Tag Archives: Hisham Matar

The Book Group and Hisham Matar’s In the Country of Men

Posted on 23 August 2020 | 9 comments

Hisham Matar, In the Country of Men (Viking 2006)

When the Book Group met by zoom on 28 July, I had been away from home for a week or so, and my copy of the book had arrived after I left and was sitting in my mail box for five days, attracting the attention of snails. I had managed to read just five pages of a friend’s copy by the time we all logged in. I’m usually one of the swats who has read the whole book, so it was an interesting experience to come to the discussion in almost total ignorance.

At the meeting: We didn’t spend a lot of time catching up on one another’s lives, and spent no time at all eating and drinking. Once we’d managed to get ten of us on the screen (the sole absentee said he was too immersed in Hilary Mantel’s The Mirror and the Light to think about any other book), this book held our attention for pretty much the whole two hours.

Let’s see.

One chap said he found the book unreadable. He kept going back to his large-print library copy with good intentions and then falling asleep: he could tell that the young protagonist was enduring terrible things but just couldn’t feel anything for him or for any of the characters. When he said he gave up at about page 116, another chap said, ‘Ah well, I felt pretty much the same until page 108 and then it just took off.’ He then gave a spirited account of the book as a study in bad parenting: the protagonist, a young boy in Gaddafi’s Libya, feels a huge obligation to look after his mother, and for a child to feel that way his parents must have failed in their responsibilities. In this case, the mother was an alcoholic (in Muslim-dominant Libya!) and the father was some kind of half-baked revolutionary who went and got himself arrested and beaten up.

And we were off.

You can’t blame the parents when the society under Gaddafi was so dire. The book is a study in how an oppressive regime infiltrates and corrupts people’s minds and relationships, including those of parents and children. A good bit of the discussion was about how the boy exploits moments when he has the power to do harm, betraying in one example the only friend he has outside his family.

Someone who had read Hisham Matar’s The Return (which I also have – blog post at this link) spoke interestingly about the relationship between that memoir and this novel: the memoir deals with Matar’s permanent loss of his father by abduction when he was 19, and his attempt over years to find out what happened to him; the novel, written years earlier, returns the father, even though damaged, to a much younger son after just a few weeks, as if Matar wrote the novel to to explore what might have happened in his own life if things had gone differently.

After the meeting: I’d expected to sit in on the meeting, enjoy making contact, hear people’s news, laugh at their jokes, and then move on. I didn’t get much news, except that the window for commenting on the egregious plans for misspending billions of dollars on the Australian War Memorial was to close on 31 July, but the rest was as expected, except for the moving on: I decided that I had to read the book after all.

Life and other books got in the way but now at last I’ve read it, and even though the Group’s discussion had been full of spoilers, I was unprepared for the book’s the impact. It’s a tremendously powerful portrait of a woman’s experience of a virulent form of male domination, as seen through the eyes of her nine-year-old son Suleiman, who is in the process of being ‘trained’ to be such a man. True, she’s a terrible mother in many ways – but we discover that she was in effect trafficked by her family when she was fourteen years old, and got pregnant soon after as a result of marital rape, all socially condoned. Your heart breaks for the mother, the son and the father, all three.

Almost equally powerful is the account of what happened to dissidents under the Gaddafi regime, including Suleiman’s father and his friends. Confessions and executions are shown in television, and Hisham Matar doesn’t let us look away from the hideous emotional and physical detail. The nine year old sees and hears everything. He knows when he is being lied to, but understands very little of the politics. There’s a terrifying moment when he is about to give damning evidence of his father’s anti-Gaddafi activities to a manipulative member of the goon squad, oops, I mean the Revolutionary Committee, which creates a visceral sense of the deeply corrupting effects the regime has on even the most intimate relationships.

At a Sydney Writers Festival a couple of month’s after Donald Trump’s inauguration, Hisham Matar was on a panel entitled ‘Resist!’ with three US women writers. Referring his childhood years living under the Gaddafi regime, he said it was important to honour complexity, otherwise those who resist allow themselves to be defined by that which they are resisting. That could sound like a counsel of moderation. Among other things, this novel demonstrates that you can honour complexity, hate injustice with a passion, and write beautiful prose, all in the same book.

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SWF 2017 Saturday

Posted on 27 May 2017 | 2 comments

I had planned to start my third day at the Sydney Writers’ Festival with Maxine Beneba Clarke talking to Peter Polites at 10 am. But a text on Saturday advised that Maxine couldn’t be here, so we had an unexpectedly leisurely start to the day, arriving in time to queue for:

11.30  Resist!
‘Resist’ is a word that has come into frequent usage in the US since the election of Donald Trump as President. Let me say up front that there was a problem with this event: it was two USers (Teen Vogue Editor Elaine Welteroth and Nadja Spiegelman, daughter of two New Yorker illuminati) talking about US politics with a third USer (Slate‘s movie critic Dana Stevens) in the chair, so they could talk to each other as if they were at home and the rest of the world, including this audience, were peripheral. Luckily the third panel member, Hisham Matar (The Return), though he was born in New York, brought a very different perspective to the conversation.

