Hisham Matar

This one could rob me of a skill that I have worked hard to cultivate: how to live away from places and people I love.

They were artists who never returned. Each had tried, in his own way, to cure himself of his country. What you have left behind has dissolved. Return and you will face the absence or the defacement of what you treasured. But Dmitri Shostakovich and Boris Pasternak and Naguib Mahfouz were also right: never leave the homeland. Leave and your connections to the source will be severed. You will be like a dead trunk, hard and hollow.

What do you do when you cannot leave and cannot return?

That I should move to Manhattan in my fortieth year, as Libya was ripping itself apart, and for this to take place on the 1st of September, the day when, back in 1969, a young captain named Muammar Qaddafi deposed King Idris and many of the significant features of my life—where I live, the language in which I write, the language I am using now to write this—were set in motion: all this made it difficult to escape the idea that there was some kind of divine will at work.

Encountering our dialect during those years was always disconcerting, provoking in me, and with equal force, both fear and longing.

I couldn’t imagine kissing a mouth that had never spoken my real name.

That special thing, when a friendship comes to resemble a shelter, began to occur between Hamza and me.

Green sprouting, thinly covering hills. And, suddenly, my childhood sea. How often exiles romanticize the landscape of the homeland. I have cautioned myself against that. Nothing used to irritate me more than a Libyan waxing lyrical about “our sea,” “our land,” “the breeze of the homeland.” Privately, though, I continued to believe that the light back home was unmatched. I continued to think of every sea, no matter how beautiful, as an imposter. Now, catching these first glimpses of the country, I thought that, if anything, it was more luminous than I remembered.

I knew that his love for me was uncomplicated and unequivocal, and knowing this felt like a great freedom.