The onset of the Arab Spring can feel like the distant past amid the grim brutality of our current times, but it raises timeless questions. What is the trade-off between courage and safety; idealism and caution; hope for change and fear of it? In hindsight, we can tell a story of how the wave of revolution crested and the undertow of counterrevolution prevailed. Autocrats remained in power. Uprisings turned into simmering civil and sectarian conflicts. Millions of people sought refuge in a West that so often fails to recognize their common humanity. Still those timeless questions haunt Hisham Matar’s riveting and humane novel of exile, My Friends.
While the novel works its way up to the Arab Spring as a climactic revelation of character, the fulcrum of My Friends is one of those extraordinary events lost to history. On April 17, 1984, a group of Libyan officials sprayed gunfire at a demonstration gathered in front of their embassy in London. A 25-year-old British policewoman was killed. Several Libyan diaspora protesters were wounded. After an 11-day siege of the embassy, with the strongman Muammar Qaddafi threatening reprisals on the United Kingdom’s diplomatic corps in Tripoli, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher expelled the embassy’s entire staff from the United Kingdom. Diplomatic ties with Libya were severed. The gunmen went free. Qaddafi’s war with the West continued.
Matar—a Libyan born in exile—tells the story through a fictional narrator named Khaled Abd al Hady, a Libyan gravely wounded in the shooting. Born in Benghazi, he is the son of a scholar who became a schoolmaster to avoid politics. Khaled is moved to study literature by two events in his formative years. He hears a short story called “The Given and the Taken,” by a Libyan émigré named Hosam Zowa, read on BBC radio. In the story, a man is incrementally devoured by a house cat. When the cat has nearly consumed his entire body, the man finally speaks up and says “no.” Then Khaled reads an essay by a Professor Henry Walbrook at the University of Edinburgh, which posits that when a work of literature is translated from one language into another, its meaning is inevitably altered for bad and for good, something lost and something gained. The short story is an allegory for Qaddafi’s Libya, and ultimately for exile itself. The essay becomes a kind of metaphor for Khaled’s life and his experience of exile: He gains safety but loses who he once was in the process.
Khaled narrates his story over the course of a night wandering the streets of London, a middle-aged man looking back on more than 30 years in exile. Most of the drama happens shortly after he moves to the United Kingdom. He wins an opportunity to study at the University of Edinburgh, and a few months later, his friend Mustafa persuades him to attend the demonstration. In the crowd with his compatriots, Khaled is momentarily euphoric: “I do not think I have ever before or since felt such solidarity.” Then the boys are shot. As they recuperate in the hospital, returning home is unthinkable: The regime would imprison them. Khaled can’t tell his parents what happened, because that might endanger them. He can’t go back to university, because the regime has spies there. His life, as he knew it, is over. “Be invisible as a ghost,” he tells himself. “You are now a danger to those you love the most.” A wealthy Libyan oppositionist (later killed by the regime) gives him a set of clothes and £1,000. The British government gives him asylum. The rest is up to him.
At the core of My Friends is a powerful juxtaposition of loneliness and camaraderie, self-reliance and dependence, which defines the outline of exile. Khaled ends up living more than three decades alone in a small, tidy flat in London’s multicultural Shepherd’s Bush neighborhood. Yet he relies on a constellation of close friendships. Each of those relationships reflects a different aspect of his exile, and a different way of being in the world.
First, a Lebanese classmate named Rana loans him her parents’ flat while he recovers from the shooting. There is something unspoken between them: a trust captured in her comment that “to be from countries such as ours is to continually feel obliged to explain them.” But there is also a distance: Whatever courtship started when they met at university is severed by his dependence upon her after he is wounded, the shame and trauma he feels about something he couldn’t control. What he can do, later in life, is repay the debt by staying with her in the hospital as she prepares for brain surgery. Like him, she initially conceals her condition from her family. There are some friends with whom we are comfortable in vulnerability. Having experienced that, sharing the rest of life with them becomes too hard.
Then Khaled turns to Professor Walbrook, the literature instructor whose essay inspired him to study the subject. The professor becomes a surrogate British father, taking the place of his Libyan one. When Khaled calls him shortly after the shooting, Walbrook asks in an uptight, British kind of way: “Do you know what you need right now?” After a few weeks’ time, Khaled calls back with a newfound British sensibility: “Money … A place to live. And an education.” They make a plan, and Khaled pursues it. He reads in the British Library, mainly stories of others in exile: Sophocles, Jean Rhys, Joseph Conrad. He changes universities. He becomes a teacher: a Libyan Brit instructing teenagers on English literature, moving between two worlds just like the Walbrook essay he read as a teenager.
