Here are 100 books that Silence Is My Mother Tongue fans have personally recommended if you like
Silence Is My Mother Tongue.
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I am a scholar of international politics and history who has taught in Northern Uganda, spent years interviewing political and military elites in Congo, Eritrea, and Sudan, and worked on climate agriculture and water in Ethiopia and Somalia. In my work on the continent and at Oxford, Cambridge, and Columbia University, I try not only to understand the material realities that define the options available to diverse African communities but also the ideas, in all their potential and contradictions, that give shape to how African societies interact internally and engage the outside world. I hope the books on this list will inspire you as much as they did for me.
Books that blur the boundaries between political theory and international history are seldom accessible, of pressing contemporary relevance, and beautifully written—but I found this book to be all three.
Reading this outstanding exposé, the book vividly reminded me of the importance of understanding the decades of decolonization in the Black Atlantic as more than a quest for sovereign statehood and recentering the ways in which the likes of Kwame Nkrumah and Julius Nyerere imagined new geographies and, indeed, new worlds. I admire the work in many ways—for its geographical sweep, exemplary pace, and conceptual clarity.
Decolonization revolutionized the international order during the twentieth century. Yet standard histories that present the end of colonialism as an inevitable transition from a world of empires to one of nations-a world in which self-determination was synonymous with nation-building-obscure just how radical this change was. Drawing on the political thought of anticolonial intellectuals and statesmen such as Nnamdi Azikiwe, W.E.B Du Bois, George Padmore, Kwame Nkrumah, Eric Williams, Michael Manley, and Julius Nyerere, this important new account of decolonization reveals the full extent of their unprecedented ambition to remake not only nations but the world.
I am a novelist and journalist who has been writing about war and refugees for nearly two decades. In 2018, I went to the Greek island of Samos, which held one of the most inhumane refugee camps in Europe, to talk to people there about their lives and hopes. Out of this, I wrote several articles and later two books, including The Good Deed. My hope is to counteract the demonization of refugees, so rife in the world today, by bringing out all that we humans have in common, such as our need for shelter, food, family, safety, and love.
I listened to this book because I wanted to understand more about the history and people of Palestine as the 2023-24 war between Israel and Hamas was escalating to ever more deadly heights.
Abulhawa is a renowned Palestinian author, and this book was an international bestseller back in 2010, but I knew nothing of it at the time. I found the novel, a family saga stretching several generations from 1941 to 2022, so immediate, eye-opening, and moving that it was as if I were reading about the current war in real-time.
I loved it so much that I bought the actual book to keep forever.
A heart-wrenching, powerfully written novel that does for Palestine what The Kite Runner did for Afghanistan.
Mornings in Jenin is a multi-generational story about a Palestinian family. Forcibly removed from the olive-farming village of Ein Hod by the newly formed state of Israel in 1948, the Abulhejos are displaced to live in canvas tents in the Jenin refugee camp. We follow the Abulhejo family as they live through a half century of violent history. Amidst the loss and fear, hatred and pain, as their tents are replaced by more forebodingly permanent cinderblock huts, there is always the waiting, waiting to…
I am a novelist and journalist who has been writing about war and refugees for nearly two decades. In 2018, I went to the Greek island of Samos, which held one of the most inhumane refugee camps in Europe, to talk to people there about their lives and hopes. Out of this, I wrote several articles and later two books, including The Good Deed. My hope is to counteract the demonization of refugees, so rife in the world today, by bringing out all that we humans have in common, such as our need for shelter, food, family, safety, and love.
I read this book a few years ago and have never forgotten it, it affected me so profoundly.
It tells the story of two Kurdish brothers in a mountain village in Iran who are forced to flee persecution and slaughter, one of whom ends up in California. Khadivi, Iranian herself, tells this with such haunting beauty and honesty that it still gives me chills to remember it.
It's part of a trilogy, and I've read all three, but this is my favorite volume.
Two brothers from a small Iranian mountain village-Saladin, who has always dreamed of leaving, and Ali, who has never given it a thought-are forced to flee for their lives in the aftermath of a political killing. The journey is beset by trouble from the start, but over the treacherous mountains they go, on foot to Istanbul and onward by freighter to the Azores.There, after a painful parting, Saladin alone continues on the final leg, on a cargo plane all the way to Los Angeles. He will have a new life in California, but will never be whole again without his…
I’ve been fascinated with the topic of immigration since childhood. My father is an immigrant, and my mother grew up overseas. My first job after college was working for a youth program for immigrant and refugee kids in Chicago. Now, I am a professor who teaches and writes about migration law. I find stories about how moving across borders shapes people’s lives to be endlessly interesting, bringing up themes of belonging, home, memory, trauma, and identity. I also think that the topic of global migration is intimately linked to questions of justice and equality and requires us all to reckon with the ways in which the colonial past shapes the present.
