In the Country of Almost Men

I just finished reading In the Country of Men by Hisham Matar. Narrated from the perspective of a child whose father is hounded by Gaddafi’s security state, a decade on from the revolution. While going through the reviews of ‘The 400 Blows” on Letterboxd, I came through one saying they wanted to beat up every adult in the movie. Something similar could be said of this book, especially in relation to how everyone treats Suleiman. No one bothers to explain to him what is going on. Even at the end of the book, when his mother determines he should spend the rest of his childhood outside Libya, he is put on a plane without being told there is no return journey scheduled.

Suleiman is not the only child whose eyes the story is told through. His mother (who is only 24 for most of the story) is in the habit of getting inebriated at night and telling Suleiman all about her own childhood, including the ‘dark’ day when – at 15 – she was forced to marry his father. We see, even from the perspective of a 9-year-old Suleiman, all he wishes he could do is go back in time and liberate his teenage mother from this fate. He wonders what hopes and dreams that girl might have had, and how all of that was relegated in his interest – the child she did not want. Suleiman takes particular exception to his mother using the collective ‘you’ pronoun to include both him and his father when frustrated, making him complicit in the excesses of his father.

Reading through a narrative of living under dehumanising repression in Libya is personally interesting. I am not unaware of the iron grip that Gaddafi or any strongman in anti-imperialist states would have had to maintain on the local population. His eventual toppling and the fate of Libya since speaks for itself, but it does not invalidate the very real suffering inflicted on many undeserving people over several decades. I saw a meme recently that went something like “Arab political thought is like: I don’t care that he murdered your uncle, that man was a fucking lion”. There is not insignificant truth to that. Internal repression has often been necessary in statecraft for everyone trying not to regime changed for not bowing down to imperial interests. The cruel fate of many a leader of the decolonisation era speaks to this. Some, like Lumumba, did not even get to have a dignified burial. Gaddafi did not either. A story like that really makes me question everything. That political action is possible without causing suffering is a liberal fantasy that falls flat under any scrutiny. But to be confronted with that, over and over, both globally and domestically, is incredibly disillusioning. It asks of you, more or less, to choose between the limited upward mobility (and chance to escape) that your socio-economic condition grants or to stay and fight, risking the little autonomy that education and property has earned you. The currency of clean language and perfectly creased shirts has always represented, for me, a ticket out of here. But it is also true that it allows for an elevated voice – and an easy target – to rail against injustice. But there is cowardice in my hopes and dreams – Slooma’s mother wins in the end, she is the one who comes closest to getting what she wants. She is the first one to choose conformance.