Hisham Matar

This Month, we invited our group of the month, the Whiteinch Book Club from Glasgow, to ask several questions to Hisham Matar, debut author of the highly evocative In the Country of Men.

Have you experienced any difficulty in revisiting your childhood memories of life in Libya through the English language, rather than in arabic? How closely is language tied to memory, in your opinion?

Well, In the Country of Men is not my childhood, but Suleiman’s. So there was no emotional struggle there in awakening the past, if that’s what you mean. Language is terribly important. I was schooled in English since the age of 12, so it would have been difficult to write this book in my weak Arabic. But there is another reason why I write in English. I find it liberating, and it feels more personally mine, and I think this is so because the English language is rather generous in what it allows you to do with it. So many writers -- like the poet Derek Walcott and the novelist David Dabydeen, for example -- have shown how one can employ the tempo and texture and mystery of one’s roots in the language. I am aware of an Arab hum in my prose.

You define exile as 'a narrative that has been interrupted'. Has your life in exile since helped to shape your understanding of that time in Libya and fostered a willingness to reconnect with your home country or do you view your life since (in New York, London and Paris) as a total break with the past?

Edward Said had said that he suffered three exiles: that from the homeland, from the mother tongue and from friends and family. I feel similarly. I miss the land in Libya. I don’t know how it would feel to live in a place where my forfathers had lived and died. I dream in English but sometimes, half asleep in the middle of the night, I would say something to my wife (who doesn’t speak Arabic) and it would come out in Arabic. The people I went to school with in Libya are still boys in my memory. I don’t even remember their names, and hardly their faces. What I still remember is the love I felt for them. I have a large extended family and that has softened the blow a little. I am still in touch with many of my cousins, although I hardly see them. But the way I feel is that all that I am now and all that I have lost coexist at the same time. It is hard to describe. There are interruptions, but there is also something else that isn’t continuum, but it isn’t the opposite either. I have always underestimated my capabilities as a human being.

How autobiographical is this novel? Why did you choose to tell the story through a fictional narrative rather than as a straight memoir of a Libyan childhood?

Not in the least. The novel is a product of my imagination: a human faculty that many, I am learning these days, are suspect of. This book took me five years to write. I am not yet interested enough in my own autobiography to spend that long writing it down. Besides, knowing what will happen next bores me.

Which contemporary writers do you most find yourself affiliated to, in terms of sharing the same goal of casting light on life under oppressive regimes? (Khaled Hosseini being an obvious starter) Were you encouraged by the success of The Kite Runner?
I haven’t read The Kite Runner so I cannot comment on it. I don’t see my work as predominately concerned with documenting life under oppression, not at all. Writing for me is an exploration of ideas and what it means to be human. I admire Leo Tolstoy, particularly The Death of Ivan Ilyich. He was a writer that never wanted to write -- he regarded it as a low, self-indulgent act -- but could not stop himself. I find that very interesting. When writers, including myself, complain about not finding the time to write, I think of that. And when he forgot about wanting to change the world, he soared. I often think of that too.

Although I agree with Turgenev that Dostoevsky ought to have chilled out a bit (it was said that after meeting Dostoevsky, Turgenev had suggested that good old Fyodor should take up yoga or meditation) I find the raw urgency in his storytelling like no other’s. I should stop, but let me mention three books I have read recently and enjoyed tremendously: I reread Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North (translated by Denys Johnson-Davies) and enjoyed just as much as the first time, the fabulously ecstatic Summer in Baden-Baden by Leonid Tsypkin was a wonderful discovery and, finally, Gilead by Marilynne Robinson, whom I think is marvellous, is an important and beautiful book.

 I lied, there is one more that I have to mention: I am very much enjoying Jim Colville’s superb English translation right now of Avarice & the Avaricious by the brilliant Abu Uthman Amr ibn Bahr al-Jahiz. I am delighting (there is no other way to put it) in the genius, mischief and intellectual flamboyance of this 8th century master of Arab prose. It is like being surrounded by a beautiful pattern from Cordoba.

What 2 paperbacks would you recommend to our readers?
All the above plus Leo Tolstoy’s Hadji Murat and Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels.

And now, questions from the Whiteinch Book Club, from Glasgow:

How typical are these experiences of life in Libya for the time?

I didn’t set out to document Libya during that time, but the backdrop of Suleiman’s story -- the political unrest that was taking place -- is based on things that did happen. 

Would you ever consider going to Libya or Cairo or did you go back there at all to write the book?

I go to Cairo regularly. It is a place toward which I have a great deal of affection, but Libya I have not returned to and currently have no plans to do so. It was on a weekend in Alexandria, where my wife and I were staying in a hotel near the Central Bus Station, that I got the idea of Suleiman meeting his mum there. I didn’t know how, or to what end. All I could feel is their presence there. It wasn’t so much research as inspiration. I felt them both there. It was peculiar and wonderful at once. The only aspect of the book that I felt I had to learn about was how children of parents with drinking problems are affected.

Did you see the story as a political tale or an emotional/personal tale?

Neither, really. I was motivated by wanting to know these characters, to understand them and come closer to them. It was a process of discovery. Sulieman came as a voice, and I wanted to know him better. I could sense a strange reticence in his voice, a kind of shyness from the world, and a longing that seemed odd for a child of his age, so I followed him because I was intrigued and he led me where the book went.

How will the themes of your second novel compare to this one if at all?

Asking such a question is like asking a greaser, who spends most of his days buried in the belly of the ship, what is the true purpose of the journey and what consequences will it have on every individual on board. What I am trying to say is that I myself don’t know. Sometimes it is not clear whether I am writing the book or it is writing me. Writing for me is chiefly about surrendering to the mystery of the human imagination.