Hisham Matar brings Alarab newspaper back to the heart of the novel

A few weeks after the publication of his debut novel In the Country of Men in 2006, I asked Hisham Matar whether he still felt Libyan, whether he still thought´-or-dreamed in Arabic. He told me then that he no longer did, that he had become English in the way he thinks and dreams. Yet he also admitted he could never shed the Arabic sensibility of his language, nor the Libyan self that inhabits him as person and memory.
Matar does not carry many memories of his homeland. Born in New York and raised in London, he holds only a handful of early Libyan impressions: a house glimpsed as if through fog, a bicycle gliding through sun‑-;-drenched streets, swimming medals his older brother pinned to his chest like tiny emblems of immortality. And yet this little opens a wide door to something deeper. It is the same door Mustafa, the wounded spirit, knocks on in his friend Khaled Abdelhadi, the protagonist of Matar’s luminous new novel “My Friends,” whose Arabic translation appeared only weeks ago. In a moment of overwhelming longing, Mustafa asks: “Isn’t it terrible that life goes on? It just goes on and on and on, without stopping.” A line that feels less like a question than a quiet existential thunderbolt, an echo that runs through Matar’s work, through the meaning of exile itself, and through every life that has learned that endurance can sometimes be more devastating than loss.
In “My Friends,” translated with remarkable linguistic sensitivity by the Omani writer Zuwaina Al‑-;-Tuwaih, we encounter Hisham the Libyan in full force, even as the novel unfolds in London and revolves around its people and their temperaments. This is one of Matar’s astonishing dualities: fortunate as a writer, wounded as a man by the enforced disappearance of his father in the prisons of the former Libyan regime, and by the sordid complicity that delivered him from Egyptian intelligence into Tripoli’s hands.
Al‑-;-Arab, the London‑-;-based newspaper, appears vividly in the novel through the character of Mohamed Mustafa Ramadan, the Libyan writer and BBC broadcaster who was one of the paper’s founding editors in 1977. He was assassinated outside the Central Mosque in London after finishing his prayers, killed by agents of the Libyan regime.
I also sense the presence of Hisham’s father, the disappeared Libyan dissident Jaballa Matar, woven into the novel, despite the belief of his loyal readers that Matar had finally freed himself from this haunting figure after the father’s shadow appeared in his earlier works: In the Country of Men, Anatomy of a Disappearance, and A Month in Siena. Here, he surfaces in the figure of a wealthy man who visits those wounded by the gunfire unleashed by Libyan embassy staff on peaceful demonstrators in St James’s Square, offering them gifts and rewards. The same man appears at a Libyan mourning gathering attended by Khaled Abdelhadi. It is difficult not to feel that this is Hisham’s father, even if unnamed.
Matar writes “My Friends” with intellectual tenderness, emotional clarity, and stylistic daring. Three young Libyan men from Benghazi, living in London, form a friendship that stretches from childhood to adulthood, through closeness, distance, re-union-, and final separation. Their story reaches back to their youth, but the narrative begins in 1984, the year Libyan officials opened fire from inside their embassy on unarmed protesters in St James’s Square.
The novel begins at its end. Hossam and Khaled, now in middle age, part ways: Hossam leaves for California, Mustafa remains in Libya among the militias, and Khaled, the narrator, stays in London. He bids farewell to Hossam at St Pancras station, then wanders back to his Shepherd’s Bush flat through winding streets, immersed in reflection. He looks at the past without the arrogance of hindsight. “I don’t know why I did that,” he says. “I’m not sure what he meant. I still don’t understand.”
When the February uprising against Gadhafi erupts, the three friends respond in unexpected ways. Mustafa, the elegant real‑-;-estate broker, becomes a fighter. Hossam, the cosmopolitan recluse, falls back in love with his homeland, with Arabic poetry, and with his cousin. Khaled, the modest schoolteacher, does perhaps the bravest thing of all: he accepts the life he has built for himself in London and resolves to hold on to it. In a wry nod to Matar’s most famous book, we sense that Khaled may visit his parents in Tripoli, but he will not “return” to the idealized birthplace that carries an old wound, only to the place where he became an adult.
Matar moves between the English self he crafted from the age of eleven and the Libyan self that never leaves him. Between the two, much is lost. Hisham is a Libyan creative treasure writing in English, preoccupied with the shifting nature of human consciousness and with measuring the distance between verifiable truth and the sky of our inner world. That distance, for him, is where literature sits, what cannot be translated, what cannot be said.
“London, in all its swagger, is a shy city, invented by interpreters and invented for them.” With this line, Matar captures the essence of London in a way no map can. He does not describe its architecture´-or-its weather, but its interpretive nature: a city seen as it is read, not as it is seen. A city rewritten every day, shaped by the eyes that pass through it and the language that describes it.
In “My Friends,” we do not rediscover Hisham Matar the English stylist and the Libyan memory‑-;-keeper alone-;- we also live with his translator, Zuwaina al‑-;-Tuwaih, who took on the difficult wager and produced an Arabic prose so luminous it seems to repay Matar’s English with loyalty.
“We are in an inescapable current. The folly of believing we are free from history is equal to the folly of believing we are free from gravity.” This line, spoken by Hossam, is not merely philosophical reflection-;- it is a gentle slap to the illusion we repeat whenever we try to flee from ourselves. History, as Matar writes, is not an event that happened and ended. It is a force of gravity we cannot escape. It is the air we breathe, the shadow that follows us, the wound that refuses to close.
And we Arabs, whether in Libya, where Matar lived only his childhood,´-or-anywhere across this fractured expanse, live this truth in its harshest form. History for us is not a backdrop-;- it steps forward every morning, enters our minds uninvited, imposes itself on our conversations, colours our disagreements and turns every argument into a recycling of old questions that never found an answer.

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