The three US representatives addressed the word ‘resist’: why ‘resistance’ rather than the more usual ‘opposition’? is this self-dramatisation, or something more substantial? They generally agreed that the election had brought about a political awakening, a new energy and sense of purpose, in many people. It was interesting to learn that Nadja Spiegelman and her mother had produced Resist!,  a free 40-page broadsheet of political comics and graphics by mainly female artists in time for the big women’s march after the election; and that Teen Vogue has become a key source of news for teen girls, including a regular feature describing the lies told by the President between issues.

Then Hisham Matar shifted the ground. It’s not so much the word that concerned him as the register. He spoke of his childhood in an intensely political home, listening to conversation among dissidents with life and death commitment. As a child, he asked (I think he said ‘mischievously’), ‘Who is more sculpted by the dictatorship, those who work night and day to defend it, or those who work night and day to resist it?’ The challenge is not to let the oppressive forces define the world. Political dogma tends inexorably to simplify matters, and rather than resist in equally simplified terms, to always honour complexity, to show up as your full, authentic self is powerful activism and resistance, to always be engaged with complexity. He hoped, I think he said, to have a response to the current situation in he USA that was complex enough to include the recognition that Trump is his brother.

Wonderfully, the other panel member responded to this perspective without defensiveness, and the conversation took an interesting turn. Spiegelman commented that in the art submitted to Resist!, the male artists tended to create images of Donald Trump (small hands, etc), while the women addressed the reality of their lives as women. Elaine Welteroth spoke of young women she knows who are taking powerful leadership, and then described her own version of ‘turning up as your full authentic self’: she was the first African American to have a particular position in a large US corporation, but when she applied for the job it wasn’t with the aim of being ‘the first’ or ‘the only’, it was simply the next challenge in her career; when the press made a big deal of it she realised that it brought responsibilities, which she embraced.

The first question at the end raised the question that had been hovering in my mind ever since I saw that the session was sponsored by a skincare product: to what extent is resistance to Donald Trump being coopted by corporate America. One of the panellists quotes a disparaging witticism, ‘Activism is the new brunch.’ We had to leave before that discussion unfolded. The last thing I heard was someone saying, ‘we could do a whole panel discussion on that Pepsi ad.’ Indeed!

1.30 Memoir: A Slippery Art
I went to this session mainly because of Kim Mahood’s wonderful Position Doubtful. All I knew about the other panellists was that Brentley Frazer’s youth was misspent to the max and Graeme Innes is a promoter of worthy causes.

Catherine Eccles, a ‘scouting agent’ from the UK, was in the chair for this unlikely gathering. She kicked the conversation off with a question about maps, and read a brief quote about maps from Kim Mahood’s book. Before addressing the question, Mahood said that she had laboured over the passage that had been read out, so as to express her meaning as clearly and precisely as she could. Asked to speak on the subject, she wasn’t sure anything she would say could measure up. I don’t think Mahood was trying to make a point when she said that, but she did make one. Nobody read to us at this session, and that is a shame.

There was much discussion of how Brentley’s use of English Prime – his writing the whole book without using any of the copular verbs, am, is, are, was, were, be, been, being – made his book Scoundrel Time wonderfully immediate, especially in its (unspecified) shocking moments, but we had to take the panel’s word for it. Graeme Innes has been blind from birth, and a natural story-teller from soon after. He described his book, Finding a Way, as all the stories he tells about his life connected up. He was a pleasure to listen to, but I would have liked to hear him, or someone else in the absence of a Braille text, read from his book. And Kim Mahood, well, I doubt if anyone in the audience who hadn’t read her book would have gathered from her unassuming manner just how profound the book is.

I mean no criticism of Catherine Eccles, but I did wonder if this session would have been more interesting with an Australian in the chair. All three books have something profound to say about Australia – Kim Mahood on relationships between settler and traditional Aboriginal people who have strong attachment to the same land; Brentley Frazer on  how we imagine masculinity; and Graeme Innes is a brilliant exemplar of a distinctive Australian yarn-spinning humour. But these aspects of their work were only incidentally touched on.

3 pm  Nevertheless, She Persisted

This is the second event today that owes its title to US politics. (If you don’t know the story of Elizabeth Warren’s silencing, you can read it here.) This time, though, the focus was on women, on feminism and the struggle against patriarchy.

