Sulaiman Addonia was born in Eritrea and lives in Brussels. He spent his teens in Saudi Arabia (the setting for his 2008 debut, The Consequences of Love) after spending his early childhood in a refugee camp in Sudan, the backdrop to his second novel, Silence Is My Mother Tongue, which was longlisted in 2019 for the Orwell prize for fiction. His latest novel, The Seers, a single 134-page paragraph about the sexual encounters of an Eritrean refugee named Hannah, takes place in London, where Addonia and his brother claimed asylum in 1990.

Where did this novel begin?
In lockdown, on my iPhone. My partner and I have two kids and, when the schools closed, we split the day into shifts: I looked after them in the morning and then, in the afternoon, I stood in front of the ponds of Ixelles, here in Brussels, which is where Hannah popped up in my head. I just got my phone out and started, and then went back to the same spot every day to write. I’d been reading Dostoevsky’s The Gambler and I discovered that he wrote it in about two weeks because he needed the money. I thought, OK, why don’t I go in a duel with this Russian guy? I lost – I finished in closer to three weeks.

How different was the process from your previous books?
It was an experiment in writing from the subconscious. Moving from London to Brussels [with his Belgian partner in 2009] was incredibly difficult: all my childhood traumas suddenly resurfaced. The massacre [of his village in Eritrea during the war of independence]; the murder of my dad; what my mum went through [working as a servant] in Jeddah; coming to London just with my brother at the age of 15 – everything came out. I lost myself but, at the same time, it was a moment where I decided to move my practice from the conscious to the subconscious: your job isn’t to intervene when the writing process happens, but before it begins. Feed your imagination – then withdraw and give it freedom.

Is writing more enjoyable now?
In Jeddah, I looked towards the west as this amazing free space. Now I look at writers in the global south and envy them: they’re the ones facing imprisonment, but writing without fear. A lot of books coming out in London or the US have become all about subtlety and conformity. The western novel feels like it’s in a very calm space; I told my friend, I’m gonna take it back to the rock’n’roll era! I was joking, but I feel The Seers is in conversation with a time when the western novel was really bold. My first book was written consciously to sell. With my second novel, I started to change the process and I think I became happier, because it’s an amazing thrill when you’re on the edge; writing a book like The Seers, you could fall.

Source: theguardian.com