A review by bookreviewswithkb
Twelve Cries from Home: In Search of Sri Lanka's Disappeared by Minoli Salgado

challenging emotional informative reflective sad medium-paced

5.0

thank you to @netgalley and @repeater for the review copy 🤍

this is a beautiful collection of the stories of twelve people who were taken and disappeared during times of war in Sri Lanka. their family members shared their story, to be remembered, so that others could bear witness. Salgado intimately crafts a narrative from her interviews with the family members of the disappeared, reflecting on ideas of justice, of hope and despair, of bone crushing fear

i couldn’t help but to also think about Palestine, Congo, Sudan and every other country whose people are suffering from unimaginable violence at the hands of oppressive colonizers. none of us are free until all of us are free 

“We just try to get by each day, put food on the table, educate the kids. You can call us survivors if you like but we just lived it out, that’s all. Don’t seek heroism in our survival when we owe our lives to contingency and chance. This is everyday violence, you understand. Each day, a struggle. The banality of evil needs to be understood in relation to the banality of survival, you might say. We survived. Get used to it. We are no more virtuous, forgiving or understanding than anyone else. We still search, look for answers. We get angry and seek justice, revenge. We learn to love and find our own peace. And we get on with this life that is in bits.”

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