On Friendship

I have been reading Hisham Matar's excellent book, "My Friends." It is a novel about Khaled, a Libyan exile living in London, and his close friendships with Hosam and Mustafa. The story spans thirty years, exploring themes of exile, identity, and the lasting impact of political upheaval under Qaddafi’s regime. The book pulls no punches. It exposes the ruthless deadliness of Gaddafi's dictatorship in Libya, and its murderous determination to eliminate opposition to its rule. All three friends are deeply scarred by exile. It is a running sore they have to live with. Khaled and Hosam attended almost as an afterthought the demonstration outside the Libyan embassy on 17th April 1984 in which Police Constable Yvonne Fletcher was shot and killed by gunmen wielding machine guns from inside the embassy. and eleven Libyan demonstrators wounded. In the novel Khaled is shot through the lung and nearly dies, and Hosam is wounded. Khaled spends three months in hospital, and could he share what had happened to him with his Libyan family.

The novel explores the memories and experiences and the enduring resilience, but also the fragility of friendship, the pain of separation from one’s homeland, and the struggle to maintain hope and connection in the face of loss and change. The novel has moved me enormously.

Matar himself has lived for over thirty years as a reluctant exile from Muammar Gaddafi's brutal and totalitarian Libya. He has made a home, albeit reluctantly, of living as an exile who could never return, in London. In the novel, Matar meticulously examines the impact of this catastrophe through the lens of the three friends, presenting it in short, medium, and long-term perspectives. He has a very distinctive way with words, not flamboyantly eloquent, but almost documentary in approach. It is an extremely well-constructed novel. It is framed by one night-long walk across London (November 2016) after Khaled sees Hosam off from St Pancras station. Hosam eventually chooses the greater challenge of leaving London in 2011 to return to Libya. He falls in love, marries and has children, but becomes disenchanted and eventually emigrates again.

The above photo is taken from the mezzanine at St Pancras and must have been from where Khaled would have seen his friend depart. The long walk home through London, beginning with Khaled saying goodbye to Hosam, from St Pancras Station to return to Libya, serves as a framing device, through which decades of memories of the three friends are linked. Time loops and returns, allowing the same episodes to be revisited at greater depth. The book reads as if it were an autobiography, and in a way, it is. It seems to me that Khaled shares many of Matar's intelligence and visual acuity, and it is through Khaled's eyes that the novel unfolds. I discovered that what Khaled loves about London, I do too!. I found that one of his favourite paintings, Hans Memling's Young Man at Prayer, is in an adjacent room to one of my favourite paintings, Jan Arnolfini and his wife.

I also discovered new things I didn't know about. In Chapter 8, he mentions the Camberwell New Church, which I was not aware of. He says: "I reach the four caryatids, strong women who are carrying on their heads the roof of the porch of the St Pancras New Church, maidens from the ancient Greek town of Karyai, followers of Artemis, each with a kink in her hip. On one hand, they are clutching an extinguished torch, and in the other, a jug. Their large eyes, smooth as eggshells, stare down blankly at me. I must keep moving. To live is to act. " I had never heard of the Camberwell New Church, so I followed his steps from St Pancras Station until  I reached St Pancras New Church. I discovered that it wasn't that new, built in 1819-22 in the Greek Revival style. I took photos of the four caryatids, which were visible through the railings that guard the church from Euston Road. I hadn't heard of the four Caryatids either, so in one page, Khaled (Matar) taught me a lot about the city I thought I had known all my life! The statues are inspired by those of the Acropolis in Athens

The sculptures below are carved along one side of the St Pancras New Church, inspired by the four Caryatids on the Acropolis above. I learned that the Erechtheion on the Acropolis in Athens was dedicated to the Goddess Athena, symbolising the enduring strength and grace of the feminine. They embody the idealised form of femininity in ancient Greek culture and legend. They are mythical representations of the feminine. They also represent enormous strength and endurance as they support the entablature of the south porch of the temple, a huge burden and weight that they carry with strength, beauty and grace.

The inside of the St Pancras New church is just as beautiful.

The three friends have different narrative arcs. Khaled, wounded in the lungs by the Libyan Embassy shootings in April 1984, stays on in London under a false name, becomes a quiet, dutiful school teacher, living a modest, uneventful life in London, His friend Hosam becomes a writer whose disquieting short story the Given and the Taken, is read out on the BBC World Radio by Mustafa. Hosam's short story is a chilling allegory of Libyan tyranny under Gaddafi. Mustafa after recovering from his own injuries in the siege of the Libyan embassy in 1984, becomes an estate agent in London, returns to Libya during the Arab Spring of 20111, and joins the militia against Gaddafi.

Khaled writes movingly about the Arab Spring of 2011 " Over the next few days I held on silently to my hopes, observing every turn of events. Cairo's Tahir Square was packed with protestors and it looked there was no way that the tide could be turned....I burned with hope; hope and fear and a violent impatience. I tried to keep it at bay during the day, but gave into it entirely at night. It had a name, the Arab Spring, a temporary state but one which knew no bounds or borders, a condition as much for the heart as it was for parliament, and one belonging to nature, to the eternal cycle of the seasons, confirming what I already have secretly believed; that as sure as blossom, freedom would come, and even though winter is just as certain, it can never last" Finally the revolution turned to Libya.

Gaddafi was killed while desperately hiding in a drainpipe

Matar doesnt say much specific about Ghaddifi's fall in the novel, but the following year he did return himself in a reflective piece called The Return. In it he shares his impressions of life in Libya after Ghaddifi's fall. He reflects: 'The streets were still buzzing with celebration' but that beneath the celebration there was a sense of unease.People were trying to speak freely after decades of censorship.He records conversations where Libyans almost whispered at first, as though still terrified of being spied upon, then laughed in disbelief of their own apparent freedom. He observed the presence of militias everywhere (in the novel, Mustafa had been in one of them). There was a sense of uneasy gratitude towards them, mixed with a fear of what they might become, since there was no accountability, no 'rule of law'. He writes about walking the streets that felt both familiar and alien. There were gaps in his own memory. Everywhere there was a sense of loss, where places he remembered from his childhood had been destroyed or fundamentally altered. There was also a personal sense of loss in the disappearance of his own father. The truth is, a dictatorship knows no boundaries, no family escapes pain and loss, losses which have repercussions for decades. This is what Matar evokes so memorably in My Friends.