The Return

by Hisham Matar

  “Apart from a few literary people, nobody knows you here,” Marwan said, driving me to Ahmed’s house. “I have decided to become your Libya publicist.” He had been telephoning journalists, letting them know I had returned.

  “I am here to see my family. I don’t want to give interviews.”

  “That’s your problem,” he said, the steering wheel competing with a cigarette in one hand and a mobile phone in the other.

  The tree-lined street was narrow and quiet. Most of the houses on it were designed in the Italian style of the early 1900s: symmetric, plain, single-storey structures. Only occasionally an ornamental, classical detail was allowed: a painted frieze or an ornate modillion propping up a cornice. Above the door to Ahmed’s house, there was the faded triangle of a painted pediment. Beyond the large, modest, tiled entrance, the house was made up of two identical flats. Ahmed and his wife lived in one, and the other was dedicated to the newspaper’s editorial office and, in the evenings, to literary gatherings. Walking us through, Ahmed said, “Back in the 1920s and ’30s, the house served as the residence of the head of the Italian Fascist Party in Benghazi.”

  We sat in the editorial office. The walls were lined with books. A portrait of Ahmed Rafiq al-Mahdawi rested on one shelf, looking young and determined, resembling less the national poet that he was and more a doubting author. Under the Italian occupation, al-Mahdawi was forced to flee to Turkey. After independence, he returned and was appointed by King Idris to the senate. He became the center of the literary and cultural life of the country. It was said that in the afternoons he could always be found at Benghazi’s Arrudi Café, which used to be on the corner of Baladiya Square, in the heart of the city. Young writers, artists and intellectuals of the day—figures such as Mohammad Faraj Hemmi, the leftist academic and lawyer who was later arrested by Qaddafi and died under torture in prison in 1981, and Basili Shafik Khouzam, the author who would later chronicle life in Benghazi in a series of novels and short stories written in Italian under the pen name of Alessandro Spina—frequented Arrudi, drawn to al-Mahdawi’s table. Some of the names I spotted on Ahmed’s shelves were William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway, Italo Calvino and Albert Camus, Milan Kundera and Mario Vargas Llosa.

  “Finally, things can happen,” Ahmed said when he saw me glance at his bookshelf. “You’ll find holes, no doubt. But you can’t imagine the acrobatics, the sheer acrobatics we had to go through to get our hands on these books. And then once you do, and the word gets around, friends come asking to borrow them. You try to build a library, but neither the censor nor the people will let you!” he said and laughed.

  I asked him if before the revolution he had been anxious that the authorities would find out he owned these books.

  “No, the decision to ban certain books was never taken out of passion—I wish it had been. It was just out of indifference and spite. A sort of natural reflex.”

  The problem was not only the censor, Ahmed explained; the regime’s repeated assaults on bookshops—confiscating their stock and closing some of them down—had meant that it was practically very difficult to find books in Libya, even those the censor had permitted. I knew this because the oldest and most reputable Libyan publisher and bookseller, Al-Fergiani, eventually had to move its offices to London.

  Ahmed smoked incessantly, which worried me because whenever he laughed, which was frequently, his face would fill up with blood and he would lose his breath. I warmed to him. He had a cheerful disposition and, notwithstanding his conclusion that “Libya has perfected the dark art of devaluing books,” he was an optimist and a tireless advocate for literature and the life of the mind. To be a Libyan artist in Libya was heroic. The country, its politics and social dogmas, thwart every possible artistic instinct. The perseverance of men like Ahmed is astonishing. In 1978, when he was in his early twenties, he was amongst the large group of authors who were incarcerated. The regime had set up a trap. It invited young literary talent to take part in a book festival, then arrested them. Like most of that group, Ahmed spent ten years in prison.

  “Qaddafi thought he was hurting me,” he said. “Instead, he gave me dozens of writer friends. I now have a house in every village and town across the country.”

  After a silence, he said, “Everything is set for your event. It will take place in two days.”

  “But that’s not possible,” I said. “I don’t want to do public events. I am here to visit my family.”

  “It’s your family who wants you to do it,” Marwan put in, laughing.

