Three Families, One Country: Intersecting Paths. A Study of Hisham Matar.

Abstract

Love, hope, rage, longing, disappointment and uncertainty are some of the most commonly shared feelings among human beings; together with the Libyan political situation following Gaddafi’s dictatorship, they represent the main themes underlying the stories narrated in Hisham Matar’s In the Country of Men (2006), Anatomy of a Disappearance (2011) and The Return (2016). As this thesis will explore, these feelings can take different forms. For instance, love can unconditionally connect the members of a family; together with longing, love can be at the basis of the indissoluble bond that ties individuals to their homelands. Moreover, love for literature and art offers consolation for painful circumstances, has the power to evoke memories and emotions connected to personal experiences and to provide a way to make life more bearable. Whether in the form of fiction, as In the Country of Men and Anatomy of a Disappearance, or in the form of memoir, as in The Return, Hisham Matar explores a wide range of issues and situations with extreme sensitivity and attention to detail. In each of these three works, the story of a family is closely intertwined with the political events happening in his homeland, where unprecedented violence and repression are frequent, forcing exile upon the most prominent opponents of the dictatorial regime and leaving indelible marks of suffering. The following thesis will show how these themes intersect and create patterns in and between Matar’s works; at the same time, it will highlight Hisham’s attempt to draw a complete picture of his father. In fact, by returning to Libya, Matar wishes to be able to draw the last mark of this picture, the one he needs to conclude it and that is blurred by the uncertainty about what happened to his father. There is one question lying at the centre of these works, asked by Hisham- Suleiman in In the Country of Men: ‘Can you become a man without becoming your father?’ (p. 149)