At the end of The Seers, Sulaiman Addonia reveals the meaning of the title. “Seers” are gender-fluid, trans, refugee outsiders. They are the traumatized, deracinated war victims who understand England better than longtime Londoners. In the words of the Seers, “We had to see ourselves the way we are from the inside first, from the moment we were born, before we learnt the rest of the world.”
Addonia was born in 1974 to an Eritrean mother and Ethiopian father who was murdered during a civil war massacre. Addonia lived in a Sudanese refugee camp until he could join his mother in Saudi Arabia where she worked as a domestic servant. Tigryina was Addonia’s mother tongue, lost when he went to school in Saudi and mastered Arabic.
Following this traumatic childhood, Addonia landed in London—an underaged, unaccompanied minor, with no English. He not only learned the language, he finished graduate school in England, and settled in Brussels, where I believe he now speaks Flemish and French. There he teaches writing as a gateway to healing from the ravages of war.
I picked up Addonia’s second novel, Silence is My Mother Tongue, in the Cape Town airport in 2019. The novel is a gripping account of life in a Sudanese refugee camp narrated through a dreamlike scrim. It wasn’t just Addonia’s command of English that blew my mind, it was the haunting, other-worldly feeling he transmits on the page. Eager to bring attention to his work, I wrote a piece called Sibling Transgressions and the Surrender of Language: Sulaiman Addonia and Aharon Appelfeld that feels pertinent to The Seers as well.
The Seers is Addonia’s third novel. It is next level, combining Addonia’s passion for gender bending, taboo breaking, connective sexuality, with his understanding that in our broken world, sexual fluidity invites violence. Addonia overlays his gender explorations with a harsh and at times, conflicted view of British colonialism.
This, in 120 pages.
We meet Hannah on page one. She is an Eritrean refugee, homeless on the streets of London, wearing a “strap-on” to enter a man splayed on a park bench. Hannah sees her reflection inside this man, a world “that was familiar and unfamiliar, beautiful and disturbing, disruptive and affirming.”
This catalogue of opposites defines Hannah. She fixates on women and on men. She is loving but espouses violence. She wants England’s Home Office to understand she’s here solely because of her war trauma. Yet she’s enamored of London’s rainy, foggy weather. She wants to live in the moment yet her past overshadows everything. She’s maddened when locals compare her trauma with theirs, concluding that hers is worse. She loves her housemates but finds solace in sleeping near a tree and making love on a park bench. She understands British politeness but can’t constrain herself from acting out in public.
We follow Hannah as her life, and the novel, become increasingly disjointed. The read feels like a fever dream—or nightmare—heating up. Addonia accomplishes this, in part, by structure. The book is one long paragraph with no quotation marks. But unlike writers who obfuscate on purpose, Addonia’s writing is straight forward and clear. (Think Anna Burns’s Milkman, as opposed to James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake.) It is the characters’ efforts to self-actualize that drive the disjunction. Too terrible to be buried, their pasts break into their present lives in painful bursts, and at random times.
Hannah’s mother died when Hannah was a baby. Other than her father’s ongoing grief and rhapsodic memories, her mother’s diary is all Hannah has. Hannah discovers that her mother fought the same societal taboos as does Hannah—sexual freedom and life outside society’s constrictions. The mother’s revelations are shocking to Hannah, initially for their departure from the saintly portrait painted by her father. As Hannah comes to understand her mother, she questions the differences between how her mother lived—in the country of the colonized—versus how Hannah lives—in the land of the colonizer.
This is a book about the trauma of being a refugee. But it also spoofs British politeness and understatement. What impact the colonizer? What face does the colonizer wear at home?
Only Addonia could have written this novel. Although he is a polyglot, English is his writing language. With his linguistic fluidity and keen cultural analysis, his work is fresh and new. He tells us things in English that a native speaker could not, because his English bends to his storytelling. He infuses his characters’ experience into language so that reading his books becomes a physical act.
I regret that I didn’t have a chance to re-read The Seers before writing this review. I’m certain it will evolve with subsequent readings. I’m excited for readers who don’t yet know Sulaiman Addonia to experience what he puts between the covers.
***
The Seers
by Sulaiman Addonia
Coffee House Press; 136 p.
Martha Anne Toll is a novelist and literary and cultural critic. Her debut novel, Three Muses, won the Petrichor Prize for Finely Crafted Fiction. Her next novel, Duet for One, comes out May 6, 2025. Toll has received a wide range of artists’ fellowships and serves on the Board of Directors of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation. She comes to writing after a career in social justice.