  “Why don’t we have an evening here, something small, with other writers?” I suggested.

  “We have already printed posters,” Ahmed said. “The conference room in the library has been booked.”

  Marwan found the whole thing hilarious. “You are stuck,” he said as we walked away from Ahmed’s house. Then, with pride, he added, “Nothing ever happens here. But when it does, it happens at the speed of lightning. You can change the world in a day. It might take forty-two years for that day to come, but when it does…”

  12. Benghazi

  The following day I met more relations. It was odd to be with people I half remembered. At the least-expected moment, I would suddenly recognize the shape of a neck, an expression in the eyes, an intonation in the voice. Somebody would be telling an anecdote and midway through I would realize I had heard it before. It seemed as if everyone else’s development had been linear, allowed to progress naturally in the known environment, and therefore each of them seemed to have remained linked, even if begrudgingly or in disagreement, to the original setting-off point. At times I was experiencing a kind of distance-sickness, a state in which not only the ground was unsteady but also time and space. The only other individuals I met who seemed afflicted by a similar condition were ex-prisoners.

  I would never be part of anything. I would never really belong anywhere, and I knew it, and all my life would be the same, trying to belong, and failing. Always something would go wrong. I am a stranger and I always will be, and after all I didn’t really care.

  When I first read those lines by Jean Rhys, I thought, yes, and then almost immediately resented the connection I felt. This is why returning to that pre-life is like catching your reflection in a public place. Your first reaction, before you realize it is you, is suspicion. You lose your footing but just in time regain your balance. I realize now that my walks, whether taken to pass the time or to better acquaint myself with a foreign city, or conducted in a hurry—to post a letter, to catch a train or on the occasion I was late for an appointment—all took place under the vague suspicion that I might somehow come upon myself, that is to say, that other self who lives in harmony with his surroundings, who exists, like a chapter in a book, in the right place, not torn out and left to make sense on its own.

  All the tools I had to connect with my country belonged to the past. Rage, like a poisoned river, had been running through my life ever since we left Libya. It made itself into my anatomy, into the details. Grief as a virus. But now I could see the walls, so old I had never noticed them before, that stood between me and everyone I have ever known, every book and painting and symphony and work of art that had ever mattered to me, suddenly seeming impermanent. The freedom frightened me—because, after all, as a man, I felt made. I wandered through the streets of Benghazi. The city was always unenthusiastic about the Qaddafi regime, and it paid the price. The neglect here had an air of punishment about it. I left the waterfront and entered the maze of the old downtown, through Omar al-Mukhtar Street, under the shade of its colonnade, turning into narrow lanes that led to quiet, dead-end squares where, I imagined, even with the windows open at midday, one could feel calm enough to work. All along I was churned up by the new possibility of making this city my home. I was both thrilled and resistant. Perhaps my choice to enter Libya through Benghazi, I now thought, was not as accidental as I had assumed. Although we had lived in Tripoli and my mother was from Derna and my father from Ajdabiya, Benghazi, at le
ast today, seemed to belong to me alone. I met Diana at the Café Vittoria by the water. We relished the chance to be away from others. I secretly began to imagine us shipping our books and pictures and music here. Packing them all on a container headed for this city by the sea, a city made for things to arrive.

  Downtown Benghazi runs in an L-shape along the water. The longer stretch faces due north. The locals refer to this side as the Arabic Corniche. If the wind is good, you could be in Crete in a day. The square tower of the lighthouse is set peculiarly back, as if shy of the sea, or not shy at all but beckoning, daring the Mediterranean to come closer. Scattered about it are the remains of several buried cities: a Greek wall that dates back some 2,300 years, ruins from a Roman settlement, a Byzantine church, and, I am sure, if excavations were conducted, clues to Phoenician life would be found too. From here the living city begins, the houses and markets of the medieval Arabic city together with what the Ottomans added. But what dominates is the present, the low-rise concrete blocks with their antennae and satellite dishes. Benghazi, more than most cities, is a contested space, a city in the making, a city open to interpretation. A few months from now, that energy that was expressing itself in unbounded hope and optimism would turn darkly on itself, seeking expression in blood and carnage.

