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March 31, 2021
Layla AlAmmar's Playlist for Her Novel "Silence Is a Sense"
In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Roxane Gay, and many others.
Layla AlAmmar's Silence is a Sense is an intense and innovative novel.
The Millions wrote of the book:
"Kuwaiti writer AlAmmar explores trauma and voicelessness through fragmented narrative form and a mute protagonist who has survived the war in Syria and is now living in isolation in the UK."
In her words, here is Layla AlAmmar's Book Notes music playlist for her novel Silence is a Sense:
Music is an important part of my writing practice. In fact, when I was a teenager, I would routinely take certain songs I loved – “Mr Bojangles” or “Cigarettes & Chocolate Milk”, for example – and spin out a bit of flash fiction from them. If forced to look back on these now, I’m sure I’d find them suitably cringe-worthy; but at the time, it was a way to exercise my writing muscle and express how a song resonated with me.
While I no longer use songs so explicitly (though I would one day love to write a novel that “feels” like a Beck album or something by Queens of the Stone Age), music remains an important source of inspiration. I usually have something on in the background as I draft or edit, and certain albums or artists evoke the atmospheric quality I might be striving for. There are also times when I feel like my characters would love this or that song, and these occasions invariably find their way into the work somehow.
It was no less so with my new novel, Silence is a Sense.
Music plays a large part in this book, aesthetically and thematically. The novel deals with a Syrian refugee who has fled her homeland after the failure of the Arab Spring uprising there, in which she and her friends had participated. She makes her way through Europe and ends up in an English city where she ultimately befriends her neighbour, Adam. Traumatized into muteness, she remains unnamed (until the end of the narrative) as she navigates this new community – a community struggling with anti-immigrant and Islamophobic rhetoric.
Adam is enamoured of the US counterculture movements of the '60s, so he listens to the music that provided a soundtrack to the era. On the flip side, the protagonist’s love interest back in Syria, Khalid, is inspired by the Arab revolutions of the '60s and '70s, finding expression for that in Arabic music of the era. This is perhaps what draws her to the two men.
What follows is a selection of music that appears in (or inspired) the novel.
1. Horse Latitudes - The Doors (1967)
This short bit of spoken word appears on Strange Days and it is... bizarre. The title refers to subtropical latitudes where the Earth’s atmosphere is dominated by high pressure systems; however, there is a bit of folklore attached to the name as well, which resonated strongly with my novel. The story goes that when Spanish ships transported horses to their colonies in the Americas, sometimes the winds were so calm that the voyage would be severely prolonged, leading to water shortages and the jettisoning of dead or dying horses in order to lighten the load.
Having read the unfathomable horrors of boat journeys taken by refugees (and boat is a very generous term) in order to reach what they hope will be safer shores in Europe, I couldn’t help but note the parallels. To the vicious smugglers who extort desperate men and women and squeeze them onto overcrowded rafts, these people are nothing more than cargo. Far too many of them have ended up drowning in cold, hostile waters. Jim Morrison dramatizes the moment of going overboard in chilling imagery: “Legs furiously pumping… and heads bob up… delicate… in mute nostril agony… carefully refined… and sealed over.”
2. Born on the Bayou - Creedence Clearwater Revival (1969)
I listen to way more CCR than I should admit to. '60s and '70s rock (both American and British) is my favorite genre of music, and so CCR is usually on rotation when I’m writing or editing. It’s the kind of music I know so well that I won’t be distracted by the lyrics.
I felt like Adam, as a new activist who is heavily influenced by the anti-war and civil rights movements of the '60s, would be attracted to this sound and the whole aesthetic that goes with it. I mean, it’s pretty much impossible to see a film or television scene about the Vietnam War without “Fortunate Son” playing over it. I chose “Born on the Bayou” for this list though because it’s the song my protagonist and Adam listen to when they’re hanging out in his apartment. She doesn’t know what a ‘bayou’ is as it’s so far removed from her frame of reference as a Syrian, and perhaps even Adam, as a northern Englishman, isn’t entirely sure what one is. So this becomes a moment of going outside herself and her experiences and connecting with another person over a great piece of music.
3. River Song - Dennis Wilson (1977)
Pacific Ocean Blue was also on repeat as I worked on this novel, particularly side one of the record, which opens with “River Song”. This is one of the records the main character finds in Adam’s apartment, playing it to soothe him after he gets his ass handed to him in a fight with some neighborhood boys who verbally attack her when they find out she’s a Muslim.
There are two refrains in the song – “I got to get away” and “You got to run away” – which resonate with the protagonist as she has fled the war in her country. Water is a recurring motif in the novel: she crosses the Aegean to get to Europe; she skirts the Danube as she crosses borders in search of safety; and she recalls the Queiq river that runs through her hometown of Aleppo – a river with memories that are pleasant and then horrifying in the extreme.
