Hisham Matar’s Tale of Friends and ‘Fathers’
The Pulitzer winner’s new novel explores the damage done by dictatorships.
My Friends
by Hisham Matar
Random House, 398 pp., $28.99
NOW WE KNOW: 39 percent of Americans sampled in a recent University of Massachusetts poll think that it would “definitely” or “probably” be a good idea for Donald Trump to act as a dictator, for only the first day of his second term. Among Republicans, that figure reaches 74 percent.
Only a short while ago, this would have been impossible. We used to hate dictators. In the years leading up to the American invasion of Iraq in 2003, it seemed easy to distinguish the public life of tyrannical states like Saddam’s or Gaddafi’s from that of democracies. The dictators fed their citizens a diet of lies. And the tyrant aimed at capturing all of the attention of all of the people all of the time through spectacularly destabilizing, bloody actions against the citizens themselves or the state’s external enemies. (Kanan Makiya’s 1998 book Republic of Fear explored this terrain brilliantly, and his analysis changed history—like it or not.)
We Americans prided ourselves on how different our politics were. We were sorry, often condescendingly, for cultures damaged in the way Iraqi culture was.
And then came Trump, who employed many of the strategies of tyrants without killing, giving a readymade identity for those without the ability to create their own, lying constantly, offering a bravado shamelessness to those struggling with shame, trying to take up all of our headspace all of the time. This was surprisingly easy to do. (New media like Twitter helped magnify the effect.) A lot of people felt Trump spoke for them, never mind that he would probably mock them if he met them.
That 39 percent should get a visceral sense of life in a dictatorship before they bite off more than they can chew. They would do well to read one of Hisham Matar’s books about Libya under Gaddafi, and the damage it produced. The rest of us can read Matar because he is a brilliant and imaginative writer, with a strong feeling for the interior life. He’s well versed in both English and Arabic literature. And readers may learn both what he chooses to show and what it seems that he—though born of Libyan parents in the United States and raised internationally—cannot stop showing.
Matar, 54, has just published his third novel, My Friends, which joins a Pulitzer Prize–winning memoir of his 2011 trip back to his homeland, The Return (2016), and two earlier novels, the first of which, In the Country of Men (2006), was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. He is also the author of a children’s book and a memoir of his time in Siena looking at painting. A former architect, he now teaches writing at Barnard College.
Much of Matar’s work has circled around the same autobiographical terrain: a boy grows up in privilege under a tyrant, aware of many secrets and silences in his family. His parents are from the elite, unselfconscious about their status, unapologetic about the pleasantness of good accents, good education, and good clothes. The boy narrator learns that his extraordinary father, in composite iron-willed, successful in business, debonair, both a leader of men in battle and a composer of traditional Arabic poetry—is an important opponent of the dictator. We experience with the boy the terror of living in a police state where people are hanged on television for entertainment as their fellow citizens jeer and pull their legs. And then his father disappears, for a round of torture, or permanently. The son’s life centers on the search for answers. We notice—as the narrator does not—that his father’s life has been defined by the tyrant, and so the narrator’s life also.
Our 39 percent should understand that Matar did not have a choice in his obsessions: His father, Jaballa Matar, a diplomat and major opposition figure, was kidnapped in 1990, disappeared into one of Gaddafi’s prisons, Abu Salim, and is presumed dead. When Jaballa was taken, Hisham, a student in London, found himself psychologically not able to go outside for six months. Casual fans of Trump’s dictator-talk may wish to ponder the merits of a system which leads here: “Eventually, passing from one room to the other became a complicated activity. . . . Any repetitive movement increased my heartbeat.”
Matar has spoken of the need to move on from the autobiographical. In My Friends he has begun.
THE NEW BOOK IS STRUCTURED AS the musings of a middle-aged Libyan exile, Khaled Abd al Hady, as he walks home one night in London in 2016. Pondering his friendships, especially with Libyan exiles Hosam Zowa, whom he’s just seen off at the train station, and Mustafa al Touny, Khaled mulls over his decision to stay in Britain rather than returning when the revolution broke out five years earlier. This time the father who disappears is not the narrator’s, a gentle historian turned high school principal who’s not politically active, but Gaddafi. His death is relayed by Hosam, one of the revolutionaries who capture him in a drainage pipe in October 2011, in a brilliant email to Khaled: “He was, whether we liked it or not, our father.”
