In the landscape of contemporary literature, few voices resonate with the raw intensity and corporeal eloquence of Sulaiman Addonia. Born in Eritrea to an Eritrean mother and Ethiopian father, Addonia’s nomadic life—fleeing war-torn Eritrea, spending his childhood in a refugee camp in Sudan, before eventually settling in London via Saudi Arabia—has shaped a literary vision that defies conventional boundaries. His works, most notably “The Seers” (2024) and “Silence is My Mother Tongue” (2018), emerge as powerful testaments to the embodiment of desire, displacement, and the persistent search for identity in spaces where traditional narratives collapse.

“The Seers”: Visionary Perception Beyond Sight

Recently selected as The Asian Book of the Month for March 2025, Addonia’s “The Seers” represents his most ambitious and formally innovative work to date. The novel follows Kaleb, a young man who, after losing his sight in an accident, discovers a profound new way of perceiving the world through his remaining senses. Set in an unnamed city that bears resemblances to multiple Middle Eastern urban landscapes, the narrative becomes a meditation on how we construct reality through sensory experience beyond the visual.

What distinguishes “The Seers” is Addonia’s extraordinary ability to translate non-visual sensory perception into prose. His descriptions of Kaleb’s world are rendered with tactile precision: “The city spoke to him through the pressure of air between buildings, through the textures of walls that held memories in their cracks, through the orchestration of footsteps that revealed human stories through their rhythm.” This synesthetic approach creates a reading experience that challenges ocular-centric understandings of reality.

The novel’s structure mirrors its thematic concerns. Divided into sections labeled by different senses—”Touch,” “Sound,” “Smell,” “Taste,” and finally, “Vision” (which paradoxically explores inner sight)—Addonia constructs a narrative architecture that forces readers to engage with alternative ways of knowing. This structural innovation reflects his broader literary project: to dismantle Western literary traditions that privilege sight and rational knowledge over embodied understanding.

Perhaps most striking is Addonia’s treatment of desire in “The Seers.” When Kaleb falls in love with Rahel, a woman whose voice he first encounters at a marketplace, their relationship develops through an intricate language of touch. Addonia writes their encounters with unflinching sensuality: “Her fingertips on his face were like whispers made flesh, telling him stories his eyes had never been capable of reading.” These moments never descend into voyeurism; rather, they illuminate how desire functions as a form of knowledge, a way of mapping another’s existence.

The political dimensions of “The Seers” emerge subtly but powerfully. In a society where surveillance and political oppression operate primarily through visual monitoring, Kaleb’s blindness becomes a form of resistance. “They watch us to control us,” one character observes, “but what happens when the watched can no longer be seduced by the spectacle?” Here, Addonia connects bodily experience to political critique, suggesting that embodied knowledge might offer pathways to freedom in environments designed to subjugate through visual control.

“Silence is My Mother Tongue”: The Body in Exile

While “The Seers” represents Addonia’s artistic maturation, “Silence is My Mother Tongue” (2018) laid crucial groundwork for his exploration of embodied experience. Set in a refugee camp, the novel follows siblings Saba and Hagos as they navigate the constraints of displacement and gender expectations.

The refugee camp in “Silence” becomes a liminal space where conventional social structures simultaneously collapse and intensify. Addonia renders this paradoxical environment through Saba’s bodily experiences—her menstruation becomes both a source of shame within the camp’s conservative elements and a symbol of her defiant femininity. “In the camp,” Addonia writes, “privacy was the most precious commodity, more valuable than food or water. Without walls, the body became both fortress and vulnerability.”

The novel’s exploration of gender fluidity through Hagos, who often takes on traditionally feminine roles, demonstrates Addonia’s nuanced understanding of how gender is performed through daily bodily practices. Hagos’s silence—he does not speak throughout the novel—contrasts with his sister’s verbal expressiveness, creating a dialectic between embodied communication and linguistic articulation.

What distinguishes “Silence” from other refugee narratives is Addonia’s refusal to desexualize his displaced characters. In much humanitarian discourse, refugees are often depicted as deserving sympathy precisely because they are rendered as non-sexual beings focused solely on survival. Addonia boldly counters this desexualizing tendency: “Desire doesn’t wait for peace,” he writes. “The body hungers even in war.” This insistence on the sexual autonomy of displaced people constitutes a significant political intervention in how refugee experiences are represented.

Literary Craft: The Embodied Sentence

Across both novels, Addonia has developed a distinctive prose style that might be termed “corporeal lyricism.” His sentences often possess a rhythmic quality that mimics bodily processes—breathing, walking, heartbeats—creating a prose that feels physically present rather than abstractly intellectual.

Consider this passage from “The Seers”: “The rain came first as a whisper against the skin, then a conversation, finally a symphony of touch that transformed the city into music.” The sentence builds in intensity, mirroring the sensory experience it describes. This attention to the musicality of language reflects Addonia’s background in multiple linguistic traditions (Tigrinya, Arabic, and English), resulting in a English prose style that feels simultaneously foreign and intimate.

Addonia’s metaphors consistently draw connections between language and physicality. In “Silence,” he describes a character’s anger as “a second heart beating in his throat,” while in “The Seers,” memory is “a finger tracing old scars.” These metaphors collapse the distinction between abstract concepts and bodily experience, reinforcing his philosophical commitment to embodied knowledge.

Critical Contextualization

Addonia’s work represents an important intervention in postcolonial literature. While he shares concerns with writers like Mohsin Hamid and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie about migration and cultural identity, his emphasis on the body as the primary site of both oppression and liberation distinguishes his approach. Unlike the cool intellectual distance that characterizes much postcolonial critique, Addonia insists on the primacy of physical experience.

His work also challenges Western literary traditions in its treatment of desire. Rather than portraying desire as primarily psychological or emotional, Addonia presents it as a form of knowledge—a way of understanding self and other that is no less legitimate than rational thought. This positions his work in conversation with philosophers like Maurice Merleau-Ponty and feminist theorists who have long argued for the epistemic value of embodied experience.

Conclusion

In recognizing “The Seers” as The Asian Book of the Month for March 2025, literary critics have acknowledged what careful readers have long observed: Sulaiman Addonia’s fiction offers not just stories, but alternative ways of knowing. His emphasis on the body—as site of pleasure, pain, memory, and resistance—creates a literary experience that challenges readers to reconsider the relationship between physicality and knowledge.

As we witness increasing global displacement and technological mediation of experience, Addonia’s insistence on the irreducible importance of embodied existence seems not just aesthetically innovative but politically urgent. His work reminds us that, regardless of technological or political developments, we remain fundamentally embodied beings, and any authentic understanding of human experience must begin with this recognition.

by Freeda Austin