by Hisham Matar
Almost immediately after the Italians arrived, a local leader emerged. Omar al-Mukhtar, the man we grew up referring to affectionately as Sidi Omar, was part of the Senussi order, a mystical religious family that ran schools and charities from Cyrenaica in the north-east of the country all the way west into Algeria and further south into sub-Saharan Africa. Its patriarch, Idris, was to become king and Libya’s first head of state after independence. Despite having very few resources, Omar al-Mukhtar led Libya’s tribesmen on horseback in what became a very effective campaign. But after the Fascists marched on Rome in 1922 and Benito Mussolini seized power, the destruction and slaughter took on a massive scale. Airpower was employed to gas and bomb villages. The policy was that of depopulation. History remembers Mussolini as the buffoonish Fascist, the ineffective silly man of Italy who led a lame military campaign in the Second World War, but in Libya he oversaw a campaign of genocide.
The tribal population was marched on foot to several concentration camps across the country. Every family lost members in these camps. Several of my forebears died there. Stories of torture, humiliation and famine have filtered down through the generations. The Danish journalist Knud Holmboe, who was traveling through Libya at the time, is the only Western reporter I know of to have visited the camps. His book, Desert Encounter: An Adventurous Journey through Italian Africa, is a deeply troubling account and a rare document. His Italian host, an army officer, brings him to one of the camps:
The camp was immense. It contained at least fifteen hundred tents and had a population of six to eight thousand people. It was fenced in with barbed wire, and there were guards with machine-guns at every entrance. As we drove up among the tents children came running towards us. They were in rags and hungry, half-starved, but evidently they were accustomed to getting money from the Commandant on his visits, for they stretched out their hands and shouted in Italian: “Un soldo, signore, un soldo!”…The Bedouins gathered round us. They looked incredibly ragged. On their feet were hides tied with string; their burnouses were a patchwork of all kinds of multi-coloured pieces. Many of them seemed ill and wretched, limping along with crooked backs, or with arms and legs that were terribly deformed.
Holmboe is outraged, but he tries to keep his opinions to himself lest he lose the access his Italian hosts have granted him. But in a moment in the camp, when no one can hear, he speaks to an internee in his perfect Arabic:
I asked one of the Bedouins:
“Where is Ahmar Moktar [Omar al-Mukhtar]?”
The Bedouin showed his white teeth in a smile.
“Ahmar Moktar,” he said, making a sweeping gesture towards the mountains with his arms, “is everywhere in the mountains and the valleys.”
The book infuriated the Italians. They banned it and arrested its author. A few months after Holmboe’s release, the Dane was found south of Aqaba, in Jordan, murdered. Suspicions that Italian intelligence assassinated him remain.
It is not clear how many perished in the camps. Official Italian census records show that the population of Cyrenaica plummeted from 225,000 to 142,000. The orphans, numbering in the thousands, were sent to Fascist camps to be “reeducated.” Brand-new planes machine-gunned herds of livestock. An Italian general boasted that between 1930 and 1931 the army reduced the number of sheep and goats from 270,000 to 67,000. As a consequence, many people starved to death.
The Libyan poet Rajab Abuhweish, who was a scholar and a teacher and later served as a jurist in Algeria and Chad, returned home to Libya in 1911 to join the resistance. When the Italians attacked his village, they burnt down the houses and poured concrete in the well. They marched him and his family, along with the rest of the villagers, 400 kilometres to the infamous El-Agheila concentration camp. Being forbidden pens and paper, he composed a thirty-stanza-long poem that he committed to memory. It was memorized by others and that way spread across the country. It so fortified the spirit of resistance that when the Italians uncovered the identity of its author they whipped him. The poem is called “I Have No Illness But.” It opens:
I have no illness but El-Agheila Camp,
the imprisonment of the tribe
and being cut off from the open country.
I have no illness but this endless despair,
the scarcity of things and the loss of my red mare,
its forelegs black to the hoofs.
When disaster struck
she galloped, stretching her long neck
with incomparable beauty.
Rajab Abuhweish’s poem was one of the first I ever encountered. It was taught at school as part of the story of Libya’s struggle for independence. It had such an impact on me. The twenty-third stanza in particular, and its image of the aged child, haunted me when I was a boy:
I have no illness but the loss of noble folk
and the foul ones who now,
with calamitous, shameless faces, govern us.
How many a child have they taken and whipped?
The poor young flowers return confused,
made old without having lived.
After independence, Rajab Abuhweish returned to teaching and served as an adviser to King Idris’s senate. He died in 1952.