The three Libyans are from Benghazi (in a sign of wider horizons, Mustafa’s Benghazi accent has “a slight working-class inflection”). They begin as aspiring writers; and yes, this is a risky move by Matar. Writers are perennially eager to make characters writers, without quite understanding that this does not make their task easier. Thankfully, Khaled becomes a teacher, Mustafa an estate agent, while Hosam, who wrote a book of short stories known in Libya, drifts from job to job. They have tepid romances. “For a writer, exile is prison . . . a severing from the source,” Hosam tells Khaled, apparently forgetting Conrad, who is frequently mentioned in the text, or Nabokov. All three seem to be marking time.
The line between love and hate blurs. Writers on trauma point to the damage done to children when those who were supposed to take care of them attack them. Something similar seems to happen to a population under a dictatorship. They become not citizens but victims or oppressors. Imagine the damage when the traumatized populace kills the dictator-father. Hence Libya’s post-Gaddafi chaos.
In the new book, the fundamental trauma of Khaled, which made him an exile from his homeland, is the real-life incident in London on April 17, 1984 in which two goons inside the Libyan embassy started firing submachine guns out a window into a crowd of young anti-Gaddafi protesters on the street, wounding eleven of them and killing 25-year-old policewoman Yvonne Fletcher.
Khaled and Mustafa, both studying in Edinburgh on Libyan government scholarships at the time, take a bus to London for the demonstration, more out of the need to show their independence than anything else. They take in a peep show the night before. They expected to put in an appearance at the demonstration and then do some sightseeing, but things worked out differently.
I could hear my own voice scream, louder than I ever thought possible, the name of our country, over and over. . . . [W]hat we were saying did not sound like “Libya” at all but rather the English word “alibi.” And perhaps we had deliberately merged the two words because . . . every one of us lived a life that was in desperate need of validation.
Matar was 13 at the time of the protest and it had a great impact on him. He came to know two of the protesters later in life.
The violence led to the U.K. severing diplomatic relations with Libya. The Fletcher case is still not solved, and when I was researching Libyan matters a few years after the revolution, Libyans told me that a certain corrupt contractor’s father, long dead, was one of the shooters and that this is what won the family Gaddafi’s favor.
KHALED AND MUSTAFA ARE AMONG the Libyans seriously wounded in the demonstration, marked for murder by Gaddafi, and it upends their lives.
To protect his Benghazi family, Khaled has to pretend he had nothing to do with the demonstration, although he’s heard that he can be seen in TV footage. His family seems not to know, but they may be feigning ignorance to keep him safe. He never returns to Edinburgh—Gaddafi’s secret police would find him there and kill him. (These were the days when Gaddafi’s secret police, the forces of other tyrants, and terrorists in their employ carried out political assassinations overseas with impunity. Carlos the Jackal, anyone?)
Khaled’s self-censored phone calls to his parents and sister in Libya, to whom he also sends heartbreaking, blatantly lying letters, are some of the most moving passages in the novel.
Even before the shooting, Khaled’s letters home were as much addressed to the censors—who deliberately leave signs of having read letters, like coffee stains—as to his family. “Our exchanges . . . became self-conscious, wary of mentioning personal details or expressing easy intimacies. I no longer wrote, for example, ‘Kisses’ at the end of my letters.” Thus Gaddafi had already won.
Khaled’s first phone call home with his father after being shot in London shows the stifling:
“Whatever you do,” he then said, “don’t go looking for a father. No matter the distance, I’m here. Not even the seas.”
I did not know what to say.
“I know you understand me,” he said. . . .
“I’m sorry,” I finally said.
“What for?” he said, no doubt, I thought, to protect us both. “You have nothing to be sorry for, my boy. You have gone to learn and that is the noblest reason for travel.”
The paternal relationship, the most important in Khaled’s life, is now stilted, based on falsehoods upon falsehoods. He must pretend to live in Edinburgh when he doesn’t, eventually explain a transfer to a different school, imaginary degrees, and so on. No wonder he never has much in the way of a romantic relationship.
EXPRESSIONISM RATHER THAN REALISM is Matar’s aesthetic. His prose is simple and direct, but the dialogue is often formal and self-consciously literary. When Khaled is repeating conversations that took place in colloquial Arabic, Matar often renders them in English pitched higher than usual. His decision to use short chapters—there are 108—contributes to the stylization and raises the stakes for the quality of the prose. Each chapter clicks shut to a clever epigram. Inevitably some of these are mood-breaking clunkers (“My devotion is not to the past but to the present.” “To be a parent is to be continually coming up against everything that is not ideal about you”).
