My only memory of WW II is a borrowed one. My mother, probably no more than four years old at the time, remembered running into the jungle to hide as the sound of Japanese bombers throbbed in the air. Their buzzing instilled so much terror that even the men screamed as they ran. She was wearing pink rubber flip-flops at the time, she recalled, new footwear in such a poor family as hers being particularly memorable and cherished. More than the deprivations to come later, the severe food rationing and extreme hardship under the Japanese, the horrors of war were encapsulated in the moment that she lost one flip-flop as she ran for cover with her family. The bright pink slipper stuck in the dark mud glowed like a flower before the ground exploded around the shacks and makeshift huts that my mother's family and neighbours had lived in. She cried for days at losing the slipper, but only when no-one was looking, because it was obviously such a frivolous obsession. This was the one story she ever told me about her experience in WW II.

Years later, I read about experiments with earthworms where an earthworm would be sliced into two and each half would regenerate: one would grow a tail and the other a head. Next, the original earthworms would be subjected to bright light followed by electric shocks that would cause them to curl up in pain. In Pavlovian fashion, each earthworm would soon learn to associate the bright light with the electric shocks and begin to curl up as soon as they were exposed to the light. After some time, the earthworms were all sliced into two and the tail ends separated from the head ends. When the tail ends grew heads and were subjected to bright lights, they all curled up in anticipation of the shock to come, even though their new brains had never been previously exposed to the light or the shocks. It was a demonstration of what I came to call Earthworm Memory.

"Why are you writing about war?" people would ask me as I was working on my book. "What do you know about war?" Nothing, I thought to myself. Nothing except a story about losing a pink flip-flop slipper. As a child, I would dive under the bed or try to hide under a table whenever a plane flew overhead. My palms grew sweaty, my heart raced and I became convinced of my imminent doom as the roar of jet liners thundered over our neighbourhood. I had never lived through a war, but the instinct to hide, conveyed by Earthworm Memory through my mother's body, flowed in my blood. Even now as an adult, I cringe inwardly at the sound of airplanes and hate flying. It was this secret fear that coursed through the descriptions of war and torture in my book. I wrote Breaking the Tongue because after living abroad for years, I wanted to write about 'home'; I wanted to write about a country that had deliberately set out to create a national identity out of its ashes; I wanted to record a nation's collective Earthworm Memory.