In April 1984 a peaceful demonstration against the Gadafy regime was held outside the Libyan embassy in London. The demonstration turned lethal when submachine guns were fired into the crowd from inside the embassy, killing one young police constable, Yvonne Fletcher, and injuring 10 demonstrators.
A then 13-year-old Hisham Matar watched the news reports on television. “We didn’t know what we were seeing,” he says. “This footage of men on the ground in great agony, chaos, the face of Yvonne Fletcher, the whole thing really affected me. I recall one of [the demonstrators] calling for his mother and something about that shocked me, that you could live in a world where that could happen.”
Almost 40 years later, Matar’s new novel, My Friends, takes this event as the catalyst for his tale of three Libyan friends living in exile and how they relate to Libya over the course of its changing political history.
Matar was born in New York to Libyan parents and spent his childhood in Tripoli and Cairo, before leaving for London, where he has lived most of his life. His father was a critic of the Gadafy regime and was kidnapped from Cairo in 1990, never to be seen again. Matar’s 2016 book, The Return, describes his own return to Libya in 2012 in an attempt to find out what happened to his father. It won a Pulitzer prize in 2017.
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While My Friends is a deeply political novel, it is also a beautiful novel about love and friendship. “I always felt that the real event is not the political event,” says Matar, “the real event is the human event of which politics is an important element.”
In its exploration of the relationship between Khaled, Mustafa, and Hosam, the novel reveals the surprisingly passionate, delicate and tender nature of their friendship.
“I’m fascinated by my friendship to my male friends,” says Matar. “The book, of course, is fiction, but a lot of these very passionate male friendships have been gifts to my life, different from the ones in the book but equally intense, maybe even more intense. So it just seems like such an important thing that I don’t feel our culture has always found the right language for and that’s where you go as a writer.’
There are other circumstances in the book that overlap with Matar’s own personal experience. For example, two of his closest friends were shot at the Libyan embassy demonstration in London that day in 1984. “One of my friends was the person who was calling for his mother.”
Did he feel he had to take extra care when writing this novel then, knowing that it covered sensitive areas of his friends’ personal experience? “I really stopped for a while and tried to argue myself out of it,” he says. But not for long.
“On some level as a writer you really do believe the world is yours,” he says. “I think in defence of our monstrous nature I would say it’s because the will of the work is more important than yours.”
His landmark book The Return was one of those instances, he says, where the will of the work exerted itself. He recalls the panic he felt when writing it. “It was perfectly rational to have that panic because it’s a book that was taking me to places that I really didn’t want to go to. Working on it was a really peculiar experience because as long as I was in the work, answering its call, where it says: you know that black hole you don’t know about, what it was like for your father when he was kidnapped on the aeroplane home, you know that part that you can’t bear thinking about? Well that’s what we’re doing today ... It was very odd because it was really the last thing I wanted to do but at the same time it gave me a strange particular kind of pleasure, the pleasure that was the opposite of impotence. It felt like now there is something I can do with this [thing] that has always filled me with bewilderment.”
If there is one word that sits at the centre of the Venn diagram of Matar’s work it must be “exile”. “I’ve been continually interested in it,” he agrees. “I think there are certain things in our life we have to put away, somehow figure out an answer to, even if it’s an imperfect answer, and just put them away so we can get on with other things. There are certain things that we just can’t do that with. Exile is one of those things. Just when I think, Okay I’m done now with it, I’ve figured it out – I haven’t.”
Likewise, home is an equally significant concept in his work. How many understandings or interpretations does he have of the word?
“London is very much my home. I live in London and spend three or four months of the year in New York [teaching at Barnard College]. To me it’s quite simple. On some level home is really the rooms that I share with my wife in London. I don’t mean to be abstract but I really think the thing that enlivens anything is contact. Relationships are really at the heart of existence, relationships between atoms, between people. Without relationships, as far as I’m concerned, everything is dead.”
So he would never call Tripoli or Cairo home? “They’re places that have very profound emotive connections. They’re very powerful places. Libya is a place that has affected me very, very deeply because I spent my first years there, my first awakenings there, but also because of my family, the way Libya came with us when we left. All of that is very, very important, but it’s not home.”
My mouth is so full, I don’t know where to start. The way that it remains okay to kill that many people, it just horrifies me
— Matar on the Israel-Palestine conflict
At one point in My Friends, one of the characters remarks that it is as foolish to think we are free of history as it is to think we are free of gravity. Does Matar feel the same way; must we always be shaped by history?
“I think when people talk about the past one of the fears is that the future is foretold, and I am as unconvinced by that as I am by the other extreme statement that says you can wash yourself clean of history. I think we are all the inheritors of a very complex story, all of us, and what you do with it is the open question. I think people can fall into situations where they have a very reductive response to the past, so straight lines are drawn, but actually those lines aren’t straight at all between a person and her history. I think it’s much more complex,” he says.
How does he feel about what has been happening in Israel and Palestine? “It just breaks my heart,” he says. “My mouth is so full, I don’t know where to start. The way that it remains okay to kill that many people, it just horrifies me. And also the surplus of facts that get forgotten as though history has just started on a certain day. The quality of the leaderships is so poor and the challenges are so great, and I include in that America and Britain and these countries that have been central to that history for such a long time. It just horrifies me really. And then the way in which everything that is to do with any support for Palestine becomes accused of being terrorist.”
It’s likely that some in Palestine and Israel will now find themselves in a similar position to Matar, not knowing what happened to their loved ones. Does he think he will ever come to terms with what happened to his father?
“It’s unbearable,” he says, and his voice becomes distant. “The likelihood that I will live the rest of my life not knowing where, when, how my father died is very high. And that takes a certain kind of strength. It’s a burden and some days you buckle under it. The real surprise is that my father feels much closer to me and he’s not the political prisoner or the person who was tortured and killed. The person that’s close to me now is the father that I remember. And also I have become really committed to my own freedom. It turns out he likes it, turns out that’s what he would want. I feel about my father [that] it’s a terrible story but it’s not complete to look at it that way because I know, particularly with male friends who have had really difficult fathers, they’ve left them with other burdens. Sometimes this happens at readings, and people start by saying, ‘It’s not as bad as what happened to you’ ... But no, it’s all the same. We are all having to deal with the past in one way or another.”
My Friends by Hisham Matar is published by Viking
