Ruthan is an Arabi-juba word meaning language. We learn to speak through the languages we hear growing up and who we’re surrounded by – but when your family is mixed of cultures and languages and your country is overcome with conflict, you’re forced to stitch together fragments of different speech. Our narrator doesn’t know the language of her people or her family; she and her grandmothers communicate by combining all the bits of languages they know. Having to constantly move from place to place because of conflict, we learn that cultural identities are not fixed but always in transition.
