Hisham Matar's debut novel, this was published in 2006, and shortlisted for the Booker Prize that year.

Born in New York to Libyan parents, Matar spent his childhood in Tripoli and Cairo, and mostly lived in London after that. In 1990, when he was 19, and a student in London, his father (a diplomat turned dissident) was kidnapped in Cairo (where he had been living in exile since 1979), flown back to Libya, and imprisoned. Matar knows no more: "I will have to live the rest of my days without ever knowing what happened to my father, how or when he died or where his remains may be."

In the Country of Men is not autobiographical, but there are shadows of the author's experience throughout.

The story opens in Libya, in 1979, when the narrator, Suleiman (aka Slooma), is nine years old. There are secrets all around him. The absences of Baba, his father, aka Faraj, are unaccountable. He's supposed to be abroad on business, and yet Suleiman has just seen him in the middle of Tripoli... It's not long before the reader finds out that Faraj is involved in anti-government activity (the government being that of Qaddafi, in power since the September Revolution of 1969). During Faraj's absences, Mama, aka Najwa, always succumbs to a mysterious "illness". Again it's not long before we realize that her strange moods are due to alcohol, obtained in a black plastic bag under the counter from the baker. But of course the explanations are never put in quite those terms. This is a child's eyes we're seeing through, and reality is never quite comprehensible.

Suleiman suffers from both knowing too little and knowing too much. When his mother has been drinking, she talks, often offering him language and information that are too much for a kid. She warns him not to tell, not to tell... And when he says to her that it's too much, and gets so unhappy he can't eat, she admonishes him: "What do you want from me? ... I have given everything for you. You're not even satisfied."



Najwa is possibly the most tragic figure in the novel. Everyone is pretty much screwed -- the next-door neighbour, Ustath Rashid, who shares Baba's political views, is arrested, and publicly interrogated and executed; Faraj is arrested, and though he returns alive, he is broken -- but at least these people had choices. Najwa had none. She was forced to marry because she was seen sitting opposite a boy in the Italian Coffee House... They are with her friend Jihan and another boy. Two girls, two boys. Drinking coffee. They are all just 14... When she is ratted on by Khaled, her brother -- who accuses her of "spending her days in cafes with strange men" -- her schooling is suspended, she is locked in her room for 30 days, and then married off to Suleiman's father, who's 23. She refers to this as her "black day". When they told her she was to be married, she took "a handful of magic pills... because they made a woman no good". She thinks if she remains childless, the marriage will last a year at most, and she will be free to resume her schooling. But no, when she's 15, Suleiman is born. So this depressed young woman, seeking refuge in alchohol because there's nothing else, is just 24 when we meet her...

This story of the "black day", or bits of it, recur multiple times in the text. How awful to have experienced that, we think -- but how doubly awful, as a child, to be the recipient of all this bitterness and grief. Suleiman's mother burdens him with expectations: "You are my prince. One day you'll be a man and take me away on your white horse." And, of course, he takes this on board: "I couldn't wait to be a man... to change the past, to rescue that girl from her black day."

This is the country of men, after all. When Najwa disparages her future husband's reported appearance (she has not met him), she is surprised that her father's rebuke doesn't turn into a beating. But, as she tells Suleiman, she is spared because she belongs to someone else: "I cried because I understood that I was now the property of another man... A word had been given and a word had been received, men's words that could never be taken back or exchanged."

You grieve for the awfulness of Qaddafi's regime, and yet Matar shows how it is mirrored, magnified even, in the awfulness that is patriarchy.


Leptis Magna, a well preserved Roman site, is about 130 km east of Tripoli. Suleiman visits with Ustath Rashid, and some other classmates

Najwa is implacably opposed to her husband's political activity. She doesn't want to fight, she just wants out: "Walk by the wall, feed your family, stay home, let them alone, look the other way, this is their time not ours, work hard and get us out of here, let me see the clouds above my country, Faraj, I want to look down and see it a distant map, reduced to lines, reduced to an idea..." She berates Moosa, Faraj's closest friend: "You encouraged him, looked up to him to guide you, inflated his chest with your adoration." Moosa is Egyptian, so she adds: "The most they could do is deport you."

