How Hisham Matar's writing reflects life under dictatorship and the pain of his father's abduction
This week's episode features parts of Matar's 2011 and 2020 interviews with Eleanor Wachel
As Writers & Company wraps up after a remarkable 33-year run, we're revisiting episodes selected from the show's archive.
WARNING: This audio interview contains disturbing details.
British Libyan writer Hisham Matar's fiction is haunted by a sense of loss and displacement, but especially by the absence of a father.
Two of his acclaimed novels, In the Country of Men and Anatomy of a Disappearance, feature the abduction of a father who opposed the government, a partial reflection of Matar's personal experiences.
In the 1990s, his father, who was outspoken against the Gadhafi regime in Libya, was abducted by the Egyptian security forces and handed over to the Libyans. He was tortured and imprisoned in Tripoli. After a few years, he managed to send a letter and an audiotape to his family, but the last time they heard from him directly was in 1995.
Nowadays, Matar divides his time between London and New York, where he teaches at Columbia University and writes celebrated fiction, memoir and political columns. Most notably, his memoir, The Return, won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for biography or autobiography.
His latest novel, My Friends, was released earlier this year, so this week's Writers & Company revisits his 2011 and 2020 interviews.
Growing up in Libya under dictatorship
"My family was very good at sheltering my brother and I from what was going on. But still, you know, we noticed certain things. For example, I remember the day that the army trucks went to all of the old book shops in Tripoli and collected basically everything and burned it. They went to the music instrument shops and collected instruments and burned them. There were these acts of euphoria, as if there's a need to assert some kind of will.
"Suddenly somebody would say this is a sign of imperialism that we have people having pianos and guitars and these Western instruments in their homes and we should cleanse the country of these. So there was a sort of romanticism about the provinces that Gadhafi brought in where anything of value was really folkloric and traditional.
[Dictators would] see the city as sort of a wild animal that needs to be tamed and controlled and put on a leash.- Hisham Matar
"Libya is not like Egypt. Not much grows there. So most people trade and they trade with the outside world. And that has over the centuries influenced Libyan society and enriched it. And that's something that he resisted. I think like many dictators, actually, they despise the city. They despise the university, the museums, the theatre. They'd see it as sort of a wild animal that needs to be tamed and controlled and put on a leash and so that was part of what was going on then."
His father's opposition of the Gadhafi regime
"It was a very dangerous business, but he had this kind of calmness. I mean, he wasn't your typical political activist. He didn't try to convince you of anything. He didn't argue passionately about it, he was just incredibly certain about what he needed to do.
"I think my father loved Libya more than anything else and I remember finding that very difficult. At some point I thought, you know, I felt jealous of the country. But he really did believe that Libya would not become the sort of country that he wanted if he didn't do his best at that.
"And also he didn't have an appetite for frivolity and I think you need to have that in order to be distracted sometimes. He was very serious.
I think I write about other fathers in order not to write about my father.- Hisham Matar
"He was a great deal of fun too and could be very funny. And he was a very warm presence, unlike the fathers in my books who are very, very distant, aloof. I think I write about other fathers in order not to write about my father."
Letters from prison
"We waited and waited and kept going back and eventually stopped going to [the Egyptian authorities]. And about four years into this we get a letter that was smuggled out of Abu Salim prison, which is a very well known infamous and political prison in Tripoli.
"And it was written in my father's hand. It was signed by him. It had his cadence. Nicknames that he used for us, his humour. It was definitely him. And it detailed exactly what had happened the day after he had been taken in March 1990. He was flown to Libya where he was tortured and imprisoned.
"He smuggled three letters and one of them is actually a tape recording his voice. And they're an amazing document because not only does he not spare us the details, but you can hear in them and read in them that he was completely there. Everything was there. His poems that he loves, the anecdotes, the stories, the humour.
You can hear in them and read in them that he was completely there.- Hisham Matar
"And there's several things that my father is trying to do in these letters. He's trying to tell us what happened for the record and for history's sake. And he's trying to tell us personally how he feels and how he feels about being away from us, that he's really sorry for this. But it's also obviously giving us advice, my brother and I, and he is also doing something else, which is to liberate us from this situation.
"For example, in one place, he says, 'Don't grieve, don't think of this as a misfortune. What happened to me is wonderful because I was able to speak my mind, I was able to face a ruthless, oppressive dictatorship. Many people haven't been able to do that. Many people had to give in and I don't think I would have been able to live with that. So I'm grateful for that, even though I am sorry for the suffering that I've put you all through. But if I had it to do again, I would do exactly the same thing.'"
Permission for poetry
"But he was also doing something that I think all fathers, all good fathers, have to do, which is to tell you, 'Don't follow me, you'll have to find your own way.' One of the ways he was doing that is he was asking each one of us about the things that he knew mattered to us most or mattered to us a great deal.
"And when it came to my turn, he asked, 'How's your poetry? Are you still writing poetry?' And I remember my heart just stopping for a fraction of a second when I first heard that because I was worried about what would come next. I was worried that he'd say, 'How is your poetry? Are you still writing poetry? Maybe you should do something more worthwhile.'
"Instead, he said. How's your poetry? Are you still writing poetry? I hope so.' And suddenly this thing that I was obsessed with, that I wondered, 'Is this frivolous?'," in this time of great urgency, that a 19, 20-year-old should be sitting down thinking about writing a poem while his father is being tortured and oppressed and so on.
I didn't even know I needed it, but he knew.- Hisham Matar
"And all of this was a great gift actually, so he gave me exactly what I needed. I didn't even know I needed it, but he knew."
