Internment

4.5 stars

Gut-punching is the best way to describe this story. Set in a horrifying near-future USA, where there’s a Muslim ban, a wall at the Mexican border and even book burnings and mandatory watching of the president’s address, 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, her boyfriend on the outside, and an unexpected alliance, she begins a journey to fight for freedom.

Composed to further a political agenda (which I heartily endorse), the text occasionally appears overly forceful (probably because it is also written for teens). But what happens in this book has happened in real life before, with Nazi concentration camps and the internment of Japanese Americans in World War II. And no, Ahmed doesn’t sugarcoat how history can repeat itself. The removal of rights, the drones watching over the internment camp, the threats to enforce obedience, the public violence, and the people disappearing without explanation.

Raw and emotional, this story addresses many important and difficult themes, such as Islamophobia, xenophobia, and the importance of freedom, including religious freedom. It may not cover everything, but it has a lot of nuances to it. For example, the different ways one can practice their religion; how black Muslims are treated differently from white Muslims or Desi Muslims; how Ahmed incorporates poetry and also portrays the Arabic language as lyrical; and how there is an interracial and interfaith relationship between Layla, a Desi Muslim, and her boyfriend, a brown Jewish.

The plot was deeply engaging to me and I was sucked in from the very first chapter. But beware, it is a very introspective story: it focuses a lot on the main character’s thoughts and feelings about the horrible circumstances she’s in. Regardless of her many questionable decisions and equally reckless actions, it was Layla’s internal dialogues that resonated the most with me: constantly living in fear–and struggling to stay true to who you are, when who you are has been criminalised–is not living at all. She felt that at her core, and of course, with emotions like fear and despair at the forefront of it all, the story can be quite draining. I was enraged most of the time, laughed a little, and cried a lot. Because, even if I don’t live in the USA but in Portugal, where the level of crazy seems non-existent in comparison, I know Internment can happen anywhere in the world. All that is needed is an authoritarian, cruel human being in power, and no one to question it.