But when Faraj returns, she seems to love him more. Possibly the power differential has changed somewhat. To save her husband, she cooperates with Moosa in burning Faraj's potentially incriminating books, and she lowers herself to put in a good word for him with a neighbour (who, trained by the KGB, is part of the clique in power). Faraj's predicament has therefore given her the opportunity for agency that up to now has been denied her. The couple's new closeness, ironically, has the effect of distancing Suleiman, and ultimately excluding him.

Which leads me to skip to the end, briefly. Suleiman is sent to Cairo to live with Judge Yaseen (Moosa's father, now deported): "I knew," he says, "that I would never see my father again, that he would die while I was installed alone in a foreign country to thrive away from the madness." And he's right. Suleiman can't return because he has missed military service, and is classified as an "Evader". Nor can his parents visit, because government monetary shenanigans mean they're now very poor. Then, in 1994, Faraj is arrested again. The family plead for Suleiman to return. He doesn't. Faraj is released, but dies a month later. This is recounted by the adult Suleiman, whose voice is accorded just a few pages at the end.

And finally in the December of that year, he meets his mother again in Alexandria: "I suddenly realize how young my mother is. She was twenty-four when I was sent away, the same age as I am now; fifteen when she had me, the same number of years I have spent away from her... Thirty-nine. She's only thirty-nine. What is she hoping for from life now, I wonder. How fitting to see her like this in Alexandria, in the city of fallen grace... The mother who tried to never have me, the mother who never chose it, the mother who resisted in all the ways she knew how. I wave my hand above my head, thinking of calling her, but I can't utter the word. Then suddenly it comes. 'Mama,' I say and say it again and again until she sees me. 'Mama! Mama! When I reach her she kisses my hands, my forehead, my cheeks, combs my hair with her fingers, straightens my collar." This is how the book ends.

You hope they have a good future. Somehow. Together or alone. Emotionally, though, Suleiman is betwixt and between. From early on in his Cairo stay, he started to feel free of Libya, and yet this new country can never replace the old one: "Instead, there is this void, this emptiness I am trying to get at like someone frightened of the dark, searching for a match to strike." He made up his mind to NOT get involved in the dramas of his father's second arrest; and he hears from a distance what has happened to all the people he used to know (which is mostly positive). It's a strange business, exile.


Carthage, 1995. Ustath Rashid: "Sidi Mahrez's lamentation for Carthage could have equally applied to Leptis: Why this emptiness after joy? Why this ending after glory? Why this nothingness where once was a city? Who will answer? Only the wind which steals the chantings of priests and scatters the souls once gathered...

***

If this country of men is clearly no country for women, it's definitely no country for kids either. Nine-year-old Suleiman is burdened not only with his mother's instability, but with the politics around him. On the one hand, he's kept in the dark, which means he makes up his own explanations (mostly wrong); on the other, he has experienced things no child should have to witness. He has seen two televised interrogations (one of them his neighbour's), and knows that when the flowers come on the screen, the person is probably being beaten... He has even seen the televised hanging of this same neighbour (a brilliantly written sequence that's nevertheless hard to stomach).

All this horror, you feel, must have an impact on the way the boy interprets life, and tries to find his role in it. Does this explain, then, the extraordinary series of betrayals to which he is party?

Lital Levy thinks about these betrayals in depth: "Not long after Ustadh Rashid’s arrest, as the fragile threads of Slooma’s home life unravel, Slooma discovers his own susceptibility to the pleasures of power and of submission as well as his innate need for acceptance and validation. In short order, he betrays and humiliates his best friend Kareem [Ustadh Rashid's son], violently stones a local beggar, divulges the location of the cell’s secret headquarters (where Nasser, his father’s assistant, is in hiding), and even supplies the loathsome agent casing his home [he's called Sharief] with names and with one of Baba’s books [that he rescued from the burning]. Why, we wonder, does this sensitive, intelligent child engage in these destructive (and self-destructive) acts?... The absence of an explanation requires us to do the work of introspection on behalf of the character."

The simplest interpretation may be the best: Cruel regimes produce cruel children. As Suleiman says: "Concern. I think that was what I craved. A warm and steady and unchangeable concern. In a time of blood and tears, in a Libya full of bruise-checkered and urine-stained men, urgent with want and longing for relief, I was the ridiculous child craving concern. And although I didn't think of it then in these terms, my self-pity had soured into self-loathing." And self-loathing makes you do terrible things.