Clementine Ford is a feminist celebrity and misogynist hate target. I haven’t read her Fight Like a Girl, a good reason to pay to hear her speak. Robert Jensen has written the intriguingly subtitled The End of Patriarchy: Radical Feminism for Men. Catherine Fox, a tireless worker for women in the corporate world and the armed forces, chaired.

Ford apologised at the start, saying she was struggling with fatigue, and a possible explanation became evident in the course of the hour as her little son woke up and demanded her attention, then struggled first to be fed then to pull himself around the table on the stage picking up styrofoam cups and generally providing an alternative focus of attention.

It was a good discussion. I loved Jensen’s argument for men to join this conversation. If we put our hands in the air and say we have no right to speak, we are abrogating our personal accountability. And it’s not enough to say one is a feminist. There are many versions of feminism; he is a radical feminist. We didn’t get down to definitions about  what kind of feminism the other two panel members advocated.

There was civil but tense disagreement about pornography, about which the hour wasn’t long enough for real discussion.

Again, I would have liked to hear some of each of the authors’ books.

Then off to a little feast of poetry at:

4.30 AVANT GAGA
Toby Fitch, organiser of the monthly Avant Gaga readings at Sappho’s Bookshop in Glebe, hosted nine poets. The venue wasn’t quite as big as Thursday’s but it’s not late at night or tucked away in a glary room either. Maybe poetry is coming back out of the shadows. By way of general introduction, Toby said that all the poets had written or were writing books, some had won awards and they all had personal lives, so his individual intros consisted of a string of anagrams (which must have taken him hours to devise).

I jotted down notes of anagrams and lines that struck me, but sadly my nots are mainly illegible. In order, we heard:

  • Toby Fitch (no anagrams, but he read us a cool list poem about clouds)
  • Emily Stewart
  • Aden Rolfe (‘ear fondle’, a found poem consisting of the editorial notes on a government tender form)
  • Holly Isemonger (whose mother, in the audience, was cajoled into saying she didn’t like poetry because she didn’t ‘get it’)
  • Alison Whittaker (I wrote down a lot of quotes from her, and they’re as legible as spiders’ tracks – sorry!)
  • Ali Cobby Eckermann (‘mean backbone lyric’; again, she knocked us out of the park)
  • Amelia Dale (this poem was brilliant in the performance, though Lord knows what it would look like on the page: she mimed while a computer-generated voice recited the text of Malcolm Turnbull’s side of an interview with Leigh Sales)
  • Jane Gibian (‘Leftovers from a Pirate Party’, a poem made up of subject lines from freecycle emails – as a freecycler I loved this, even more than I loved Aden Rolfe’s editorial poem)
  • Michael Farrell (‘While My Veranda Gently Weeps’)

Sorry, no more detail than that. But it was a lot of fun.

We walked up town, had dinner in the old GPO at Martin Plaza, then to the Town Hall for:

8.30 Advice from Nasty Women
And it’s a hat-trick for US-politics-derived naming of events today. This time it’s Donald Trump’s insult of Hillary Clinton that’s being reclaimed. (Surely some of our local reactionaries have given us a memorable phrase or two, or have they all shut up since the great success of ‘destroying the joint’?)

Here for an hour and a half we were read to, with Sophie Black as compere.

Anita Heiss kicked off with an acknowledgement of country, and a beautiful piece of writing about Barangaroo (the woman not the place), Oodgeroo, and Rosie Scott (a white woman with a black heart).

US writer, editor and cultural critic Chris Kraus, labouring through a heavy cold, took the ‘nasty’ in ‘nasty women’ literally, and read some of Kathy Ackers’s nasty letters.

Nadja Spiegelman read a personal essay about jealousy. This is the third time I’ve seen her at this Festival, and she has been good value every time, each time revealing another side of her writerly self.

Viola Di Grado, a depressed looking young Italian woman, read a depressing story about childhood bullying in a depressed manner, and ended with an exhortation, ‘Always be a witch. Always be real.’

Canadian Durga Chew-Bose read a letter to her infant niece, a kind of good-fairy blessing, and chief among the blessings she wished on the little one was to find meaning.

African-American Brit Bennett began by saying that the whole Twitter phenomenon of women reclaiming nastiness was pretty much restricted to white women, because in the US African American women have been labelled nasty already in a number of ways. In a serendipitous echo of Hisham Matar earlier in the day, she called for a more complex feminism than Twitter seems to envision.

So the take-home message from the day was to go for complexity. I took it home.

 

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SWF 2017 Friday

Posted on 26 May 2017 | 7 comments

I heard a rumour that this will be the last Sydney Writers’ Festival to happen at Walsh Bay. That would be a great shame, because, especially when the weather stays bright as it has this year, it’s hard to imagine a more beautiful place in which to gather with hundreds of other reader-types.

