The Trauma of Loss

In his first novel, Libyan writer Hisham Matar addressed the impact that the trauma of the Gaddafi dictatorship had on his own family. His new book focuses on how a boy's life is overshadowed by the disappearance of his father. By Volker Kaminski

By Volker Kaminski

There are hugely personal implications for Hisham Matar in the transitional period now underway in post-Gaddafi Libya: after decades in London exile, suddenly the Libyan writer is not only witnessing the end of repression and dictatorship, but there is now also the possibility that he may find his father again. In 1990, Matar's father, the diplomat and businessman Jaballa Matar, was abducted to Libya from his exile in Cairo. Since then there's been no news on his fate.

Not that Matar follows a strictly autobiographical line in his novel, titled "Anatomy of a Disappearance". He relates the life of the 14-year-old Egyptian Nuri el-Alfi, whose father disappears without a trace while on a business trip to Geneva.

All the evidence points to a political abduction, but the case remains unsolved. From now on, Nuri has to deal with the fact that no one can tell him where his father is, or whether he is still alive at all.

Up to this point, Nuri has led the privileged life of a diplomat's child. There are servants at home, and one particular employee pays devoted attention to Nuri's needs. His father has a chauffeur and is mostly away on business, he has the authority and distance of a "great man".

The traumatisation of a damaged soul

But these years are also overshadowed by loss: Nuri's mother dies when he is 10 years old. Although he experienced the tragic events of that night when his father rushed his mother to hospital, he never discovered what caused his mother's death.

Nuri's grief for his dead mother does not last long – all too soon his father meets a new partner while on holiday with Nuri in Alexandria: Mona, a confident young woman who also lost her Egyptian father at an early age and whose mother is English.

During this holiday, the widowed father Kamal Pascha and his 12-year-old son compete with each other, as though they were equal rivals vying for the attentions of this beautiful woman. Unusual behaviour for a 12-year-old perhaps, but Nuri discovers at an early age the perpetual confusion of his feelings.

When Mona and his father marry a short time later, and Nuri is sent to boarding school in England, he plunges into great desperation, he torments himself with conflicting feelings about his father and is consumed with desire for Mona. He experiences an almost insurmountable loneliness, which is further exacerbated by his long bouts of silence.

Nuri's emotional instability and his sense of dislocation with his surroundings are already pronounced at the time when his father is abducted. The disappearance of the father and the ensuing search for clues as to the perpetrators and the circumstances of the abduction are reflected in the traumatization of a damaged soul.

Matar succeeds in illuminating the consequences of the loss in all its psychological facets; he carries out, as the original title of the book indicates, an anatomy of the soul.

Rejected by reality

Nuri's world often appears empty and grey, he feels not wholly 'accepted' by reality. Initially he hopes to discover his father's whereabouts with Mona's help.

It eventually turns out that Nuri's father actually spent that night with a lover, with the suggestive name "Béatrice". It becomes increasingly clear to Nuri that he knew very little about his father. As he grows up, leaving school and then completing his studies in London, he understands that he has never found his own place in the shadow of his father.

Traumatic memory of the Gaddafi regime: Hisham Matar, whose father was abducted by Libyan security forces two decades ago, relates the story of the kidnapping of an Arab dissident in his new novel

The absence of the father is the very thing that deepens the sense of his own "questionable presence". He often feels guilty, as though he has abandoned his father, he wears his father's watch, and dreams of somehow continuing the life of the lost person.

Unsurprisingly then, one day he turns his back on Europe and returns to the house of his father in Cairo, back to the servants and the friends, to – so it would appear – deliberately set out to continue the life of his father: He sits in his office, and tries on items of his father's clothing which appear to him after so many years to not only be worn out, but also strangely "shrunken".

It appears as though Matar allows his hero no other way out from his vacuum-like pupation. But why should Nuri not try to find happiness in Cairo and live out his life on a bridge between cultures? After all, didn't his father have a fondness for European culture, extolling the virtues of the old cities London and Paris, while as an ex-minister of the Egyptian king, always remaining true to his Arab roots.

In the homeland of his father, Nuri is in any case best placed to sustain the daily hope that his father will one day return.

Volker Kaminski

Translated from the German by Nina Coon

Editor: Lewis Gropp/Qantara.de