A Review of Samira Ahmed’s Internment (Little Brown for YR, 2019)
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ljiang28
Written by Stephen Hong Sohn
Edited by Lina Jiang
As part of the shorter lightning reviews, I wanted to cover Samira Ahmed’s Internment (Little Brown for YR, 2019), which I read sometime over the last year. Let’s start off with the marketing description: “Set in a horrifying near-future United States, seventeen-year-old Layla Amin and her parents are forced into an internment camp for Muslim American citizens. With the help of newly made friends also trapped within the internment camp, her boyfriend on the outside, and an unexpected alliance, Layla begins a journey to fight for freedom, leading a revolution against the camp's Director and his guards. Heart-racing and emotional, Internment challenges readers to fight complicit silence that exists in our society today.” This novel is one of those that I find super politically compelling even if it is not always narratively dynamic. Clearly, Ahmed is engaging the complicated post 9/11 milieu in which there had been documented cases of politicians stating that it might be a good idea to put Muslims Americans into internment camps. Of course, the rise in surveillance and hate crimes in the post 9/11 period also contributes to the inspirations behind a novel like this one. In this alternative future, Muslim Americans experience something similar to Japanese Americans. What differentiates this text from some of the canonical first generation Japanese American writings on the internment is that is Layla is explicitly confrontational and oppositional. That is, she’s an activist and will go to great lengths to achieve justice even at the expense of her own well-being. In this sense, you certainly root for her at all stages but the delineation between heroes and villains can be so stark that narrative tension and drama sometimes remains a little bit flat. Fortunately, Ahmed provides us a couple of cases where you can’t be sure who her allies are. In this way, the novel produces its greatest friction when you begin to see that revolutions are often reliant upon double agents and that much must go on behind the scenes for justice to prevail.
Buy the Book Here
comments
ljiang28
Written by Stephen Hong Sohn
Edited by Lina Jiang
As part of the shorter lightning reviews, I wanted to cover Samira Ahmed’s Internment (Little Brown for YR, 2019), which I read sometime over the last year. Let’s start off with the marketing description: “Set in a horrifying near-future United States, seventeen-year-old Layla Amin and her parents are forced into an internment camp for Muslim American citizens. With the help of newly made friends also trapped within the internment camp, her boyfriend on the outside, and an unexpected alliance, Layla begins a journey to fight for freedom, leading a revolution against the camp's Director and his guards. Heart-racing and emotional, Internment challenges readers to fight complicit silence that exists in our society today.” This novel is one of those that I find super politically compelling even if it is not always narratively dynamic. Clearly, Ahmed is engaging the complicated post 9/11 milieu in which there had been documented cases of politicians stating that it might be a good idea to put Muslims Americans into internment camps. Of course, the rise in surveillance and hate crimes in the post 9/11 period also contributes to the inspirations behind a novel like this one. In this alternative future, Muslim Americans experience something similar to Japanese Americans. What differentiates this text from some of the canonical first generation Japanese American writings on the internment is that is Layla is explicitly confrontational and oppositional. That is, she’s an activist and will go to great lengths to achieve justice even at the expense of her own well-being. In this sense, you certainly root for her at all stages but the delineation between heroes and villains can be so stark that narrative tension and drama sometimes remains a little bit flat. Fortunately, Ahmed provides us a couple of cases where you can’t be sure who her allies are. In this way, the novel produces its greatest friction when you begin to see that revolutions are often reliant upon double agents and that much must go on behind the scenes for justice to prevail.
Buy the Book Here
comments
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