I couldn’t stop listening to this book. This autobiographical tale of a girl who flees Iran, grows up in the United States, and migrates to Europe is powerful and poignant in a way only a really good story can be. It perfectly captures the sense of being from multiple places but never truly at home. Nayeri has also written excellent nonfiction on the topic of migration and refuge, but this book has stayed with me and remains one of my favorite novels.
“Rich and colorful… [Refuge] has the kind of immediacy commonly associated with memoir, which lends it heft, intimacy, atmosphere.” –New York Times
The moving lifetime relationship between a father and a daughter, seen through the prism of global immigration and the contemporary refugee experience.
An Iranian girl escapes to America as a child, but her father stays behind. Over twenty years, as she transforms from confused immigrant to overachieving Westerner to sophisticated European transplant, daughter and father know each other only from their visits: four crucial visits over two decades, each in a different international city. The longer they are…
I am a novelist and journalist who has been writing about war and refugees for nearly two decades. In 2018, I went to the Greek island of Samos, which held one of the most inhumane refugee camps in Europe, to talk to people there about their lives and hopes. Out of this, I wrote several articles and later two books, including The Good Deed. My hope is to counteract the demonization of refugees, so rife in the world today, by bringing out all that we humans have in common, such as our need for shelter, food, family, safety, and love.
This new novel from Libyan writer Matar is mainly a story about the love between friends, especially male friends, but that love is set against displacement and trauma and the psychological difficulties of being separated from one's country, family, culture, and identity.
A contemplative, deeply thoughtful novel, it is totally engaging and searingly honest, just as much about being a human being as it is about political ideologies or survivor guilt.
I am a scholar of international politics and history who has taught in Northern Uganda, spent years interviewing political and military elites in Congo, Eritrea, and Sudan, and worked on climate agriculture and water in Ethiopia and Somalia. In my work on the continent and at Oxford, Cambridge, and Columbia University, I try not only to understand the material realities that define the options available to diverse African communities but also the ideas, in all their potential and contradictions, that give shape to how African societies interact internally and engage the outside world. I hope the books on this list will inspire you as much as they did for me.
It is one of the most emotionally challenging reads I have ever read. This book is a bone-chilling dissection of how teachers, peasants, and shopkeepers in apparently peaceful farmlands in Southern Rwanda went from sharing harvests and drinking with their neighbors to becoming their pitiless executioners. “Killing was less wearisome than farming,” one of the protagonists remembers during testimonies that I have wrestled with since first encountering them.
The book is the second installment in Hatzfeld’s trilogy on the Rwandan Genocide and relies almost entirely on interviews with the perpetrators in one community. I find it extraordinarily lucid in explaining how grand ideological narratives around identity politics and history interact with petty grievances and the most recognizable of desires to enable mass murder.
Navigate the darkest corridors of humanity with Machete Season–a harrowing saga that dusts off the grim truths of the Rwandan Genocide.
Rewind to April-May 1994, as the Tutsis face the unimaginable horror of annihilation under their fellow Hutu's brutal reign. The author, Jean Hatzfeld, painstakingly pieces together the chilling accounts shared by nine Hutu executioners. Recounted are not just tales of horror, but a frightening display of the dehumanizing banality of evil.
This revelation doubles as a probing exploration of the mechanisms of mass murders and their remorseless orchestrators. Delve into their candid confessions about the dreadful slaughter of approximately…
I am a scholar of international politics and history who has taught in Northern Uganda, spent years interviewing political and military elites in Congo, Eritrea, and Sudan, and worked on climate agriculture and water in Ethiopia and Somalia. In my work on the continent and at Oxford, Cambridge, and Columbia University, I try not only to understand the material realities that define the options available to diverse African communities but also the ideas, in all their potential and contradictions, that give shape to how African societies interact internally and engage the outside world. I hope the books on this list will inspire you as much as they did for me.
If some books inspire a rethink of recent history through hundreds of pages of forensic evidence or rigorous theory, Emtithal Mahmoud’s poetry recasts big questions that African societies have struggled with by weaving together hard-hitting metaphors and stunning phrases to open up new worlds of possibility and loss.
I find Emi’s writing an incredible call for solidarity, compassion, and the shattering of barriers—whether through the tender or the raw, the unspeakable or the gushing, the blistering and the comforting. A set of poems I return to regularly for perspective, whether on personal dilemmas, the contraptions of unity and division, or the political currency of love and othering.
2015 World Poetry Slam Champion and Woman of the World co-Champion Emtithal "Emi" Mahmoud presents her hauntingly beautiful debut poetry collection.
Brimming with rage, sorrow, and resilience, this collection traverses an expansive terrain: genocide; diaspora; the guilt of surviving; racism and Islamophobia; the burdens of girlhood; the solace of sisterhood; the innocence of a first kiss. Heart-wrenching and raw, defiant and empowering, Sisters' Entrance explores how to speak the unspeakable.
