Border Crossings

In both policy debates and media coverage, refugees are often presented as a problem to be solved: an unknown mass traversing oceans and distant countries we’ve never set foot in and crossing invisible borders. The individual taking refuge is obscured by stereotypes and systems that promote cultural assimilation. When telling their stories, displaced people can only hope that listeners will try to understand the singularity of their experiences.

This idea drives Sulaiman Addonia’s The Seers, which offers an erotic, defiantly uncompromising portrait of Hannah, a seventeen-year-old Eritrean refugee navigating life in Great Britain. “My mother gave birth to me in Keren, but I rebirthed myself in London that spring night as I topped Bina‑Balozi on a bench in Fitzroy Square,” she says in the novella’s opening lines, establishing from the jump her unblinking frankness.

Hannah’s sexual awakening is the theme that runs throughout her journey from Africa...