He played the flute at seven minutes past six every morning for nine years. On the last morning, the street woke to silence.
Chukwunonso Anyaegbu arrived in Sydney in 2017 on 11 February 2017 with a student visa, a degree certificate, his father's watch, and a wooden flute wrapped in a face towel. He was going to study, work, bring his family, go home at Christmas. He was twenty-eight.
What happened instead was a corridor. A visa that ceased. A condition that made work a crime. A protection claim built on a true thing that a tribunal found insufficiently personal, because it had happened to eleven other students in the same room in Benin. Bridging visas. Reporting conditions. Nine years of forms, and a boy born in Blacktown who is Australian and whose father is not.
Nobody in this book is a villain. The lawyer never lies. The delegate applies the law correctly. The woman who will not marry him is right, and her reasons are sound, and she has been judged for them ever since by people who were not in the room. That is what makes it unbearable, and that is the point.
Told through nine years of ordinary mornings, departmental letters, a comrade's notebook and the roll call of a student movement that never stopped counting its dead.
The Morning the Flute Did Not Sound is a novel about the particular damage done by waiting, the kind that lifts, and the kind that does not, and the fact that the person carrying it is always the last to know. It's central figure is a composite. He is made out of many men, deliberately, because no single family should have to carry in public what a great number of people have been carrying in private.
For readers of Shuggie Bain, Behrouz Boochani, Nam Le and Christos Tsiolkas.
Opens with a Before You Begin page of practical help for anyone reading it from inside their own wait. Includes an Author's Note, a glossary of Igbo and Australian migration terms, a reading group guide, and a list of where to get help.
