My Friends is a brilliant political novel. Hisham Matar’s third work of fiction highlights several historical events, most importantly, Libyan officials’ shooting of anti-Qaddafi protestors at the London embassy (1984) and the Libyan Revolution (2011). Through his melancholic chronicle of Khaled, Hosam, and Mustafa, all Libyan exiles in the UK, Matar reminds us of the brutal conditions that gave rise to the Arab Spring, and intimates how that moment of insurrectionary hope eventually collapsed into factionalism and tragedy. But this rich narrative is also a brilliant formal achievement. A virtuoso writer, Matar regularly crafts sentences that pull the reader into a character’s experience. Consider, for example, Khaled’s first-person description of being shot: “I was now empty and standing, my life reduced to a single unbroken line of a swirl locked inside a child’s glass marble. And there it rolled out, that marble, rolled out of me, taking everything with it” (75). Matar never elevates questions of social change or issues of personal trauma over considerations of style and structure. On the contrary, he suggests throughout the novel that literature isn’t only a means of representing or commenting on politics; literature also provides a way of instantiating, of experiencing—of living—the political. A writer in Matar’s view must assume a pivotal role in the making and maintenance of community. We should “ask of writers what we ask of our closest friends,” he writes: “to help us mediate and interpret the world” (341).
As this reference to close friends should imply, Matar understands his subject through the affective and the quotidian. Khaled, Mustafa, and Hosam experience politics as a force that impacts their everyday relationships. Khaled makes this manifest through his life as a literature student and, later, literature teacher in Scotland and England. Gravely wounded during the Libyan embassy shooting, Khaled bears large scars he is loath to reveal to anyone but his intimates. Yet these scars, troubling though they are, pale in comparison with the psychic injuries inflicted upon him by deracination and loss, and the enormous effort required to forge and maintain a new life for himself in the UK. As he explains late in the novel, “the life I have made for myself here is held together by a delicate balance. I must hold on to it with both hands” (325).
In certain respects, Mustafa and Hosam help Khaled hold this life together; the capacity of male friends to sustain and support each other is central to Matar’s compelling novel. Yet, Mustafa and Hosam also disrupt the “delicate balance” of Khaled’s exilic existence. Unable to return to Libya, each of these friends bears his own “invisible burden” (3). Mustafa, like Khaled, a student shot at the London embassy, finds it hard to suppress his anger at the political situation at home but seems largely functional abroad, embedding himself in a Libyan expatriate community. By contrast, Hosam, a slightly older writer whose work long has bewitched both Khaled and Mustafa, cannot create a sustainable life in Europe, let alone continue to continue to create. Drifting through “half a dozen cities,” Hosam embodies the impossibility of ever accepting the loss of patria (281). As he tells Khaled, “for a writer, exile is prison…A severing from the source” (33). Even London, the city where Hosam seems most at home, and the city where he has a meaningful romantic relationship, proves unstable to him. Trying to “orientate himself” by mapping writers’ residences in the British capital, he instead finds the city increasingly oppressive (286). Before long, Hosam rejects this method of situating himself in an alien land for a far more troubling approach: locating the sites of modern terrorist activity in the metropole, visiting one tragic site of shooting and bombing after another (294).
Khaled, by contrast, manages to secure some footing, however tenuous, from literature in a violent and unstable world. Early on, we learn of how the fourteen-year-old Khaled “lived inside” Salim el Lozi’s novel The Emigres as he listened to news reports of the Lebanese writer’s murder. This precocious cathexis to the literary persists as Khaled enrolls at the University of Edinburgh four years later. And it continues as he studies the canon of world literature—Bronte, Turgenev, Salih, the fictive work The Given and the Taken; and, later, collaborates with Hosam on his pilgrimages to literary residences. Mustafa claims that Khaled thinks “if only people read more, the world would be a better place” (63), but Matar suggests on the contrary that a life in literature is for Khaled more of an individual endeavor—a highly personal way of saying with Hosam “fuck exile” (33). Indeed, it is Khaled more than any other character in the novel who uses literature to create a “terrain,” to find in books a kind of shaky “native land.” And this, more than anything, is the lesson of My Friends: not that literature can enable us to return home, let alone save us from political terror, but that literature can, at its best, help us create a redoubt, however “feeble,” however “meek.” With this beautiful novel, Matar gives us that gift.