  Café Vittoria is on the other side of the L, what the old folk used to call the Lungomare—“seafront” in Italian—and now everyone refers to as the Italian Corniche. The café occupies the spot where Mussolini landed. Lest Il Duce’s eyes be offended, a great deal of trouble went into erasing any signs that this was an Arab and Muslim city. Not one Ottoman or Arab minaret, house, colonnade or dome could be seen from this angle. It was a feat of architectural camouflage. Indeed, the neoclassical buildings that line the seafront are so basic that they could almost be part of a film set, albeit an old and decrepit one now. Punctuating this Italian disguise is the Benghazi Cathedral, one of the largest Roman Catholic churches in North Africa. It hovers at the water’s edge, as though looking for direction, its twin domes naked of crosses.

  On the 7th of April 1977, as a response to the student union’s demand to protect the academy from growing political interference, two students, Omar Ali Dabboub and Mohammad bin Saud, were hanged in the gardens of the cathedral. On the 7th of April 1992, when I was an architecture student in London, and more out of boredom and curiosity than a conscious desire to commemorate the fifteenth anniversary of the event, I spent a few hours in the library, looking into the life of the architect who designed the cathedral. Guido Ferrazza, it turned out, had had an eventful life. He was born a long way away from Benghazi, in a small Alpine village near Trento. The name of the town is Bocenago, and, not long after that afternoon in my university library, I found myself wandering through the streets of Bocenago. Its population when I visited barely exceeded 300. Back in 1887, the year Guido Ferrazza was born, it was double that size. Mountains rose up around the town from all sides. The snow and rock and greenery made the sky seem unusually enormous and close. The sun was out. The light did not seem to shine down on the valley as much as pour in and fill it like liquid. As I walked through the village streets, all the buildings seemed empty. From here, Ferrazza went to university in Milan. He was obviously afflicted with restlessness. On graduating, he went abroad to Bulgaria, where he consulted on works on the St Alexander Nevsky Cathedral in Sofia, and then on to far-off Singapore and Bangkok, where he worked on the royal residence. He project-managed numerous construction sites in South America and seemed to be considering settling there. He worked on the parliament of Montevideo, a monumental structure designed by Vittorio Meano. I imagine Ferrazza saw a role model in Vittorio Meano. He was a generation older, had also come from a small village in the far north of Italy, and was now heading a successful architectural practice in Argentina. On completing the work in Montevideo, Ferrazza returned with his mentor to Buenos Aires. But a great misfortune was awaiting Vittorio Meano. On arriving home, he found his wife in bed with another man. Witnesses heard a gunshot, and then the voice of the architect shouting, “They murdered me!” Soon after this, Ferrazza returned to Italy.

  In 1927, when Ferrazza was forty, Attilio Teruzzi, the then governor of Cyrenaica, called him to prepare a new plan for Benghazi. Teruzzi was not an indifferent bureaucrat; in 1922, as one of the commanders of the Blackshirts, he had taken part in the Fascist’s March on Rome. Libya offered Ferrazza a golden opportunity to implement his ideas. It launched him as a major architect in the colonies. Under his supervision, Benghazi was to become a new Italian city. He moved there and began work immediately. The project kept him so busy that when, a couple of years later and on account of his success in Benghazi, he was asked to produce plans for the capital, Tripoli, he accepted but delegated the new commission to his partners. A few years later, in 1935, he moved to Eritrea, where he was appointed Chief Architect of Asmara. Later he would design entire districts of Harrar and Adis Ababa.

  But a unique architectural expression had occurred in Benghazi, or Bengasi Italiana, as the city’s Italian inhabitants—who numbered, in Ferrazza’s time, about one third of the population—referred to it then. Whereas the colonial architecture in Tripoli is sober and decidedly neoclassical—there are streets in Tripoli where you could very well be in Italy—in Benghazi you can always see the crossroads and the layers. The cocktail of influences—Arab, Ottoman, Italianate, European modernist—suits the relaxed, eclectic and rebellious nature of the city. But there is something else, a material that does not belong to any other culture or period. It is timeless and unique to Benghazi. It is perhaps the most important architectural material there is, more than stone. It is light. The Benghazi light is a material. You can almost feel its weight, the way it falls and holds its subject.

