“Displacement and misplacement are this century’s commonplace,” the Russian poet Joseph Brodsky wrote in an essay titled “The Condition We Call Exile” (1988). He noted that ever greater numbers of people were fleeing their home countries, even as the Cold War drew to a close. Exiled writers like himself, Brodsky suggested, were well-positioned to take stock of these forced migrations. “To be lost in mankind, in the crowd—crowd?—among billions; to become a needle in that proverbial haystack—but a needle somebody is searching for—that’s what exile is all about.”
The wisdom animating Brodsky’s essay also flows through the oeuvre of the Libyan American writer Hisham Matar (b. 1970). His three novels cast a light on the inner lives of characters who are exiled or otherwise uprooted by tyranny; his two works of nonfiction offer philosophical reflections on related themes. The books derive their power from a central contrast: their subject matter is dramatic and often violent, but their tone is calm and unwaveringly tender. As Lucy Hughes-Hallett noted in her glowing review of My Friends (2024): “This is a book about exile and violence and grief, but it is above all—as the title tells us—a study in friendship.”
Exile has been the given of Matar’s life. His father was a prominent critic of Muammar el-Qaddafi; as repression worsened, the family fled to Cairo in 1979. In 1990, Jaballa Matar was kidnapped and disappeared into the Abu Salim torture center, never to be seen again. Hisham, meanwhile, trained as an architect in London and briefly ran a practice there, before devoting himself to literature. He only returned to Libya in 2012, after the fall of Qaddafi’s regime.
Matar’s first two novels draw on elements of his biography. In the Country of Men (2006) is narrated by Suleiman, a nine-year-old living in Tripoli in the early decades of Qaddafi’s rule. His father, Faraj, is a businessman and opposition activist; his mother, Najwa, effectively raises their child alone. The plot is driven by the growing tensions between them. As Faraj plots a revolution in hiding, Najwa is left to deal with surveillance and visits from Revolutionary Guards. Matters come to a head when Faraj and his comrades are arrested in a sudden police sweep. One of them is hung at a basketball stadium as part of a televised broadcast:
The camera turned to the spectators. They were punching the air and cheering. Several women ululated. And suddenly, like a wave rising, the cheering became louder and more furious. The camera swung quickly, and we saw Ustath Rashid swinging from the rope, the shiny aluminum ladder a meter or two to one side, too far for his swimming legs... Mama stared blankly at the television.
Anatomy of a Disappearance (2011) offers a more oblique variation on these themes. Its teenage narrator, Nuri el-Alfi, is the son of Kamal Pasha el-Alfi, an advisor to King Faisal who fled Iraq after the 1958 military coup (Matar does not name the country but provides enough clues). When Nuri is fourteen, his father is abducted, likely by the Iraqi military, leaving a hole in the boy’s life: “There has not been a day since his sudden and mysterious vanishing that I have not been searching for him, looking in the most unlikely places. Everything and everyone, existence itself, has become an evocation, a possibility for resemblance.”
The Return (2016) is an account of Matar's first trip to Libya after thirty-three years away. It is set in the “honeymoon of the revolution, the brief window between the dictatorship and the current civil war,” as Robyn Creswell noted in an admiring review. Matar glories in the landscapes of his youth, which he evokes with a painterly eye: “The Benghazi light is a material. You can almost feel its weight, the way it falls and holds its subject.” These passages are set beside the somber, unflinching testimonies of Qaddafi’s victims, including Matar’s uncle, who was imprisoned in Abu Salim for twenty-one years. Mahmoud recounts the day of his arrest:
This was the first time I heard the horrific noise—a noise that was to become familiar—of the heavy door, rusted or not opened in ten years, being unlocked and swung open. He pushed me in and slammed the door, bolting it shut. My hands were no longer handcuffed, but I still had the blindfold on. I feared what I might find, so I waited a few minutes before taking it off. I found myself in a place that was absolutely dark.
A Month in Siena (2019) takes a very different landscape as its setting. This slim, graceful book-length essay is about Matar’s brief stay in Siena, Italy, where he intensely studied the work of painters from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century—Duccio, Pietro, Ambrogio Lorenzetti, and Simone Martini, among others. His meditations on their styles and philosophies invariably lead back to familiar concerns. He writes that Lorenzetti’s The Effects of Bad Government (1338):
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shows Tyranny reigning and Justice in chains. Tyranny, portrayed as an androgynous devil, reminded me of the graffiti that covered walls everywhere across Tripoli, caricaturing the fallen dictator Muammar Qaddafi. Here too Tyranny is meant to look vile and stupid, and here too he is darkly mesmeric: cross-eyed, with horns and braided hair, a permanent frown clinched on Dracula teeth. He is without doubt.
My Friends is Matar’s longest and most ambitious novel yet. It follows three Libyan immigrants in London, whose lives are upended when they attend an anti-Gaddafi demonstration outside the Libyan embassy in 1984, at which secret police open fire (this scene is based on a real historical event). They remain in England as refugees, until the Arab Spring revolutions of 2011, when Hosam and Mustafa join the armed resistance against Gaddafi, while the narrator Khaled follow their exploits on social media. As in the works of Javier Marias, My Friends largely unfolds through memories and recollections; as in the works of W.G. Sebald, it is rich with layered descriptions of city life (Matar was friends with Marias, and he is an admirer of Sebald). Though the book’s action is mainly contained within London, its spiritual heart lies elsewhere. “Haven’t you noticed how we Libyans never leave home?” Hosam asks Khaled at one point. “We go far, and might stay decades, but remain strapped to the old country.”