Love in the land of Gaddafi
Childhood is God’s gift to the novelist. Fiction thrives, not just on the obvious juxtaposition of innocence and experience, but on the pleasurable exercise of trying to establish an appropriate voice for the narrator. How to register feelings for which, perhaps, the child still has no name? How, on the other hand, to convince grown-ups of a disagreeable truth, that children understand far more than we judge to be good for them regarding the adult world. The very title of Henry James’s What Maisie Knew issues a sardonic warning not to confuse infant ignorance with unawareness, especially where little girls are concerned.
In the Country of Men retains the subtlety of this Jamesian perception while inhabiting another planet stylistically. Though there are occasional indications that English is Hisham Matar’s second language, the seeming artlessness in his narrative mode is of that classic kind which conceals art. The viewpoint of his nine-year-old hero Suleiman remains plausible because the mature voice seeking to recapture it preserves its clarity and directness of engagement.
The scene is Libya, nowadays the archetypal ‘far-off country of which we know nothing’, even when the apparently inextinguishable Muammar Gaddafi is disposed from time to time to play the part of honest broker among fractious Arabic-speaking nations. Suleiman, growing up in Tripoli, is a no more than average kid, inquisitive, persistent, something of a dreamer, not entirely happy with either of his parents, eternally fretful Mama or the strangely aloof Baba. Their marital unease is rooted in Mama’s sense of betrayal by her own family, who bundled her into wedlock at 14, forbidding her even to inspect a photograph of the chosen groom. She has, after all, been caught holding hands with a boy in a café, something only bad girls do.
Having tried and failed to get rid of Suleiman before his birth, she now worships her boy. ‘You are my prince,’ she assures him. ‘One day you’ll take me away on your white horse.’ Their shared fondness for the Arabian Nights turns that doyenne of tale-tellers Scheherazade into the ultimate symbol of heroism against all odds. Her courage, under the fearful death sentence she can only postpone by breaking off her stories at dawn’s approach, becomes a benchmark by which Suleiman measures his own and others’ actions.
His stamina is tested all too soon, when his friend Kareem’s father, the university teacher Ustath Rashid, is taken in for questioning by Gaddafi’s Revolutionary Committee, who then come looking for Baba. The family burns his books in the garden, before Suleiman is doorstepped by the sinister informer Sharief, whose eyes recall ‘the flames of Hell Eternal licking the sides of the Bridge to Paradise’. Ustath Rashid’s interrogation, meanwhile, provides the Libyan equivalent of reality TV, with pink flowers obscuring the screen whenever the questioning gets too physical.
By the time Rashid’s execution before a jeering crowd in the National Basketball Stadium is televised, Suleiman has lost most of that ‘dark, warm glow of hope’ earlier sustained by his fecund imagination. Baba is allowed home, where curtains have been thoughtfully hung over the mirrors to prevent him seeing a face so disfigured by torture. For the briefest instant we grasp the depth of attachment between man and boy. In one of the novel’s most moving scenes, Suleiman tries to feed the half-blind Baba with mulberries from his favourite tree. Unable to swallow them, the father points instead to a burn-mark on his temple where the interrogators have stubbed their cigarettes.
Across a relatively short span, In the Country of Men continuously surprises us with its thematic richness. The developing moral relationship of a child to those around him, young or old, the burdens of expectation shouldered by women amid the suffocating maleness of an Islamic society, the ways in which an oppressive regime contrives to break the spirit, not just of its targeted opponents but of their families and support networks besides, are all subjects making up what modern publishers like to call ‘an important novel’. Important so often means laboured and self-conscious, but Hisham Matar’s work is neither of these things. He proposes no glib solution to the commonplace political problems of cruelty, mendacity and corruption. Gaddafi abides, and ironically it is Suleiman, rather than either of his parents, who leaves for exile. With him, however, he carries the experience of a love whose grip is far stronger than any dictator’s.