—
Grandfather Hamed had also joined the resistance in the east of the country, under the leadership of Omar al-Mukhtar, immediately after the 1911 invasion. But then eight years later, in 1919, he suddenly and in great haste took his young family and escaped to Alexandria. This puzzled me, because Libyans who fought under Omar al-Mukhtar and who, like Grandfather Hamed, had some private means—in his case, land—to fund their move did not begin to emigrate to Egypt for another twelve years. To be precise, it wasn’t until September 11, 1931, that the resistance received its mortal blow. Omar al-Mukhtar, who was by then seventy-three years old, was wounded in a rapid retreat and fell off his horse. Five days later, and after a show trial, the great man was hanged on the outskirts of Benghazi. Just as the Qaddafi regime did half a century later, when traffic was diverted so that commuters were obliged to witness the bodies of the students dangling in the garden of the Benghazi Cathedral, the Italian colonial administration made sure that Sidi Omar’s execution was attended by as large a number of Libyans as possible. It broke the spirit of the country. Over the next two years the resistance, a formidable force that had inspired several independence movements around the world, disintegrated. It was then that many of its members fled to Alexandria. A generation later, my father, having observed how Qaddafi’s dictatorship had decimated the opposition, also immigrated to neighboring Egypt in the hope of rebuilding dissent from abroad. But what on earth drove Grandfather Hamed to leave in a hurry in 1919, when the Libyan tribesmen on horseback, armed with old Ottoman rifles and what they could capture from the enemy, seemed close to defeating a European power?
One explanation—told in different versions, depending on who is telling the story—is that one night, shortly before Grandfather Hamed fled to Alexandria, he hid behind a street corner in downtown Benghazi. A high-ranking Italian officer had popped out in the late hours for a stroll and to catch the bakery before it closed. He walked home clutching the sack of bread in one hand and nibbling an end of a baguette with the other. Grandfather Hamed pulled the officer into the shadows and stabbed him in the neck. A few days later he was in Alexandria.
I find it difficult to believe the attack was random, responding to an opportunity to hurt the enemy or provoked by hunger. In the resistance, Grandfather Hamed was known for being a good shot, an excellent rider and an effective strategist who rarely took unnecessary risks. The war was fought in battles away from heavily populated centers. Omar al-Mukhtar’s men were determined not to descend to the tactics of the enemy and target women, children or the civilian population. They did not operate in towns and cities. When they ambushed, they ambushed military columns and garrisons, not an officer walking home from the bakery. This increases the credibility of some of the other accounts of the story, which claim that Gr
andfather Hamed did not kill the Italian for bread but rather to settle a score with that particular man, whom he had been stalking for days. Perhaps, like the family in Father’s story “In the Stillness of the Night,” Grandfather Hamed’s family and livestock had been attacked by Italian troops and perhaps it had not ended as well for them as it had for Ahmed, his uncle and cousin Aisha. I suspect others knew of the enmity and therefore might have been able to deduce who killed the Italian, which would explain why Grandfather Hamed felt it necessary to quickly leave Libya, the country he nearly died defending, and take his family with him.
But, of course, this whole story may not be true. He may not have killed the officer, and moved simply because he had had enough of the war and wanted to bring up his young family in peace and in the cultured city of great opportunities that Alexandria was in those days. Whatever the reason, he settled in Alexandria and remained there for the next twenty years. Having shown no particular interest in business up until then, he became a successful tradesman and owned a large house in one of the best neighborhoods. It was said that when the rings around the eyelets of his handmade leather boots wore away, he had them replaced in platinum in the hope that he would not have to return to the cobbler. But then at the height of his success in the early 1930s, after the execution of Sidi Omar, when the noose was tightening, Grandfather Hamed, like his son many years later, was arrested in Egypt. He was handed over to the Italian authorities and sent to Italy. The record is not clear whether he went to Bologna or Padua. Whenever the colonial authorities took a member of the Libyan resistance to Italy, it meant only one thing: execution. And the bodies of the deceased were never returned to the families. The day after my grandfather was taken, droves of people came to the house to offer their condolences. My grandmother put on her black clothes, rented a couple of hundred chairs and hired a graduate from Al-Azhar University, who, over the next three days, sat cross-legged in the main hall and recited the entire Quran.
What no one knew was that a few days into his captivity, Grandfather Hamed escaped, made his way to the nearest port and persuaded a fisherman to take him to a ship that had just set off for Alexandria. The fisherman’s boat edged close to the rear steps. Grandfather Hamed climbed in unnoticed. He hid in the engine room. When night fell, he rummaged in the bins for leftovers. A few days later, the ship docked in Alexandria. Several weeks after Grandfather Hamed’s capture and after all the mourners had returned to their homes, my grandmother was woken up in the middle of the night by heavy knocking at the door. She was frightened, but when she opened the door she nearly fainted. She kept squeezing her husband’s hand to make sure he was not a ghost. He closed his business and in a few days the family was back in Libya. I found the story puzzling. Why did he return so quickly and place himself in even more danger?