This is the third "childhood folly" story I've read in comparatively short order (Atonement being the first, and Evening Is the Whole Day the second). I was initially slightly dubious about another child's-eye viewpoint. And, given that this is a book that tends to divide critics, it is noteworthy that the childhood-narrator element is one of the features that detractors see negatively (see here and here, for example).


Valletta, 2025. "Mama ordered cappuccino and sipped it slowly, looking out on to the sea, squinting her eyes at the horizon where on a clear day we could see Malta, a giant biscuit floating on the sea"

Lital Levy, however, explains that Suleiman's betrayals start when, on the one hand, Kareen calls him a child (he responds to Sharief, conversely, when the agent actually answers his questions, and doesn't treat him like a child), and on the other, when -- Suleiman having strenuously protested the book-burning activity -- his mother accuses him of complicity in it. Repeatedly, Suleiman reproaches himself for not being able to intervene in circumstances he can't, as a child, understand or influence: "In his subsequent acts of betrayal, then," wonders Levy, "is he compulsively acting out a script in which he has already cast himself as passive and cowardly? Or is he simply finding an outlet for the repression he has endured?" Or does he genuinely think the best way to help his father is to provide the information that Sharief is looking for?

Or -- and there's a modern-day resonance to this explanation that makes it very scary -- is Suleiman simply drawn to the strength exuded by tyranny? Levy again: "Hearing the meaningless, senseless roar of the crowd in response [to Qaddafi's speech], Slooma recounts that he 'longed for the voice of the Guide to return' -- implying that Qaddafi’s voice offers Slooma a stable, reassuring -- even fatherly -- presence. How can Slooma long for the voice of the man ultimately responsible for the arrest and torture of his beloved Baba? Does this moment capture the regime’s psychological victory over the entire family following Baba’s capitulation, or is it yet one more painful illustration of Slooma’s state of confusion, navigating the conflicting messages of his public and private worlds? Perhaps more than any other scene, this brief and subtle moment in the narrative epitomizes how the regime succeeds in securing the total submission of its subjects."

Lorraine Adams has another take on the fairly horrible things that Suleiman does: "The boy interrogates himself after each episode [of cruelty or betrayal], weak with shame. But then morning comes, what he experienced recedes, and its lessons fail to take hold. Gradually, we begin to apprehend the ways in which any despotic system is like any boy's inner life. Short-lived in their affections, easily offended, impressed with showboating stadiums of cheering automatons, blindly vicious, the boy and the system embody a topsy-turvy puerility..."

This parallel is underlined in the terrible hanging scene. At the end, Suleiman recounts: "A couple of men hugged and dangled from [the dead man's] ankles, then waved to others to come and do the same. They looked like children satisfied with a swing they had just made."

Every "crime" the child commits -- gratuitous cruelty, inadvertent cruelty, betrayal, misrepresentation, and unpredictability -- is replicated and magnified at the systemic level. In the country of men, the men are children...

The blinding, oppressive, inescapable quality of the ruling system is also expressed by the constant depiction of the heat of the sun. Examples:

-- "I am recalling now that last summer before I was sent away. It was 1979, and the sun was everywhere. Tripoli lay brilliant and still beneath it..."
-- "The sun had nibbled away all the shade, burning our dirt street white."
-- "The sun was vertical, the shade narrow and mean."
-- "Why did we have so much respect for the sight of blood? Why is the sun so unforgiving?"


Hammamet, Tunisia, 1995

***

Just a couple more things to note.

Matar, of course, is writing in a language that's not his first. Like Edward Said, he says, in the little interview at the back of the book, he has suffered three exiles: From his homeland, from his mother tongue, and from friends and family: "But the way I feel is that all that I am now and all that I have lost coexist at the same time." He was schooled in English from the age of 12, and he also finds it "liberating" to write in English.

His earliest experience of the language dates back a bit further, however. As he explains: "I learned English at the age of 11 by listening to Jane Austen audiobooks, for two-and-a-half hours every morning for six months. I would have the book in front of me and follow with my eyes. I underlined countless words. I often lost my place and felt I was drowning. There were instances when the mist lifted. I didn’t look at her books again until, a decade and a half later, I read Persuasion and felt I was back in the company of a governess, who appeared even younger than I remembered." In this 250th anniversary of Austen's birth, that's surely a nice little tribute.

Less positively, Libya is still not at peace...


Hisham Matar