Young Libyans take part in a military parade in the city of Misrata, commemorating the 13th anniversary of the uprising that overthrew the regime of Muammar Gaddafi, in February 2024. | Photo credit: Getty Images
“I have lost friends, some by death … others by not being able to cross the road,” wrote Virginia Woolf in 1931, and if any book contains this quote, it is Hisham Matar. My friendslonglisted for this year’s Booker Prize. Friendship is supposed to be the ‘literary equivalent of education’. A field that requires its own forensic study.
My friends spanning 30 years, from 1980 to the Libyan revolution 2011, told in a two-hour-long walk across London carried out by the protagonist, Khaled. The story begins with an ending – both friends and the reader do not know why. When one goes further through the water, it is revealed that Khaled’s relationship with his friend is unusual. In 1980, when Khaled was still in Libya, living with his parents, a story was told on the radio by a journalist as a sign of protest against Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi. Assassinations, killings and kidnappings are routine and exiled Libyans are not exempt from the tyrant’s supervision.
The story was told by a young Libyan writer named Hosam Zowa, who was studying at Trinity College, Dublin. Titled ‘The Given and the Taken’, it is the strange story of a man who was eaten alive by a cat until he was ‘nothing but head and body’. Amazingly, Khaled can’t shake this allegorical feeling towards him. Exactly three years later, he moved to the University of Edinburgh, London, to study English literature. And it wasn’t until many years later in Paris that he actually met Hosam and thus began the story of a deep friendship.
The hope of the artist
It is rumored that Picasso was busy drinking coffee somewhere in France while World War I was raging in the background. Hosam’s character juggles with the idea of being a reactionary artist and on top of that, who dares to face tyranny. While being an ordinary human being who lives in the shadow of his own situation, it is expected that an artist can be an example in times of crisis.
Mustafa, another dear friend of Hosam’s who arrived in London at the same time, was disappointed when Hosam was unable to speak out against the dictator when given a platform. Ideology is often in conflict in the novel. Khaled himself admitted about his friendship with Mustafa and Hosam: “I believe that my two friends represent two separate and inseparable parts of my life, which I have to keep in balance, and without me, they would not be able to see each other. .”
Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi in Tripoli, March 1992. | Photo credit: Getty Images
After arriving in London, everyone, like a “hopeful fisherman, casts his net wide”. London as a setting becomes a ‘bottomless well’ of abstract and material reality in which it occurs. It’s also Khaled’s walking buddy and sometimes his own gory life. My friends is as much a story about exiles as it is about the sorrows of young people who are prematurely disillusioned in their coming of age. These characters are constantly scrutinized for having too much courage or shying away from leaving things to fate. The author manages to read in the proverbial shoes of Khaled because he uses the idea of only two of his friends who are the people who act while he watches from the sidelines, forever exiled.
Live in the past
Pulitzer-winning author Hisham Matar. | Photo credit: Getty Images
After writing about his life experiences in a 2017 Pulitzer-winning memoir The BaliMatar came out as an ‘exemplary sufferer’ with this book. My friends perhaps one of Matar’s best attempts at impersonality. He responds to history and politics more violently than in any other work. Also amazing about this book is the treatment of women, who despite being secondary characters, are not just extras, and are given a place of authority on the page.
When two of Khaled’s friends join the Libyan front, the prose flows from one century to the next, until its unconscious languidness. Khaled tells us that Joseph Conrad, when he first came to England, burned his father’s papers. Libyans never leave their homes, even when they are exiled. It is an achievement, according to Khaled, to forget his father. The collective resistance of the Libyan people and their ability to live together in two extremes, comes (as Hosam’s mother later) from a place “where hate and love, confused and clear, are so tightly woven that they form an unbreakable rope, a rope that is right to lift all nations”.
The reviewer is an independent journalist based in Delhi.
My friends
