Refugees don’t just have dreams, aspirations, and families they leave behind. They get horny, fuck, and fantasize about it, too.
Sulaiman Addonia’s latest novel, The Seers (Coffee House Press, April 2025), opens on Hannah, a young Eritrean refugee, topping her lover Bina-Belozi on a park bench in London’s Fitzroy Square. She details their tryst in raunchy, poetic detail while recalling the generations of European colonial violence waged in East Africa leading to her displacement. In just three pages, desire for the body—both corporeal and national—surfaces as a driving force in this subversive work about forced migration.
Many refugee novels show protagonists fleeing turmoil. They cross land and sea to then encounter the endless indignities of life in a new land. In The Seers, this familiar resilience tale recedes to instead emphasize Hannah’s budding sexual agency as a form of home and sense-making. Barred from employment and education, she awaits her asylum decision from the bedroom of her foster home. In her isolation, she explores her body and its desires. “In that room... my journey of discovery to my inner world launched my increasing flirtation with the deepest desires of my body and mind”. She likens “lovers to lands, to places, as if my search for home had eroded the boundaries between my body and a country, so that the two had merged to make sense only when my desires were fully intact and in action”.
Such erosion of boundaries also manifests in Addonia’s experimentation with form. Written as one continuous paragraph without line or chapter breaks, the narrative fully immerses readers into Hannah’s roving psyche. Scenes of her early days in a foster home in Kilburn, migration from Eritrea to London, memories of her family Keren, numerous sexual encounters, and attempts to navigate Britain’s bureaucratic immigration process all weave into one another, mirroring the unmoored quality of her days spent adrift in a nation over which she has no claim.
Early in her asylum process, her immigration lawyer urges her to soften her backstory, framing herself as a grateful refugee to aid her application. Hannah confronts the realization that Britain—a nation that facilitated Ethiopia’s annexation of Eritrea after WWII—is both perpetrator of and protector from colonial violence. The cost of being welcomed into her new home means erasing the ugly truth of its role in her displacement. She wonders, “Who are we,” she asks, “if our stories have to be changed, amended and simplified in order to live in peace?”.
Throughout most of the book, Hannah exists in a limbo state. While much is out of her control, it’s through her sexual impulses that she finds agency. One central fixation is Anne, an immigrant adoptee and Hannah’s prickly housemate. Anne—who has a job, friends, and a life outside the foster home—fascinates her. She represents someone who has found their footing in this new world. When they finally get intimate, Hannah feels like she’s made whole. “She explored me until I saw my humanity shining in her eyes, the eyes of a Londoner. Anne made me visible through sex... Home is your bellybutton, Anne, I said. Home is your breasts, your eyes, your smile”. Sex is a validating force, one of the few aspects of life Hannah can control. Through it, she asserts herself and carves out hope for a future of her own. As a result, she resists being characterized as a tragic victim of her circumstances.
Stories about unapologetic female pleasure have always been radical but are especially so when they reject assumptions of the immigrant trauma narrative. In a 2024 interview with The Guardian*, Addonia describes editors’ incredulity over a scene in which a refugee character wakes up and masturbates, as though pleasure must not be possible amidst such harrowing circumstances. Despite Addonia’s belief that stories about sex are just “as important as people’s stories of violence,” he was told that his writing was “far removed from what the western reader would expect.” To have gotten such resistance from gatekeepers is a good sign. It means Addonia has found the edge, and his contributions are overdue in contemporary migration literature.
Even the book’scover captures the novel’s lush, erotic spirit. Its soft rendering of a bouquet of flowers in all red mirrors the book’s pulsing heat. Malachi Lily, the cover artist, chose roses (the national flower of England), gerberas (the national flower of Eritrea), and various species of nightshades common to Eritrea for the imagery. These flowers are all beautiful, some thorny or poisonous—a perfect nod to the novel’s explorations of pleasure and pain.
While The Seers recounts the tale of Hannah’s migration, the work itself is also migratory in the sense that it thrusts readers into the more taboo planes of empathy for the displaced. This unexpected, evocative work challenges notions of what refugee stories get to encompass. In the spring of 2025, as the book makes its American debut, The United States has already halted refugee admissions and suspended federal funding to refugee aid organizations. Against this backdrop, The Seers and its bold portrayal of one woman’s sexual agency is urgent, required reading in the face of the Trump administration’s dehumanizing policies.
Jamie Li is a writer and editor based in San Diego. A VONA/Voices alum, her work appears in Slant’d Magazine, Mangoprism, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from the Vermont College of Fine Arts, where she is Managing Editor & Associate Fiction Editor of Hunger Mountain. She has received support from the Fine Arts Work Center and is a 2025 Seattle Public Library Writers’ Room Fellow. She is at work on her first novel. Find her on IG @j.a.m.i.e.l.i or at jamieli.co.