4. Wild is the Wind - Nina Simone (1964)
This moody piece makes me think of Khalid and the protagonist. Given their culture and background, much of their relationship is conducted in secret. In the backseat of a borrowed car or the quiet of an empty stairwell, all they have are these stolen and fleeting moments. The desperate tone of this song and its lyrics capture that very well. When Simone says “satisfy this hungriness” or “Like a leaf clings to a tree… Oh my darling, cling to me”, I can sense the frustration of my protagonist and her overwhelming desire to be with the one she loves in the midst of the chaos and destruction and uncertainty surrounding them as Syria descends into civil war.
5. Guevara mat (Guevara has Died) - Sheikh Imam & Ahmed Fouad Negm (1967)
Part funeral dirge, part news flash, part call to revolution, I would need much more space in order to adequately convey how important this song is in the long history of Arab revolutions, particularly in Egypt. “Guevara has Died” was written by revered protest poet Ahmed Fouad Negm (1929-2013) and set to music by his longtime collaborator Sheikh Imam (1918-1995). Composed following the death of Che Guevara in October 1967, it became a staple of the duo’s concerts for many years (when they weren’t in jail, that is). Guevara appealed to Arab revolutionaries as much as he did any other countercultural movement. The combination of economic stagnation, Egypt’s defeat in the Six-Day War, and disillusionment with Nasser’s policies (which included curtailing free speech and banning independent student unions on campuses), led to an uptick in civil disobedience during the late 60s. The perverted hopes and melancholy of the time are hauntingly conveyed in the syncopated beat and “marching feet” ethos of the song.
In Silence is a Sense, the song illustrates the interconnectedness of Arab revolutions across space and time. The media has shown the contagion of the Arab Spring that began in Tunisia in December 2010 and rapidly spread across the region, eventually reaching Syria, where my characters are swept up in the possibilities of the movement. Khalid, in particular, is a student of Arab political history, and he is able to reach back in time to other revolutions and other protest songs – both as teaching moments and as spaces for consolation.
6. Al-Atlal - Um Kulthum (1966)
Um Kulthum (1898 - 1975) is an Arab icon. Dubbed “Egypt’s fourth pyramid” and “Star of the East”, she’s sold over 80 million records around the world. Highly improvisational, her concerts could last up to five hours, during which she would only perform two or three songs, repeating lines and feeding off the energy of the audience. At the height of her success, she gave concerts on the first Thursday of the month, and the traffic in Cairo would drop noticeably as people rushed home to listen. Her emotive tonal variations and intensity brought the audience to a euphoric state known in Arabic as “tarab” (go ahead and Google “Um Kulthum audience reaction”). You would be hard-pressed to find a single Arab household that has not had her records playing in the background as the coffee brews or as grape leaves are stuffed and rolled.
There are many staples of hers that could’ve gone on this list – Enta Omry, Seret el Hob, Alf leila wa leila – but I chose Al-Atlal, which translates to “The Ruins”. Another poem set to music, the song is ostensibly a love ballad, but as was the case with many Arabic songs of the era, who or what the loved one was remained an open and fluid question. When she sings “Oh, my heart, don’t ask me where love has gone | it was an edifice of illusion that collapsed | pour me a cup and I will drink on its ruins”, she could easily be speaking to the disenchantment that follows defeat or a failed uprising, such as those which occurred at the time.
7. Revolution 9 - The Beatles (1968)
Silence is a Sense is ultimately about revolutions, those of the past and those of the present, those of the East and those of the West, those that are political and those which are personal. It’s about the cacophony of life and how we derive meaning from it. It’s about pain we don’t have words for but that we nevertheless try to communicate. It’s about pockets of silence amid the noise of existence.
That’s what this song is to me. A cluster of crowds, chants, a child’s whimper, gunfire, the city, radio announcers and news bulletins. Explosive and uncontained. Chaos, confusion, you have to imagine there’s fear in there as well. And this number 9 refrain, this interjection, like a call to order or a compulsion to repeat.
Layla AlAmmar is a writer and academic from Kuwait. She has a master's degree in creative writing from the University of Edinburgh. Her short stories have appeared in the Evening Standard, Quail Bell Magazine, the Red Letters St. Andrews Prose Journal, and Aesthetica Magazine, where her story "The Lagoon" was a finalist for the 2014 Creative Writing Award. She was the 2018 British Council international writer in residence at the Small Wonder Short Story Festival. Her debut novel, The Pact We Made, was published in 2019. She has written for The Guardian and ArabLit Quarterly. She is currently pursuing a PhD on the intersection of Arab women's fiction and literary trauma theory.
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