In her political fiction book Internment, Samira Ahmed employs descriptive details of the setting to convey the hopelessness, isolation and the desire to be free the characters are experiencing in an internment camp. As the main character Layla enters her room in her small trailer at the internment camp, she is shocked and disgusted by the dullness and size of the area. The low metal bunks are pushed up against the wall. The mattresses and pillows have plastic on them. . . A small desk drops down from the wall like an airplane tray table. Next to the desk is a tiny round metal sink; in the corner is a closet. . . with a clear plastic curtain serving as a door. . . The room is about the size of my old bathroom. Layla’s room is described as tiny …show more content…
While the director and other authority figures at the internment camp try to turn it into a new home, the interned people aren’t fooled. They realize that the place is simply a prison and is nowhere near anything like being at home. Furthermore, the cramped and squished room being only “the size of [her] old bathroom” is claustrophobic, mirroring Layla and the other character’s terror, anxiety, and desperation to escape from the internment camp. The description of the room adds another layer to reveal to the reader how deep and suffocating Layla’s fear, desperation, and hopelessness runs by providing a concrete noun as a symbol that physically surrounds her (because it’s her room). The details of the room put the reader in Layla’s shoes to depict both what she’s seeing and feeling. Ahmed expands on developing the character’s emotions, specifically isolation, by describing what Layla experiences as she searches the periphery of the internment camp trying to find a way out. She notes that the internment camp “is dwarfed by the vastness of the desert around us” and that “there is a lot of eerie