Above all, the “friends” of the book’s title are Mustafa and Hosam. Khaled is bound to Mustafa by the shared experience of the shooting, the fact that they knew each other before it happened, went through it together, and made lives for themselves in London. Mustafa is more outgoing than Khaled, less inhibited. He falls in with the Libyan diaspora. Unlike Khaled, he never abandons the political impulse that propelled them to the demonstration—the belief that things can change, and that they can return home. Yet there is love between the two of them, even as they draw different conclusions from what was done to them. Mustafa wants revenge; Khaled wants to survive.
Khaled meets Hosam, the author of “The Given and the Taken,” years after the shooting. In the presence of the writer who once stirred him, he takes the rare step of sharing his history, which he regularly hides from others. Khaled tells Hosam that he is puzzled by one fact of Conrad’s story of exile: that he burned his father’s papers when he reached England. By contrast, Khaled still feels tethered to his own father and the Libya in which he remains. “It’s an accomplishment, I think,” he tells Hosam, “a genuine achievement to forget one’s father. I would like to do that. To wake up one morning and commence life without giving him a thought.”
Perhaps most evocatively, London itself is a character, simultaneously the seat of empire and a city of exiles from former colonies; a place of colonizers and people longing for lost lands. Khaled and Hosam make pilgrimages to the homes of writers who turned up on its streets. At first, common destinations: houses inhabited by Conrad and Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot and Henry James. But then Hosam becomes fixated on the fates of those more like him: murdered Iraqi, Lebanese, and Palestinian politicians. The African writer Dambudzo Marechera, who ended up sleeping on the sidewalk in Shepherd’s Bush. London may have taken them in, but can the imperial capital ever be home?
Then the Arab Spring intrudes with dizzying velocity, and each of the characters must answer those timeless questions for themselves. Mustafa and Hosam both throw caution to the wind and return to Libya, choosing the hope and idealism of return. But Khaled cannot bring himself to go. He chooses his life of exile, which is its own form of courage. “My friends never stopped wanting a different life,” he says in an imagined explanation to his family. “I have managed, Mother, not to want a different life most of the time and that is some achievement.”
For a time, his friends ride the wave of revolution. “It’s beautiful. Fucking beautiful. Like being brought back from the dead,” Mustafa calls to tell him from Libya. Both Mustafa and Hosam join militias. Some of the most haunting passages of the book are long emails written by Hosam in respites between battles. In one, Hosam recounts being present when Qaddafi is pulled out of a drainpipe and killed. “We had caught the spirit of things,” Hosam writes of Qaddafi, “the very essence of our lives, the source, the maker of our reality, the one who parted and gathered us, who took and gave, who punished and forgave. He was, whether we liked it or not, our father.” The passage calls back so much of the thrust of My Friends. The given and taken from Hosam’s short story. The ways in which the lives of people are arbitrarily shaped by those in power. The father, and country, that Khaled—like Conrad—finally chooses to leave behind.
Strangely, I was once on the other side of Hosam’s account. This fictional email called back the image I had seen in a photograph when I served in the White House: of Qaddafi, bloodied and bruised, lying outside a drainpipe. At the time, it seemed like the apex of a convergence between a popular uprising and a NATO intervention against a dictator who had made too many enemies, at home and abroad. A bet on idealism and hope for an uncertain future that paid off, as it did for Mustafa and Hosam. Until it didn’t. In Libya, the future became civil war. For the United States, the Libyan people were soon forgotten. Benghazi—a center of the revolution—became Benghazi, a scandal of ever-changing meaning that somehow led to Hillary Clinton’s private email server, a prequel to unfolding conspiracy theories that continue to shape our lives and politics. Translation can do strange things to reality. Empires also arbitrarily shape the lives of people. Individual human beings are left to make their own way.
By the end of the book, Mustafa is commanding his men in increasing futility against the chaos around him, unwilling to abandon Libya for exile. Hosam has made the decision to pursue a new exile in America, and bids farewell to Khaled at the train station. From there, Khaled begins his walk across London, narrating his story. Left unsaid, perhaps, is a key to understanding his character: Khaled already experienced, in miniature, the events of the Arab Spring when he chose to attend a demonstration. The euphoria of solidarity with the crowds. The violence of counterrevolution. A life mostly lived in the aftermath. In the last pages, Khaled is back to the loneliness and comfort of his flat. In the final sentence, he makes his bed: home. Having been burned by courage, he has chosen safety, and there is both wisdom and loss in his choice.
“We ask of writers what we ask of our closest friends,” Hosam says at one point, “to help us mediate and interpret the world.” At its best, the literature of exile offers a different window through which we can see ourselves, because the exile, like the writer, stands apart. Matar passes no judgment on the answers his characters choose amid forces beyond their control. But at a time when it’s almost too late to say the word no before those forces consume the world we knew, he shows us with masterful command how life happens at the intersection of the personal and political, what we can control and what we cannot.
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