Landscapes of Silence
Hardcover, 352 pages
Expected publication:
July 21st 2022 by Faber Faber
ISBN: 0571370934
ISBN13: 9780571370931
This is a book about silences. And land.
Renowned anthropologist and film-maker Hugh Brody weaves a dazzling tapestry of personal memory and distant landscapes: childhood in England in the shadow of the Second World War, the Derbyshire hills, a kibbutz in Israel and the deep Canadian Arctic.
Growing up on the outskirts of Sheffield, Hugh Brody ate roast beef and Yorkshire pudding but was always given to understand that the real, the perfect food came from his mother's home, Vienna. He attended Hebrew classes three times each week but was sent off to a Church of England boarding school. Conflicted and bewildered, he sought places to which he could escape - but everywhere he discovered deep and troubling silences.
He takes us on his first journeys to the Arctic, a world so far removed from anything he had known as to be a chance to learn, all over again, what it can mean to be alive. As he reveals, the realities of the far north were a joy, but even there he found abuses of the people and the land - and voices that were deeply silenced by the forces of colonialism.
In these landscapes, human well-being appears to be both possible and impossible. Yet in memory, in the land, in the defiance of silence, Hugh Brody sees a profound humanity - as well as hope.
Reader Reviews
“The depth and diversity of abuse and their debilitating impacts are made lucid, captured by Hugh Brody in sometimes harrowing detail. This writing is part of our collective efforts, the constant weight of our responsibility, to nurture understanding. Here is a book that understands we all are lightened by truth.” —Dalee Sambo Dorough, Former International Chair of the Inuit Circumpolar Council
“We have a teaching where I come from that when we speak our Ancestors hear us. This book must soothe the shattering silences Hugh Brody’s many ancestors, and mine, endured. I deeply identified with his journey of yearning, of sorrow and ultimately of interwoven connections and belonging. Every reflection is brought forward from the past and connected to a current truth in each of us.” —Jada-Gabrielle Pape, Coast Salish from the Saanich and Snuneymuxw Nations, certified grief and trauma counsellor
“Resonant, enthralling, Hugh Brody’s memoir contains multitudes. It leads us from Sheffield to the Inuit lands of Northern Canada and further afield, at each point tracking with great power and acuity, the damage wrought by war, disempowerment and dispossession. This is a book for both mind and heart, as passionate in its advocacy as it is enchanting in its storytelling.” —Lisa Appignanesi
“Hugh Brody has crafted a unique, harrowing and always luminous journey of discovery into his own past, its traumas and whispers, relating those personal experiences of suppression with the way in which colonized people around the world have been abused and yet managed to break the ice of silence and reach our interconnected hearts.” —Ariel Dorfman
“A wonderfully vivid and honest work that is simultaneously anthropology, autobiography and philosophy. Permeated with wonder and grief, Hugh Brody delves into unspoken regions of personal and political history. He contemplates with candour and empathy his experiences among Indigenous peoples. In eloquent prose Brody challenges orthodoxies of development and progress while reflecting on his life, family, and journeys from Israel to the Canadian arctic. BRAVO!” —James Cullingham, author, filmmaker and journalist