Today, much to our dog’s displeasure, we gave her a very short walk i the morning because we had to be at the Sydney Theatre by ten o’clock for:

10 am A Murderer in the Family

The title of this session is from Art Spiegelman’s misquotation of someone’s remark that being related to a writer was like having a traitor in the family. Each of the three panel members has recently published a memoir in which a parent is a central figure. Michael Williams, from Melbourne’s Wheeler Centre, did a brilliant job as chair (in fact, I reckon that if he is listed as chairing a session you can be reasonably sure it will be excellent), beginning in a way I wish every panel at the festival could begin, with each of the panellists reading briefly from their work: Nadja Spiegelman from I’m Supposed to Protect You from All This, Susan Faludi from In the Darkroom, and Hisham Matar from The Return.

Such different books: a young woman’s exploration of her mother’s and grandmother’s stories, an older woman telling the story of her father whose violence led to much unhappiness in her young life and who is now a woman, and a man who returned to his native Libya after the fall of Gaddafi and searched for word of his activist father who disappeared when he was nine. Yet they had clearly read and appreciated each other’s books, and the conversation was lively and interesting.

Nadja Spiegelman did a nice inversion of the famous Kafka line about a book being an axe to break the sea of ice in the soul. ‘I needed,’ she said, ‘to freeze the sea so I could see it.’ Turning her mother and grandmother into characters inevitably flattened them, created a  single version of these complex, uncontainable beings, but it was necessary for her to be able to know her own mind. And the process brought her closer to both of them.

Susan Faludi was estranged from her father for more than two decades. When her father contacted her to announce that she was now a woman, she wanted Susan to write the story of her transition: Susan insisted that the life before transition still needed to be told.

When Hisham Matar read to us, I realised I read too fast. I must have skated over his delicate, nuanced reflections on what was happening as he searched for the truth about his father. He resisted the suggestion that it was cathartic to write the book: if it was catharsis, the book would have been serving his emotional needs, but in the process of writing, he felt that he was serving the needs of the book.

Then lunch, of lentil soup in thick cardboard containers.

1.30 pm: Human Baggage: The Hate Politics of Immigration

This was billed as ‘a frank and fearless conversation on the political and personal consequences of border control policies’ among panelists from the US (Mona Chalabi of the Guardian), Australia (Indian-born Roanna Gonsalves and Palestinian-born Samah Sabawi) and Canada (playwright Stephen Orlov), chaired by academic Claudia Tazreiter who among other things is the managing editor of The Australian Journal of Human Rights.

In fact, the conversation very quickly moved from the politics of immigration to the politics of racism. This wasn’t really a change of subject: as one of the panellists pointed out, most immigrants to Australia, and most illegal immigrants, are from Britain, but these are not the ones that attract the hate-filled rhetoric. It’s the TWLPs – Third World Looking Persons – who do that.

The whole conversation was interesting. Roanna Gonsalves gave the most memorable quote. We imagine Australia as white, she said, and it’s not only the white Australians who do it. when some of her relatives came to visit from India, they were astonished. Her accent became much more pronounced as she mimicked their surprise: ‘Oh my God, there are so many Asians!’

4.30  Caroline Brothers: The Memory Stones

Caroline Brothers, a novelist, historian and foreign correspondent, chatted with Kate Evans from ABC’s Books and Arts program. Kate Evans was the most straight-down-the-line interviewer of my festival, and elicited a wonderful hour’s talk from her interviewee, who explained the history of the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo. It’s a terrible story. Thousands of suspected enemies of the Junta in Argentina were snatched and disappeared in 1976 – not imprisoned, but detained in unofficial places, tortured and mostly killed, leaving their families not knowing what had happened to them. Some of the snatched women were pregnant, and when their babies were born they were taken away and given to other families, mainly members of the military, to raise. The Grandmothers have for decades followed up every lead to find and reclaim these babies – so far about 125 have been found, the most recent one earlier this year.

Brothers first encountered this story when she heard that the poet Juan Gelman had found his granddaughter after 26 years of searching. The combination of those two story lines, the quest on the grandfather’s side, and the coming of age on the side of the lost child, struck her as tremendously powerful.

She spoke very interestingly about the difference between reporting on this tragic story as a journalist and writing a novel that stuck as closely as possible to the reality. I’m writing this two days later, somehow I’ve lost my notes, and I can’t remember anything about the novel (The Memory Stones), which is an indication of how powerfully her telling of the real story grabbed my imagination. She evoked very sharply the moment when a young person who has been raised in a family that believes the military dictatorship of Peron was a good thing and that those women on the Plaza de Mayo are mad is faced with irrefutable evidence that she was snatched from her own kidnapped mother by the agents of that dictatorship.

We had a lot to talk about as we made our way home through the crowd gathering to watch the Opera House being lit up to mark the beginning of Vivid.

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