Minoli Salgado - Twelve Cries From Home: In Search of Sri Lanka's Disappeared

Minoli Salgado - Twelve Cries From Home: In Search of Sri Lanka's Disappeared

4 ⭐

Genre: Non-Fiction, Memoirs, True Stories

Pages: 250

Format: Digital (Netgalley)

Publisher: Repeater Books

Date Published: 8th February 2022

Thank you to NetGalley and Repeater Books for e-arc of this book to read and review.

Book Blurb: 

Twelve Cries from Home speaks out against Sri Lanka's official silencing of war crimes, reclaiming the stories of survivors who insist on being heard.

Since August 2020, the intimidation of witnesses and journalists has surged in Sri Lanka. Twelve Cries from Home navigates the memories and stories of twelve war survivors, mostly women and relatives of the disappeared, who wished to have their stories retold so that a permanent record might be made, and so that those outside the country might understand their experiences.

The outcome of a journey across the island in late 2018 by writer and Professor of Literature Minoli Salgado, who was revisiting her ancestral home, Twelve Cries from Home is deeply-layered and localised work of travelling witness. It returns to the concept of home as a place of belonging and security, which is a lost ideal for most, and uses a Sri Lankan measure of distance - the call, or hoowa - to ask how we might attend to stories that are difficult to tell and to hear.

Exploring the bitter complexity of war by presenting stories from four regions of Sri Lanka, it reveals the complex network of relationships between the agents of conflict and their victims, as well as the blurred boundary between victims and perpetrators, the role of informers and the process of ethical repair after traumatic experience.

Twelve Cries from Home offers a rare glimpse into a country subject to enforced self-censorship, allowing us to take stock of social and political developments in Sri Lanka and what has and has not been achieved in light of the transitional justice mechanisms promised to the UN.

My Review: 

This book took me quite a long time to read, mainly because I had to take breaks every so often as the topics discussed in this book are at points very hard to read. This book is the account of different people, who all lived and lost loved ones through the Sri Lankan war. The author interviews them all around the island of Colombo and each interview is filled with pain, harsh realities, losses, and heartbreaks, but also hope for a better future and love.

This book is a very important read and I am glad I read it. I also learned so much about Sri Lanka and the war that raged there for decades. Before reading this book, I wasn’t familiar with it as much, but reading this book made me look into the war and Sri Lankan history more and to educate myself. It is a hard book to read, but at the same time it is powerful and it gave a voice to people who otherwise not be heard.

Overall: It is a hard read, full of pain, and suffering, but also hope and love. It’s people’s accounts of how their lost their loved ones and family members, as well as how they suffered themselves during war years. I think it is a very important read, albeit not a light one. I am glad I picked up this book and educated myself more about Sri Lanka and its history, as well as the recent war, through the accounts of those who lived through it. 

This review was first published on NetGalley: https://www.netgalley.co.uk/book/247157/review/959200

About the Author: 

Minoli Salgado is a Sri Lankan writer and academic based in the United Kingdom who was born in Malaysia and educated mainly in England. She has written extensively on migrant studies and diasporic literature and is the author of the critically acclaimed work Writing Sri Lanka. She also writes fiction and poetry, and her debut novel A Little Dust on the Eyes won the inaugural SI Leeds Literary Prize.

https://minolisalgado.com/about/