I Don't Want to Talk About Home: A migrants search for belonging

(Paperback)

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A powerful debut memoir which offers an moving and refreshing portrayal of the Syrian migrant experience and what it takes to rebuild your life out of the rubble. 'I carry my troubled homeland within me; I hide it like a crime.' Growing up in deeply conservative Saudi Arabia, Suad Aldarra felt stifled. The daughter of Syrian parents, she railed against the extreme strictures placed on women in Saudi society at the time and the rising prejudice her family faced as migrants. When the opportunity arose to study software engineering at Damascus University, she jumped at the chance to move to the city she loved for a degree of freedom she'd never known. But when the war started, everything changed. Suddenly Suad and her new husband Housam were thrown into a world of relentless pressure, desperately looking for a way out. Suad's degree in engineering was the saving grace that allowed her to travel to Ireland on a working visa. Yet reaching safety came at a price... I Don't Want to Talk About Home is not a memoir about war and destruction. It's not about camps or boats. It's about the enduring love for a home that ceased to exist and how to build a life out of the rubble. With great warmth and insight, Suad writes about those left behind paper borders, the sacrifices made, and the parts of yourself you lose and find when integrating into a new world.

Reviews

Powerful, fascinating and deeply moving - this book pushes aside our lazy images of human migration and refugees. I loved it. -- Roddy Doyle, author of Love
Full of heart, honesty and hard-learnt wisdom, I Don't Want To Talk About Home addresses complex issues about identity, belonging and family. This book took me on a captivating journey across continents, history and culture. Suad Aldarra possesses a rare gift to when it comes to storytelling; I literally couldn't put this book down. -- Jan Carson, author of The Raptures
Illuminating, vivid, and insightful, this is such a timely book. -- Louise O'Neill, author of Idol
This is a heart-wrenching memoir. Suad's courage, resilience and determination to find a place she can now call home, shines through. A beautiful book that I read in one sitting. -- Sinead Moriarty, author of Yours, Mine, Ours

It is difficult to convey in a few words how much I loved this book. Full of heart-wrenching moments, it moved me to tears frequently, tears of both empathy and joy.
A beautiful evocation of a lost home and a lost homeland, tender, heartfelt, elegiac, full of humorous and wry observations that create a vivid picture of a vibrant world little known, understood, or appreciated in the west, it gives identity, humanity, and dignity to all those too often dismissed as faceless and nameless 'refugees' or 'migrants.'

Author Bio

Suad Aldarra is a writer and data scientist based in Dublin. She was born in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia to Syrian parents. In 2003 she moved back to her family home in Syria to study software engineering. After fleeing the war in 2012 she lived in Egypt and the US, before eventually settling in Ireland. In 2021, Suad was awarded the Art Councils of Ireland English Literature bursary. I Don't Want to Talk About Home is her debut memoir.