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Literary Review
FICTION
Distant memories
S. RAMACHANDER
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This is an unusually poignant, vivid and well-crafted work.
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In the Country of Men, Hashim Matar, Viking/ Penguin, p.194, 2006
FEW adults can resist a fascinating story, told with the wide-eyed innocence of a nine year old. Great literary works have sprung from the imagination of adults expressed through a child's eyes, Charles Dickens alone accounting for three, in Oliver Twist, David Copperfield and Pip, of Great Expectations. Hashim Matar, now a 36-year-old Libyan writer living in New York, has produced a novel of happy childhood and tragic loss of innocence. It tells of the tragedy wrought by Colonel Qaddafi's repressive regime, taming a country of virile and strong-willed men, who ruled over families as absolute masters, treated as a superior race by women and children. The stinging irony in the title is that one man, simply referred to as The Guide, emasculated the country and its men; they ran for cover from his rampaging Revolutionary Committee, willing to confess to anything.
Matar writes of a time when some idealists still sat in coffee houses and spoke their mind freely, taking the refinement of a rich civilisation and Islamic values for granted. Soon we see this mosque-going, devout world collapse as every citizen, particularly the educated and intellectual classes, lives in unspoken dread of the infamous and peremptory knock on the door, as in tyrannies everywhere before and since.
Young protagonist
The protagonist, Suleiman, is the only child of a prosperous and frequently absent travelling businessman. The father befriends professors and intellectuals, who do not easily accept the need to hang up portraits of The Guide and Leader on drawing room walls nor sing his praises. Yet, when a best friend and neighbour, Usthath Rashid, apparently disappears one day into the void, Suleiman's troubles begin, as his best friend Kareem is Rashid's son and the mothers too are very close. He does not have anyone to turn to for advice or explanation, as adults seem masters and victims of an inevitable double-speak. He sees a new vulnerability in them, a mixture of anxiety about the future and urge to stave off trouble for their families at any cost.
When the father too mysteriously disappears on what seems not quite the normal business trip to Europe and England, Suleiman's unease increases. His mother becomes increasingly remote and given to fits of crying, seeking solace in a bottle of medicine that she is supplied with from time to time by the baker. It dawns on the lad much later that she is an alcoholic and drinks, in fear and stealth, in defiance of religious injunctions. He becomes even more attached to and fiercely protective of his mother. The doting relationship and mutual dependence and Suleiman's precocious awakening to sex, to girls and a larger conception of life in the world, are etched tastefully and with great restraint by the author.
Matar manages to retain the exotic tones of a North African Arab culture, despite the foreign language. There are some splendid descriptions with a credible approximation of a nine-year-old's voice in them. For example, while others bow down in the characteristic prayer fashion, he reflects that many times during prayer (in a mosque) "I remained standing while all the worshippers bowed... a carpet of white hunched backs, like seagulls grooming their chests." The Mediterranean climate and atmosphere is beautifully evoked — the bright glare of the noonday sun warming up the white stucco walls, the quiet streets which even the playful children have left, while life seeks refuge in the cool of the gardens and deep shadows of the inner courtyards. All of the action barring the last few chapters takes place in one summer vacation.
Poetic passages
Suleiman is sent away to Cairo to escape the regime, and experiences the delights of freedom, losing his Libyan accent and ways, while yearning for his parents. The ending, though a bit abrupt, still has room for the poet in the author. A dry and severely spare language pervades the narrative which is an unusually poignant, vivid, sad and yet well-crafted work that can rank alongside The Kite Runner.
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