The song of the desert is not chained. With the defeat and death of the tyrant Muammar Gaddafi, Libyan writers welcome a new era. For the first time, they can bare their souls without a dictator or occupying power looming over their thoughts. Until the fall of Gaddafi, exile was a necessary condition for novels, poems, or simply statements against the nation’s chronic problems, such as women’s rights, poverty, tribal friction, and individual freedom.
Anguish has been the theme of Libyan writers ever since Adam was expelled from nearby Eden. When the land became a colony of ancient Greece (around 300 BC), Callimachus recorded the excesses of imperialism in what is now Benghazi. Then came the Roman, Turkish, Italian, French and British invaders. Authors in Libya have never been free.
After the revolution that has now deposed and assassinated Gaddafi, the dream of literary freedom has finally arrived. It has been a long and cruel wait through the many torments of history.
Colonel Gaddafi, as a young soldier, himself wrote poetry and stories that dreamed of civil freedom. After independence from Britain in 1951, he led a military coup against Libya’s autocratic monarchy when King Idris was abroad for medical treatment. Gaddafi’s writings later became an illusory social theory, The Third Way, a middle ground between communism and capitalism. It was an inspired political vision, but in practice it degenerated into despotism. And Libyan literature kept the pain from him.
The writers were censored. Dissent was not only discouraged but punished with jail, torture and worse. In one infamous case in 2005, author and journalist Daif Al Ghazal wrote articles critical of Gaddafi’s system of government. He was tortured and then killed. and his body dumped in Benghazi. Many other writers lived in fear, careful in what or how they expressed their inner thoughts. These included several talented scribes including Kahled Darwish, Wejdan Ali, Mohamed al-Asfar, Ramez Enwesri, Saleh Gaderboh, Wafa al-Buissa, and others. It seemed that being creative without fear was only possible by living abroad. And this tended to limit their problems to the political.
A recent notable novel, In The Country Of Men (Penguin) by Hisham Matar, was shortlisted, in translation, for the 2006 Booker Prize. In 2007 it won a Commonwealth Writers Award and many other awards. It is about a 9-year-old boy experiencing Gaddafi’s oppression and begins like this: “I remember now last summer before I was expelled. It was 1979, and the sun was everywhere. Tripoli lay bright and still below.”
On state television under Gaddafi, young Suleiman watches the execution of his best friend’s father. The road to adulthood is fraught with despair. Matar’s second novel, Anatomy Of A Disappearance, was published this year, 2011, in March. He lives in London.
Well-known earlier Libyan authors in English include (according to Wikipedia) Maryam Ahmed Salama (Dreams of a Captive Girl), Ibrahim Al-Kouni, Ahmad Al-Faqih, and Sadeq al-Neihum. To which I would add Bashir al-Hashmi (Screams In Our Village), included in Libyan Stories (Kegan Paul International, 2000).
Literature, like religion, thrives on slavery. It also echoes history. “It is a whole checkerboard of nights and days where Destiny plays with men by pieces” (Omar Khayyam). During the coming months and years, the Libyan revolution still has a long way to go. What will evolve as your new system of government? How will jealousy mix between factions of tribes and religious sects?
These are complex human issues that will add impetus to Libya’s writing. However, with the authors finally unchained, it is to be hoped that her novels and her thought-provoking pieces will emerge from tales of anguish and hope to literary chimes of joy.
Happy reading! By Cathy Macleod at Booktaste.