Matar knows what the 39 percent probably don’t realize: Dictatorships operate as much through internalized oppression as fear. As several Libyans told me in Benghazi in the exultant spring of 2011, removing Gaddafi (or, we could say, killing the father) also requires removing the little Gaddafi inside yourself. “It’s not enough to vanquish your enemy,” Hosam writes in an email to Khaled after being a part of the capture of Gaddafi. Figuring out why Libya ended up in a mess again will involve understanding how this process went wrong. The suggestion is that, unknowingly, you can take the internalized tyrant into the new state with you.
When Khaled and Hosam, who is six years older, meet by chance in Paris in 1995, each thinks the other is a regime spy tailing him. Hosam, whose forebears were powerful tribal aristocrats around Benghazi, is the night clerk at Khaled’s hotel. He says his name is Sam. The two men speak to each other only in English and French, although each knows the other is a North African Arabic speaker. “I knew this game: he would not ask where I was from and I would keep to the same policy. Whoever blinks first loses.” And this internalized colonialism maddens Khaled. One night, he can stand the fiction no longer and creates a scene in the lobby.
“So . . . you insist that your name is Sam. . . . Well,” I yelled out even louder now, “if you are Sam, then I’m Kafka.”
Sam responds calmly, and, switching to Arabic, “speaking it in a perfect Benghazi accent,” invites Khaled out for a hot chocolate, yet for an hour or so Khaled continues to believe he’s about to be arrested. When Hosam finally divulges his real name, Khaled, who knows his short stories, experiences a disturbance so profound that space shifts, something like what the author felt after his father was abducted: “The square turned. The distances between us—my hand resting on the table, the table, the wet cobblestones, the surrounding buildings, the black sky above—all became uncertain.”
This is the origin of their friendship, which, Khaled says decades later, “remained never entirely free of distrust.”
DESPITE ITS TITLE, which I sometimes think is ironic, My Friends is missing a sense of the texture of close friendships, of casual conversations where everything doesn’t have to be spelled out. (Matar’s In the Country of Men, for all its fever pitch, is much better at that.) And the characterizations themselves are fragile. Mustafa disappears from the narrative for long stretches, only to have an undermotivated metamorphosis late in life, and he never leaps from the page like a real person. Once he returns to Libya, we mainly see him in amateur videos of the revolution. Hosam, with his crafted set speeches, is a refugee from a Russian novel. We don’t get much of a sense of the energy behind the friends’ interactions. The friendships are not convincing.
But maybe that’s realistic. Part of the reason may be that dictatorships are not good for peer relationships—friendships quite often are “never entirely free of distrust.” In a republic of fear, the only people you can trust are (maybe) your family, not your friends. Tall poppies are not welcome in small societies, still less in those based on unpredictable violence, where only presumed commonality in suffering makes life tolerable. Emulation and modulated competition are part of many healthy adult friendships, but they are problematic when turning in your pal to the secret police is an everyday occurrence.
Khaled’s first reaction when Mustafa and Hosam take off to fight for revolutionary Libya is something like jealousy: “My two closest friends, with their divergent temperaments, had been reunited by the war” giving him “the feeling of being forsaken, left behind.” They called him “reluctant Khaled.”
A Libyan joke gets at the feelings: A Libyan, a Saudi, and an Egyptian are drinking coffee together at a café. A genie comes out of a bottle and tells them they can each have one wish. The Saudi asks for the most beautiful woman in the world as his wife. “No problem,” says the genie. The Egyptian asks for the biggest diamond in the world. “It’s yours,” says the genie. “And what would you like, Libyan?”
“Please take away those things you gave the other men.”
Where the tyranny can take anything from you at any time, one who admits that he wants, loses. It’s like the game of not-asking that Hosam and Khaled played in Paris, but what is suppressed is desire, not national origin.
Khaled tells himself that at least he has succeeded in creating a life that is not based on wanting to be elsewhere. “Let all your elsewheres go. London is where you are.” That may or may not be true; he spends a lot of time missing the Libyan Mediterranean. But if he’s right, still, that’s far from creating a life that is based on desire. There are plenty of Khaleds who live where they are born.
My Friends is often brilliant, mainly engaging, sometimes compulsively readable. It’s not the masterpiece that Matar may yet write, but it takes us somewhere we did not know before, with rigor and compassion, and reminds us that it is an endless struggle not to live life in bad faith, in exile or at home. Something to ponder in this ominous time.
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