I am a scholar of international politics and history who has taught in Northern Uganda, spent years interviewing political and military elites in Congo, Eritrea, and Sudan, and worked on climate agriculture and water in Ethiopia and Somalia. In my work on the continent and at Oxford, Cambridge, and Columbia University, I try not only to understand the material realities that define the options available to diverse African communities but also the ideas, in all their potential and contradictions, that give shape to how African societies interact internally and engage the outside world. I hope the books on this list will inspire you as much as they did for me.
I think this is by far the most convincing and meticulously crafted study of Africa’s deadliest cholera outbreak in the 21st century. The book paints the political, social, and cultural complexities of pandemics in an extraordinarily lucid way, balancing carefully worded scholarly analysis with vignettes that left me astonished.
For me, Chigudu’s evidencing of the willingness of Zimbabwe’s government to treat its township citizens as utterly disposable is unforgettable. This book helped me rethink the painful legacies of urban design and racial segregation on the continent. It also poignantly underlines the abject indifference of the post-colonial African state as it reproduces the conditions “when people eat shit,” as one gripping chapter is titled.
Zimbabwe's catastrophic cholera outbreak of 2008-9 saw an unprecedented number of people affected, with 100,000 cases and nearly 5,000 deaths. Cholera, however, was much more than a public health crisis: it represented the nadir of the country's deepening political and economic crisis of 2008. This study focuses on the political life of the cholera epidemic, tracing the historical origins of the outbreak, examining the social pattern of its unfolding and impact, analysing the institutional and communal responses to the disease, and marking the effects of its aftermath. Across different social and institutional settings, competing interpretations and experiences of the cholera…
Two books that I read as a young child were very important to me. The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins by Dr. Seuss made me think about riches, poverty, and the power that rich people have to make stupid rules; and poor people have no choice but to obey them. The Japanese Twins from Lucy Fitch Perkins' series on twins from different cultures gave me a life-long interest in cultural differences. Not only did they think differently, depending on their culture, they also had different skin colours. Later I learned about racism when I worked with unhappy displaced children and interpreted for asylum-seekers. I write from a child's perspective, making books accessible to all ages.
30,000 children some of whom were as young as six were orphaned and displaced from their homes when their villages were attacked in the Civil War. They met and banded together to trek across Sudan to Ethiopia and Kenya, looking for a new home. This was a journey of almost 1,000 miles. Thousands died on the way, but over 3,000 survived and many were resettled in America. I learned what can happen to children when their village is attacked and their parents killed. It's a fascinating story of perseverance and the importance of hope.
Coretta Scott King Illustrator Award Honor, American Library Association (ALA) Notable Children's Book, Association for Library Service to Children (ALSC) Best Children's Books of the Year: Outstanding Merit, Bank Street College of Education Notable Books for a Global Society, International Literacy Association (ILA) Children's Book Award Notable, International Literacy Association (ILA) Books Reflecting Diversity: - A Look Into a Wilder World, Bank Street College Children's Book Committee
Based on heartbreaking yet inspirational true events in the lives of the Lost Boys of Sudan, Brothers in Hope is a story of remarkable courage, and an amazing testament to the unyielding power…
When I first met Michael Majok Kuch and he asked me if I was interested in writing his life story, I knew nothing about South Sudan. Over the next several years, we met weekly. I’d interview him, write a chapter, research it, and then show it to him for his approval. I read everything I could find on South Sudan and the adjacent countries. In fact, I became so obsessed with Michael's culture that once I read Francis Mading Deng's Dinka Folktales, Mike’s sister arranged a meeting between Francis Mading Deng and me. These books prepared me for writing How Fast Can You Run, helping other “Lost Boys” of Sudan reunite with their mothers.
When One Book, One Philadelphia called me in my office at Drexel University and asked me to select 10 students to interview 10 South Sudanese refugees for a One Book project, I read Dave Egger’s epic tale of Valentino Achak Deng’s survival as a so-called “Lost Boy" of Sudan. Valentino along with thousands of other “Lost Boys” was forced to separate from his parents at a young age and trek thousands of miles across Sudan, Ethiopia, and Kenya without resources to food or water to arrive at several refugee camps. This is Valentino’s story yet it resonates with fleeing people worldwide. Anyone who lives in freedom will stop and listen to the plight of others after reading this astonishing book.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The epic novel based on the life of Valentino Achak Deng who, along with thousands of other children —the so-called Lost Boys—was forced to leave his village in Sudan at the age of seven and trek hundreds of miles by foot, pursued by militias, government bombers, and wild animals, crossing the deserts of three countries to find freedom.
When he finally is resettled in the United States, he finds a life full of promise, but also heartache and myriad new challenges. Moving, suspenseful, and unexpectedly funny, What Is the What is an astonishing novel that…
