In the Country of Men

Hisham Matar’s novel, In the Country of Men (Dial, 2006), is set in Libya in 1979, ten years after the coup that made Muammar al-Gaddafi “Leader and Guide of the Revolution.” It was a nation where neighbors spied on neighbors and dissenters were tortured into confessions to be made on national television. In which such dissidents were publicly hanged on television.

When such scenes went wrong, the television screen was filled with a picture of flowers.

The novel is narrated by nine-year-old Sulieman, who is the child of a marriage more forced than arranged. Sulieman’s life is dominated by his unhappy mother, a woman who keeps herself apart. Mama gets “sick” every time her husband takes one of his frequent business trips. It puzzles Sulieman somewhat that Mama is never sick when Baba is at home.

When Mama is sick she needs her strong-smelling medicine, which she buys under the counter from a local baker. Under the influence of this medicine, she turns confessional, tells Sulieman the horror story of her life. The first installment goes like this:

They rushed the wedding through as if I was a harlot, as if I was pregnant and had to be married off before it showed. Part of the punishment was not to allow me even to see a photograph of my future husband. But the maid sneaked in to tell me she had seen the groom. “Ugly,” she said, frowning, “big nose,” then spat at the ground. I was so frightened, I ran to the toilet ten times or more. My father and brothers—the High Council, who were sitting right outside the room—became more and more nervous, reading my weak stomach as proof of my crime. They didn’t know how it felt waiting in that room, where the complete stranger who was now my husband was going to walk in alone and without introduction, undress me and do filthy, revolting things.

It was a dreary room. It had nothing in it but a huge bed with a sqaure, ironed white handkerchief on one pillow. I had no idea what the handkerchief was there for.

…

On one of my journeys to the toilet, pulling my wedding dress up and running like an idiot, I saw my father bury a pistol in his pocket. “Blood is going to be spilled either way,” were the words he told your grandmother.

…

Your father, the mystery groom, was twenty-three; to the fourteen-year-old girl I was that seemed ancient. When he finally walked in, I fainted. When I came to, he wasn’t there. Your grandfather was beside me, smiling, your grandmother behind him, clutching the now bloodstained handkerchief to her chest and crying with happiness.

A shotgun wedding with a vengeance. And the “crime” was a small act of sexual choice, a small freedom.

So the national misery plays out in Sulieman’s life against the backdrop of this domestic misery. One day when Mama takes him to town in a fit of atonement to buy him a treat, he sees his father cross the city square disguised by dehumanizing sunglasses. Baba is supposed to be out of the country on business. Why, Sulieman wonders, is he here and why does he not acknowledge Sulieman?

From this point on the child gets caught up in events that he can’t fully understand except to know that such stability as he has is under threat.

Hisham does a masterful job of telling such a complex story from the point of view of a child. Such a technique allows for a great deal of irony, but as far as I was concerned, Hisham didn’t overplay his hand. I could see the way the child was misinterpreting events and cringe when he is manipulated by agents of the state, when he takes action that, instead of protecting his family, puts every one in more danger. I found myself often saying, “Oh don’t don’t don’t.” And yet, I could understand how it was that this real, confused, and angry child did what he did.

Writing in the New York Times, Lorraine Adams describes events this way:

Throughout, the narrator turns his questioning in on himself. It is here that one of Matar�s most powerful themes, the convoluted roots of betrayal, slowly takes shape. The boy betrays his best friend, his mother and his father�s closest friend � and would, if not for developments elsewhere, also betray his father. Alongside his faithlessness, his capacity for sadism particularizes. He throws a rock, and although he denies he aimed at a seriously impaired friend, a boy he respects, he nonetheless badly injures him. He tries to save the neighborhood beggar from drowning, then inexplicably finds himself kicking the man in the face.

The boy interrogates himself after each episode, weak with shame. But then morning comes, what he experienced recedes, and its lessons fail to take hold. Gradually, we begin to apprehend the ways in which any despotic system is like any boy�s inner life. Short-lived in their affections, easily offended, impressed with showboating stadiums of cheering automatons, blindly vicious, the boy and the system embody a topsy-turvy puerility. As in Orwell�s famous formulation � �war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength� � the world has lost its definitions, or, in Matar�s formulation, it has yet to learn them.

Adams compares In the Country of Men to 1984 and Fahrenheit 451 (as opposed to a novel like The Kite Runner). Such a comparison is apt, and I think this novel may become another classic description of totalitarianism. But for me, this is a story about the mother, a woman who would have been no older than 24 and who had no control over the events of her life except for manipulation of those around her, a woman who loves her child but resents having given birth to him at 15. This is what I think the title tells us. Against the “puerility,” the vicious boyishness of the totalitarian regime, this “country of men,” she plays out her struggle for what little autonomy she’s been able to hold onto at great cost and at overwhelming odds: the illegal liquor, her refusal to conform and have more children, a refusal to kowtow to her fundamentalist neighbors. The struggle to overthrow the person identified as “The Guide” seems as threatening to her needs as is the fundamentalist state. It is all a violent playacting that happens over and over again to the same effect.

An aggregation of reviews here.

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