At some point in recent history, the merits of reading literary fiction became inextricably entwined with the genre’s potential to instill empathy, particularly for characters whose lives are radically different from our own. In this context, literature has tangible (and perhaps commercial) value in no small part because of our hope that what is true on the page might be true in reality. If we encounter unknown, unfamiliar or even unlikable characters in a novel, and still find room in our hearts to care for them, then perhaps we will be more likely to do so when such figures wash up on our own shores.
Mohamed Mbougar Sarr’s second novel, “The Silence of the Choir,” opens with the arrival of 72 migrants in a fictional Sicilian village called Altino, an ideal narrative framework to test a novel’s empathetic capacity. The migrants, who come from a range of African countries, including Senegal, Nigeria, Ghana and Mali, are referred to collectively as the ragazzi, Italian for “the guys.” They represent one side of an equation that brings two dramatically different ways of being into contact. On the other side lie Altino’s residents: the aid workers, poets, priests, butchers, doctors and politicians who live in the shadow of Mount Etna and contend with the ragazzi’s arrival.
The migrants may be the newcomers, but Sarr is too interesting and thoughtful a writer to simply answer the inevitable question: Will the good people of Altino learn to care about these men? His interest, rather, is in finding what kind of narrative form, if any, is best suited to such a task. In the process, Sarr employs almost every literary form available, including monologues, historical interludes and somewhat didactic dialogues about the malicious plans of a far-right politician.
The novel’s more conventional emotional heart resides in the journal entries of Jogoy, who arrived in Sicily from Senegal years before the rest of the migrants and now works as a translator for a resettlement agency. The intimacy and lyrical grace of his accounts stand in stark contrast to the voice of the far-right politician, as well as the haunted, guilt-ridden voice of Fousseyni Traoré, a Malian refugee. Traoré’s story is so hard to tell that Sarr interrupts the narration halfway through and turns it into a play.
More frequently, though, Sarr uses a range of third-person perspectives that vary in scope and style. Alison Anderson’s deft translation is all the more impressive for the ease with which she manages these shifts. Characters aren’t revealed so much as they are refracted through different narrative lenses, allowing us to consider how a story’s form, perhaps more than the story itself, can determine how we understand a person.
There are real-world implications to Sarr’s experimentation. The fate of people like these 72 men, who have left their homes, families, friends, cultures and languages, who have risked their lives to head to Europe, will be decided not by what they’ve endured, what they want or are willing to do, but by how they tell their stories and how “we” — the resident public, the privileged reader — feel about them as a result.
In one of the novel’s more dramatic narrative breaks, Sarr appears to address the reader directly. He opens a chapter with the same question the ragazzi will have to answer in their asylum hearings: “Why did you leave your home?” Sarr points out the impossibility of answering this. Instead, he writes, we should be asking “Why are you here?” and, perhaps even more important, “Now that you’re here, what do you want from us?”
Sarr notes that the right answer to the first question will engender sympathy, perhaps even pity. The other two questions, stripped of the veneer of innocent curiosity, address the harder truth: that the migrants “have a life in the present, and want to build a future,” one that will inevitably have an effect on those asking the questions.
It’s only fitting that a novel so concerned with how we read, interpret and respond resists easy attachment (or aversion) to its characters. There is the potential for love, grace or enmity, but the most formidable challenge for us is posed early in the narrative by Salvatore Pessoto, the village doctor: “How can we possibly understand one of the most complex things that exists in a person — sorrow?”
Perhaps we can’t, Sarr suggests, but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t value in trying. Sarr points honestly and often brilliantly to the divisions between us and the world’s ragazzi, and in that empty space he offers a dozen different ways of seeing not only the other side, but ourselves as well.
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