The Libyan poet Khaled Mattawa and I
agreed to meet by the Arch of Marcus Aurelius, in the heart of Tripoli.
I was there a few minutes early and walked toward the familiar
structure in that invisible atmosphere that surrounds us when we find
ourselves in a place that has meant a great deal but from which we had
been separated. I had not been back to the city of my childhood in over
three decades. I left a boy; returned a man.
The
sun was sharp. The shade beneath the stone arch was as physical and
reliable as a lake. The structure was built some 1,850 years ago, a year
or two after Aurelius came to power. I remembered the opening lines
from one of Khaled Mattawa’s poems—“East of Carthage: An Idyll”—when he
addresses the Roman emperor:
I had first encountered the poet’s work more than a decade before. I got hold of his book Ismailia Eclipse.
I was living in a tiny house in the English market town of Bedford.
There was a river nearby—the River Great Ouse—and although the sun was
hidden that day, it occasionally found a gap in the clouds. I wanted to
be outside. But I could not leave my bed: a thin mattress on the bare
wood floor beneath a large window that looked out onto an unkempt
garden. I remember the emptiness of that morning: emptiness and these
precious poems that alighted on delicate moments and gestures,
unutterable shifts in private lives.
I remained there until lunch. I read Ismailia Eclipse
cover to cover twice. There was a strangely familiar quality to the
poems, as if they had been written by a sibling soul enduring similar
burdens: exile (from country, family, and language); the need to take
account of history, to attend to the merciless present; and, most of
all, an ardent, humanist commitment to guard the spirit of the artist
and the life of the mind from the usual urgencies: politics, money, and
fear.
We
read to discover the world—that is perhaps true—but we also read to
encounter ourselves. And that Sunday I felt the world had been nudged a
little by these poems, or had expanded ever so slightly that when I
eventually did leave the house, I felt remembered. Someone had
acknowledged my existence.
History
can accuse Col. Muammar Gaddafi’s regime of a multitude of sins;
indifference to literature is not one of them. The late Libyan dictator
and his security apparatus had a deadly interest in writers. It regarded
them with the superstitious anxiety a child might have for ghosts. Made
up of loyal allies and family members, the organ of the Gaddafi regime
grew, over the 42 years of the colonel’s rule, like a thorny bush
winding up the trunk of a tree. It protected, but also isolated the
leader. It acted upon his wishes, but also in anticipation of them. As a
writer, you could never be certain whether something you had written
was not going to offend the leader himself or one of his eager servants.
There was plenty of evidence to support the paranoia. Writers had been
imprisoned and killed, and often not for a clear reason. What was
certain was that, notwithstanding the dictatorship’s low opinion of the
high arts, the regime devoted serious resources and attention in
co-opting or else silencing certain writers. And it did so with
extraordinary success. At the expense of authentic artistic life, it
created a poisonous atmosphere that reached you no matter where you
lived, found you in your rooms even in Bedford, inviting you always to
subservience or else to obsessive, rage-filled opposition. To resist
both, you had to cut yourself off.
That same day that I read Ismailia Eclipse,
I sat down and wrote Khaled Mattawa a letter. We met for the first time
two years later, and continued to see each other wherever and whenever
we could: in London, where I was living by then; in Ann Arbor, where
Khaled is an English professor at the University of Michigan; at
literary festivals in foreign cities; snatching walks, talking about our
two obsessions: literature and Libya.
the daily beast
the daily beast
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