In one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises, hundreds of thousands of Rohingya Muslims have fled Myanmar because of systematic violence and ethnic cleansing by its government. It’s really easy to be so consumed by what’s happening in the United States to completely ignore or be ignorant to what’s happening outside of it. Perhaps the better phrase to use here is that history repeats itself. Set two and a half years after the presidential election, the narrative timeline now mirrors that of reality, and we can only hope that the horrific events within the novel won’t transpire in the same way. Samira Ahmed began writing the book in January 2016, and it isn’t hard to imagine her fiction becoming our reality in the near future, with internment-style camps already existing in light of Trump’s war on undocumented immigrants. Is Internment an example of life imitating art or the other way around?

Internment teaches us the power of solidarity and challenges us to fight the complicit silence in our societies today. With the help of her friends and an unexpected alliance, Layla leads a revolution against the camp’s Director and his guards in what can only be described as one of the most political and timely novels of 2019. Among the books burned, are Ali Amin's poetry collections Layla, therefore, has an immediate emotional response to.Set in a near-future United States, the book follows Indian American Muslim teen Layla Amin in her fight for freedom when she is forced into an internment camp along with her parents. The book burning illustrates how the government has overtaken the minds of its people, systematically working to eliminate the identities and words of millions of its citizens. The election of a fascist president leads to a wave of Islamophobia, which infects the spirits of the nation.

The book burning the community stages at the start of the novel symbolizes erasure of minority peoples, and dissenting voices. The theft not only keeps her from communicating with David, but illustrates the governmental work to strip Muslim American citizens of their voices, agency, and connection to the world beyond their coming imprisonment in Camp Mobius. When the Exclusion Officers storm her home at the start of the novel, they seize her telephone. Layla's phone symbolizes freedom of speech.

Internment book samira ahmed