After a menacing exchange, silence descends: “No one spoke. They waited. In architecture, space was material to be shaped, even created. For these men, the material was silence. Silence like water in which you could drown, the absence of talk as constricting as the absence of air. Silence that sucked at your will until you came spluttering to the surface confessing your sins or inventing them.” Couched in the spatial metaphor of suffocation and drowning, Mo’s feelings testify to a sense of spatial as well as legal disadvantage as he languishes in the interrogation room with the natural light blocked out “to create the ambience of a cell.” Mo reflects: “Someone among them understood the manipulation of space.”

XREF: Connects to broader techniques of psychological coercion and spatial control in institutional power.

Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, loc. 272