Hisham Matar on Gaddafi, the Libyan Revolution and His Father’s Abduction « Shabab Libya

Photographs by Diana Matar

Hisham Matar’s first novel had huge political resonance in Libya, but both that and his recent second work are personal, human tales at heart, he tells Sophie McBain

‘I DIDN’T SIT down and think, “I want to write a political book that would inspire, that would expose the nature of life under the Gaddafi regime.” That wasn’t my intention at all. In fact, if I could have, I would have avoided it, because it created a great deal of anxiety for me and for lots of people I know,’ Hisham Matar insists.

It is a surprising admission, because his first novel, In the Country of Men, shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2006, did precisely that. At a time when Muammar Gaddafi had successfully painted himself as the ultimate nuclear-bad-guy-turned-good, when Saif al Islam Gaddafi was studiously learning the language of democracy (or possibly paying others to do it for him) at LSE, and when regime strongmen were putting away their army uniforms and donning their best business suits, Matar penned a quietly haunting portrait of the Tripoli of his childhood in the late Seventies: a city of chain-smoking mokhabarat (secret police) and power-hungry telltale neighbours, where schoolchildren watched public hangings on TV, fathers disappeared and returned unrecognisable and teenage brides drowned their dashed hopes with illegal grappa.

In the Country of Men was one of the few books I brought with me when I first arrived in Tripoli in late 2008 and moved into Girgaresh, the same well-heeled suburb described in the novel. My first disorienting days in the city were filtered through Matar’s deliberate, measured prose.

While a lot had changed since the Seventies, an equal amount hadn’t. The secret police still lurked outside houses in shiny new cars and cheap leather jackets, exuding tobacco smoke and violence. Phones were tapped, houses bugged. Sometimes people went missing, more often they lived with a constant, niggling anxiety. And Girgaresh was still known for the ‘butchers that don’t sell meat’ and ‘bakers with no bread’ where Libyans found guilty solace in bocha (date alcohol), for expats the key ingredient for the bojito, the Tripoli party tipple of choice.

I felt a jolt of panic when a Libyan friend of mine spotted In the Country of Men, but he surprised me by grabbing it off the shelf and asking to borrow it. I never saw the book again: it was passed from friend to friend, as they pored over pages describing a chapter in Libyan history of which their parents never dared speak.

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