  Even from this distance, after all the neglect and poor planning that had followed, I could see what excitement men such as Ferrazza must have felt here: the superior optimism, at once reckless and misguided, that pulsed through him and his Milanese contemporaries as they paced up and down the Benghazi waterfront, turning Africa, as an Italian colonel in one of Alessandro Spina’s novels puts it, “into a bordello and offering her up to our young men, so that they may vent the entire spectrum of their human, heroic, sadistic and aesthetic emotions.”

  In July 1943, as Italy was being devastated in the war, Ferrazza showed a great instinct for self-preservation and moved to England. He joined the exiled resistance there. This is how, in 1945, when the Fascist regime disintegrated completely and Attilio Teruzzi—the man who had first brought Ferrazza to Benghazi—was fleeing south from the Partisans, Ferrazza was granted an honorable return to his country. For the next four years, he served on numerous committees charged with post-war reconstruction. In the spring of 1949, in a sudden yearning for adventure, or perhaps wanting to emulate his unfortunate mentor, Vittorio Meano, Ferrazza decided to emigrate to Argentina. There was no clear reason why, two years later, he returned to Milan. He lived a quiet retirement until, on the 1st of February 1961, perhaps out of nostalgia that in old age seemed inescapable, Guido Ferrazza boarded a train for Bocenago, his birthplace in the Alps. The carriage he was in derailed and crashed a few miles outside Milan. He was seventy-four.

  Sitting with Diana at Café Vittoria, where we had a good view of the water, the length of the corniche and the cathedral, I tried to imagine Guido Ferrazza’s face. As hard as I tried, I could not find a photograph of him in my university library. Perhaps my old theory that saw connections between the façades of buildings and the faces of their architects was not entirely ridiculous. Judging from the over-earnest symmetry of the Benghazi Cathedral, I pictured a face imprinted with a similar expression of uncertain confidence, unmoored by history and rather large and awkward, doing its best not to engage too much in introspection, peering instead into the distance with searching yet somewhat wary eyes.

  We drank our coffee and talked about living here part of the year. The light was slowly seeping out of the sky. The sea was
calm but not still. Its surface was mapped with current lines running in different directions, as faint as sleep marks on skin. I felt I was not observing but remembering, as if Diana and I had already lived here and were now returning in the same spirit in which we had visited other cities where we had once lived, standing together in front of a building we used to call home and feeling that odd sensation one feels when the changes in us are juxtaposed against the constancy of a familiar geography. In the background of these thoughts, I could detect an echo of an old power: that childhood conviction that the Libyan sea was an open door and that appetite for an authentic acquaintanceship with nature, which had become less consistent over the years, was returning now unhindered, renewed. I don’t mean a casual desire for travel, not a tourist’s curiosity for sites and landmarks and languages and new faces, but a precise and uncomplicated conviction that the world was available to me. But wasn’t this an odd thing to think now, now that I was finally home? Or is this what being home is like: home as a place from which the entire world is suddenly possible?

  The following morning, Maher Bushrayda, a cousin I had not seen or spoken to since I had left Libya as a child, dropped by. Maher is a generation older than me, and I only vaguely recall his visits to us in Tripoli. He seemed cool and mysterious to me then, probably because he was a member of the student union at Benghazi University. He took part in the demonstration in 1976. A year later, when Omar Ali Dabboub and Mohammad bin Saud, who were close friends of his, were hanged, Maher, along with several other students, was arrested and spent the years from 1977 to 1986 in prison. He was the first in our family to face the consequences of criticizing the dictatorship, and this, in the years after we left Libya, lent him, in my naïve teenage mind, a romantic mystique. We had met the day before, at a large family gathering, and set a time to speak privately. We had coffee in my hotel. He confirmed what he had told me yesterday, that he had joined the new secret service, which was, in his words, “scrambling to fill the gap.”