Bausch, the blend of friction, energy, swagger, fragility, and tenderness? 

Furthermore, I also began taking walks at night, not only to converse with and listen to trees, as Hermann Hesse did, but also to recite poetry to them. I wrote the entire first draft of The Seers on the streets of Brussels, in front of a pond, surrounded by trees to whom I recited poems. Hannah was born in an environment where the sounds of dancers, poets, and nature came together to create a unique blend of sounds that is entirely fluid, perhaps even ethereal. That is the sound of The Seers.

You’ve written extensively about mothers. Indeed, a mother’s love story haunts/resounds [which word would you use?] throughout Hannah’s love story in The Seers. Who do you write these narratives for?

Feel free to choose any word that feels right. I don’t own the story of The Seers. 

I write from my subconscious. The strength of subconscious writing lies in not fully understanding the motivations behind your characters’ actions as you are working on automatism.

For me, the art of writing lies in not knowing why things happen. So, I did not plan out Hannah’s character and backstory, or create a family tree for her, or design a specific trajectory for her journey from Keren in Eritrea to London. It all started during the first lockdown in 2020 when I was working on a book of essays. One afternoon, while taking a walk near the pond of Ixelles in Brussels, where I am currently based, the name ‘Hannah’ popped into my mind. I grabbed my iPhone and started writing the first sentence. Less than three weeks later, I had a complete first draft of Hannah, her family, friends, and the world she lives in.

Should politicians be listening to authors? Should politicians read – or rather see – your novel?

I never have a specific reader in mind when I write, so I cannot say whether politicians should or shouldn’t read my novel. However, your question reminds me of my teenage years in Saudi Arabia, where my brother and I, like many other young people, read banned novels, including those by Western authors. These books allowed us to connect with people we had never met and provided a depth of nuance and empathy that was lacking in the black and white dogma preached by the religious rulers of Saudi Arabia. I believe that not only politicians, but all of us in the UK should read works by writers from diverse backgrounds in order to combat tribalism. A survey published by the Royal Society of Literature in March 2017 revealed that only 7 per cent of literature in Britain comes from writers of colour. I think promoting reading beyond one’s comfort zone in the UK is important. While reading things like Oliver Twist and George Bernard Shaw in Saudi Arabia, I discovered that such experiences can be liberating and help overcome the mentality of ‘us versus them’ that political, religious, and publishing systems seek to impose on us. 

I hope to see the publishing and cultural industry in the UK become as bold and daring as the youth in places like Saudi Arabia, who take risks to bravely explore a world to free themselves from prejudice.

Famously, James Joyce left Dublin to write Dubliners; did you need to leave London to write about it? How does moving to Brussels change your relationship with the sense of arriving in London as a refugee?

I believe so. But it’s not just about the distance. I discovered it is more nuanced. It’s about why you leave a place and what happens after you leave. In my case, I left a city I adore because I fell in love with a woman from Belgium. But when I got to Brussels, and contrary to my partner, who had her friends and family and made new acquaintances at her work, I found myself on my own.

In that island of loneliness, the memory of London, as well as the dead poets and artists whose work I consumed, became a company. So my story with London started to dominate my thoughts on the streets of Brussels and during the solitary nights. I remembered my history of arriving as a refugee with only my brother in London when we were both underage and how, in the absence of a family, London became more than a building, a concrete jungle. In those years, London extended a caring arm towards me when I walked its streets, when I felt invisible to British people. To be seen by trees, buildings, flowers, canals, and architecture of a place is to reimagine the idea of tenderness and the notion of belonging. The way I felt love from London enabled me to feel belonging to a city before feeling an affinity towards the British people.

In other words, yearning for a human touch and connection transformed London into a human-like entity with feelings.

Do you think you would have written about Eritrea had you not  been a refugee?

I don’t know. I have been a refugee since the age of one and a half or two, so I have no recollection of being in any other state of being other than a refugee, an exile, a traveller, a nomad, someone who was forced to flee between countries and languages. When you live in a state of continuous movement, the air becomes your root. To me, the idea of writing isn’t fixated on preconceived notions or plans, but rather the mere surrender to an imagination that has always existed in a state of fluidity.
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Sulaiman Addonia is an Eritrean-Ethiopian-British novelist based in Brussels. He has written about the refugee experience, queer expression, and his relationship with language as a global citizen – among many other things. His most recent novel, The Seers, is out now.