More than 40 years have passed since Hisham Matar saw an image on television that shocked him and that still continues to haunt his head today: a young man who had just been shot calling for his mother in a heartbreaking voice. He was one of the protesters who had attended a peaceful anti-Gaddafi rally in front of the Libyan embassy in London’s St. James’s Square. An encounter that broke up when someone started a shooting, believed to have been from within the embassy itself, and left several injured and a police officer, Yvonne Fletcher, dead. The square was evacuated and the embassy besieged by armed police for eleven days, until the Thatcher government allowed Libyan officials to leave the country.
“The boy was writhing on the ground. He was wearing a balaclava so as not to be identified by the Libyan government and avoid consequences. In fact, everyone had their faces covered. He was going to be somewhat tense, yes, although calm. But chaos broke out,” recalls the writer, who is visiting Barcelona these days to present his novel, Los Amigos de mi vida (Salamandra), which focuses part of his narrative on this attack.
He never imagined that seven years later he would meet that student, much less that he would end up becoming his friend. “It was in college. “I became friends with a boy older than me and, two or three years later, he confessed to me that he was that protester who appeared on television.” A reality that appears captured in his fiction although, he insists, “I am not Khaled, the protagonist, although we do have some things in common” such as, for example, that they are both Libyans and that for a time they were forced to change his identity for security reasons, “although the reasons were very different.”
Also that the two were students abroad and saw with their own eyes how their classmates were, in reality, spies. “Whenever the Government gave a scholarship to study abroad, the group was made up of the readers, who were the ones who were going to study, and the writers, who sent reports to the authorities about any anomaly they found. Of the latter, there were always two or three in each group and this is because all authoritarian regimes are obsessed with knowing what their citizens think. “Dictators are nothing more than jealous lovers.”
Author and protagonist also share a reflection: What happens if I decide not to live in my country again? “Both Khaled and I are very committed to the present and the life we ??lead. It is true that we will always be nourished, I imagine like everyone else, by the place where we are born. But we have also grown in other countries that have seen us grow. I, for example, have lived more years of my life in London than outside of it and I feel that I have flourished here. There is a constant fantasy during exile which is that, one day, you will be able to continue with your previous life in your country. But one cannot return to the starting point as if nothing had happened. It’s okay to want to do it, but it doesn’t have to be obligatory for everyone.”
Matar returned to Libya, on a temporary trip to find answers about his father’s disappearance. The result was the book The Return, an evocation of his origins in which he narrates how Gaddafi made his father disappear in his prisons. “It was a complex journey, since we had not heard from him for 33 years.” His absence has marked all of his work, “although this has not always been a conscious decision.”
In its recent pages, however, for the first time there is no absent father. “I wanted to free myself from his influence, and I don’t mean that in a bad way. I have always been interested in being faithful to the facts, but what I don’t want is for them to dominate me and for me not to end up having power over what I write.”
