“What is accomplished in exile is constantly diminished by the feeling of having lost something, left behind forever,” wrote Edward W. Said (1935-2003) in his Reflections on Exile and Other Essays. Even if exile is also an experience that allows you to gain something, a cruel exchange like a Faustian pact.
It is the soft and complex material that the Anglo-Libyan writer Hisham Matar seizes, who gives us with My friends a subtle and melancholic score about exile, loss and regret.
In 1990, when Hisham Matar was studying in the United Kingdom, his father, an opponent of Gaddafi who was living in exile in Egypt, was kidnapped by the Libyan dictator’s henchmen before being thrown in prison — where he vanished into thin air. The very beautiful The land that separates them (Gallimard, 2017), which recounted his investigation in Libya in the footsteps of his father who disappeared after the fall of the regime in 2011, allowed him to obtain the Pulitzer Prize for biography in 2017.
Autobiographical elements which partly infuse Hisham Matar’s third novel, in which a narrator, Khaled, a Libyan living in London, remembers his first years abroad, the strong friendships he made there and the choices, obvious or difficult, that he and his friends of Libyan origin were led to do.
One day in April 1984, while Khaled was studying literature in Edinburgh, he took part in a demonstration outside the Libyan embassy in London. That day, shots were fired into the crowd from the roof of the building, instantly killing a British policewoman. Khaled will be injured, as will one of his friends. A largely true story, a “friendship hallowed by blood.”
For the narrator of My friends, this incident will have dizzying consequences. It will be dangerous for him to return to university – where “snitches” in the service of the Gaddafi regime circulate – at the risk of compromising his security and that of his family remaining in Libya. An “unforeseen” which amounts to an existential derailment.
Shipwrecked, walled up living outside his own country, he will now no longer be able to return to Libya: he will not see his family again for many years and will have to start a new life in London, where the status of political refugee has been discreetly granted to him.
As the years passed, two of his close friends, Hossam and Mustafa, also Libyans, experienced trajectories that were both similar and different. For their part, they will choose, many years later, at the time of the “Arab Spring” and the first Libyan civil war in 2011, to change into “men of action”, leaving their ordered life in London to join armed struggle in turn.
But it is “Khaled the Reluctant”, as his friends sometimes call him, who holds the pen. He chose to be the living memory of their trio. To play the game of literature and thus fully assume, in a certain way, one’s destiny as a writer.
Through everyone’s memories, letters and telephone conversations, Khaled tells and tells his story. Who was right to come back, or to stay? Which form of disenchantment is preferable to the other? The one that hits here or the one that hits there? Hisham Matar’s strength is to lead readers to move forward with him through the gray of life, the gray of exile, and the gray of London.