I recently contacted the historian Nicola Labanca, an authority on the Italian colonial period in Libya. I was hoping he could direct me to an archive where I might find a record of Grandfather’s arrest. Labanca said there was no such archive, that the Italians then kept few records, most of which were destroyed during the war. I was back in that familiar place, a place of shadows where the only way to engage with what happened is through the imagination, an activity that serves only to excite the past, multiplying its possibilities, like a house with endless rooms, inescapable and haunted. According to Labanca, who kindly indulged my questions, it would have been highly unlikely that my grandfather was taken to Italy for trial. “The Libyans,” he said, “who were brought to Italy were brought here for two things and two things only: to be tortured for information and then killed. There was no trial for Libyans.” On the other hand, the timing of his return to Libya made sense. In the years after the execution of Omar al-Mukhtar, Mussolini was very keen on bringing wealthy Libyans living abroad back to Libya. He wanted to do this for two reasons: to help the economy, particularly that of Cyrenaica, which had suffered most during the later years of the fighting; and to have such dangerous men, who were probably pouring money into efforts to re-establish the resistance, back in the country, where they could be monitored. This, Labanca said, would better explain why my grandfather returned. “He couldn’t have escaped,” Labanca said. “He was probably confronted with the two stark choices the Italian authorities gave wealthy Libyans living in exile: die or return to Libya.”
—
When my grandmother passed away, Father, in Cairo and unable to attend the funeral, grew quiet. For several days he became terribly distant, as though grief were a far-away country. When several years later Grandfather Hamed died, my father fell into an even deeper despair, although Grandfather had been extremely old and it was expected.
It was late in 1989. Ziad and I were at university in London, and our parents were visiting. Mother, with her usual anxiety about breaking bad news, told me in the morning, after I had caught her crying, that Grandfather Hamed was unwell.
“He might not make it,” she said.
I headed to class but turned back when I remembered how, when I was seven, my mother came to find me in our garden at the back of our house in Tripoli and said the same thing about her father. He would die later that day.
Ziad, Mother and I waited for Father to return from his morning errands. Mother sat him down and tried, as gently as she could, to hand him the bad news. She and Ziad were visibly moved, but I remember only being terrified. Without saying a word, Father stood up and went to his room. We followed him. He sat on the edge of the bed and covered his face. I had never seen him cry before. He kept his palms pressed tightly to his face. I could hear a low howl, as though he were screaming from a long way away.
A few months later my father disappeared.
Those two events—the death of Grandfather Hamed and Father falling into the abyss of Qaddafi’s dungeons—are connected in my mind also because, in the days that followed my grandfather’s death, a new desperation took hold of my father. I recall thinking, whenever I would catch him sitting alone, there is a terribly impatient man. I detected it too in the occasional photograph Mother included with her letters, showing him alone or the two of them standing side by side. I found this new idea of his impatience peculiar. My father had always been the very expression of patience. Whenever I showed frustration, he would say that word, “Patience,” as though it were a vow, and then add the nickname he had fashioned for me, “Sharh el-Bal,” “The Soother of Mind”; the name was no doubt intended to help me cure myself of my own impatience. He would often quote the twice-repeated line from the chapter “Soothing” in the Quran: “With hardship comes ease. With hardship comes ease.” But the death of Grandfather Hamed disturbed him, and disturbed him, as it turned out, irrevocably. He lost his way. He became less careful.
Three years after his abduction—three years of utter silence—an audio-cassette letter reached us, with his voice recorded over a recital of the Quran that the prisoners had been given. After forty minutes of poised speech, after he had said goodbye and therefore could have pressed the “stop” button, I heard it come as though from within me, that same soft howl again, this time from an even deeper well. For a reason I will never know, he chose not to erase it. He wanted us to hear it.
—
Shortly before he disappeared, my father had confided in me a secret. In the years following my grandmother’s death, Father, on more than one occasion, would dress as an Egyptian farmer and, bearing a fake passport, slip through the Egyptian–Libyan border. He would make his way to Ajdabiya to see his father.
“Brief nocturnal visits that rarely lasted more than an hour or two,” Father told me.
We were both lying on my narrow bed in London, facing each other. Out of respect, I had my feet bent away from him, but his were right beside me, so I could press my thumbs into the soles with the strength I knew he liked.
“Was he surprised to see you?” I asked.
“No, somehow he always expected it,” my father said.
They would sit in the corner of Gra
ndfather’s large room, whispering in the dark, before Father would kiss his father’s hand and forehead and begin the dangerous long journey back.
“You didn’t see your brothers and sisters?” I asked.
“Too dangerous,” he said.
My father too had a father who knew how to keep a secret.
All in all, Father told me, he had done this “about” three times.
“Reckless,” I said.
“Now that he’s gone,” he said to reassure me, “there’s no need to worry.”
And now, after a quarter of a century of not seeing my father, I would take the same risks to see him, even if for an hour or two.