Admiring Silence

An unnamed narrator, a middle-aged man originally from Zanzibar who has lived in England for roughly twenty years, describes a persistent pain in his chest. A visit to his doctor confirms that his heart is damaged. The doctor assumes the narrator is Afro-Caribbean and lectures him about racial predispositions to disease; the narrator does not correct him. He reflects with bitter irony on England's imperial legacy, its healthcare system, and the crowd of immigrants now demanding recognition at its gates.

The narrator lives in London with Emma, his long-term partner, and their seventeen-year-old daughter, Amelia. They are not married, a decision rooted in Emma's rebellion against her parents' middle-class respectability. Their relationship, once passionate and sustaining, has grown fractious. Amelia views her father as a failure. The narrator decides he must tell Emma about his diagnosis immediately, since he has always told her everything. Or nearly everything.

When the narrator first met Emma, he was washing dishes in a restaurant while training as a teacher, and she arrived to wait tables. She transformed his life: Her affection made him feel confident rather than alien, and her circle of friends embraced him. His foreignness granted him automatic sympathy and authority over the world beyond Europe. This latitude, he admits, made it necessary to invent stories. Emma asked endlessly about his home and family, and the narrator embellished and fabricated until his personal history became an elaborate fiction. He created a stern uncle and a father figure from his one stepfather, adjusting stories to seem "noble and ordered" (33).

In the version he tells Emma, his mother's elder brother, a powerful merchant named Hashim, arranged his parents' marriage. His father, a gentle but poor young man from the countryside, grew dependent on Hashim for housing, money, and status, and gradually sank into shame and bitterness. Woven through this fabricated account are the narrator's actual memories of Zanzibar's political upheaval: independence, ethnic tensions, and then a violent uprising involving murder, detention, rape, and expropriation. Hashim, who had supported the nationalists, was arrested and detained for eighteen months. The narrator's biological father's sister, Khadija, arrived wailing that her entire family had been killed, their dismembered bodies thrown in a well.

The narrator tells Emma a version of how he escaped to England: a fake passport, a tourist visa, a year living secretly in a college room with Ahmed Hussein, a family connection who pushed him to study. He secured a grant, obtained a residence permit, and eventually reached London, where loneliness overwhelmed him until Emma filled his life. He became a schoolteacher and, as he puts it, "did not fulfil myself" (84).

Emma's parents, Mr. and Mrs. Willoughby, react to the relationship with varying degrees of dismay. Mr. Willoughby, a retired solicitor, makes casually racist remarks but develops a taste for the narrator's romanticized Empire stories. Mrs. Willoughby maintains polite disengagement. When Emma becomes pregnant, Mrs. Willoughby campaigns for marriage, adoption, or abortion, arguing the child will be "neither one thing nor the other" (24). Emma resists. Amelia's birth brings Mrs. Willoughby deeply into their lives as an essential caretaker, subtly reshaping the flat's domestic landscape while the narrator feels increasingly invisible.

A crucial fact underlies all of this: the narrator has never told his family in Zanzibar about Emma or Amelia. To his mother, Emma would be disreputable, and the announcement would unleash accusations of betrayal. He has maintained a twenty-year silence, and the longer he remained silent, the harder it became to tell Emma about the silence.

On the day of his doctor visit, the narrator receives a letter from his mother. A change of government in Zanzibar means amnesty for those who left illegally; he can return. His mother also reveals she has been arranging a marriage for him, describing his life in England as that of "a ghoul in a ruined house" (94). The narrator tells Emma about the amnesty but says nothing about the marriage proposal. Amelia responds with excitement, declaring it is her country too.

Arriving in Zanzibar after nearly twenty years, the narrator finds the island physically devastated: blocked toilets, no running water, electricity for only a few hours daily. His mother and half-siblings, Akbar and Halima, welcome him warmly, but his stepfather, Hashim Abubakar, greets him with an impassive face. The old town has collapsed into rubble and sewage, while the historically poorer district has been rebuilt with new flats, a display of the government's ethnic revenge.

Over several evenings, the narrator asks his mother about his biological father. She reveals the true story, correcting the fabricated version: His father was Hashim's nephew, a quiet young man who married the narrator's mother when she was eighteen. The marriage was arranged to settle a debt her father owed Hashim. After about a year, the father simply did not come home one day; he was seen boarding a launch at the docks, apparently stowing away. He never contacted anyone again. His mother, Bi Habibi, never recovered and eventually starved herself to death. Three months later, Hashim asked for the narrator's mother in marriage.

The narrator receives an elaborate job offer from Amur Malik, the Permanent Secretary at the Ministry of Culture, who pitches a Scandinavian-funded translation project. The family also presses the arranged marriage. The proposed bride, Safiya, is a twenty-year-old medical student who wants to continue her education in England. She visits, and the narrator is drawn to her despite himself but asks for more time.

Finally, the narrator tells his family the truth about Emma and Amelia. Akbar explodes with anger. His mother says she will have to learn to think of him as no longer her son. His stepfather, when they speak privately, compares the narrator to his biological father, Abbas: "You remind me of your father... In the way you are both afraid" (188). The family refuses to speak to him until he leaves.

On the flight back to London, the narrator sits beside Ira, an Indian-born woman from Ealing whose own interracial marriage ended when her English husband left her. She describes her feeling for England as "disappointed love" (205), a phrase that resonates deeply with the narrator.

Emma meets him at Heathrow and embraces him. That night in bed, he asks if there is someone else. She says yes. She describes how her feeling for him has changed into something unbearable, how she has spent weeks dreading his return. At the end of the week, she leaves.

Amelia stays with the narrator for six weeks as he weeps and drinks, then moves out, calling him contemptible. He writes to his mother expecting reproach but receives a heartbroken reply dictated to Akbar, closing with "Come home" (217). The narrator acknowledges it is not home anymore and that he has no way of retrieving that idea "except through more lies" (217).

In the novel's final pages, the narrator sits alone, meditating on his father Abbas, wondering if the man might live nearby. He thinks about calling Ira to ask her to a movie. The novel closes with the narrator holding the phone, afraid of disturbing what he calls "this fragile silence" (217).