2024 in one book: My Friends by Hisham Matar
In a year that felt at times turbulent, I found solace in books: dependable companions that feed our minds and nourish our souls. I’ve always been an avid reader and an admirer of literature, save for extremely busy years on university campuses (the irony does not escape me here!). But especially this past year, one of professional and personal transitions, I turned to books to defuse stress, tame my solitude, and try to understand the world. I am almost exclusively a fiction reader because I am interested in people and their psychology: anything and everything that makes up and explains the human condition. To me, fiction writers are the geniuses of our times, able to expertly craft personas and develop multi-dimensional characters with precision and detail. I also find myself drawn to literature that transcends its plot and attempts to say something bigger about its setting: political novels, tales of immigration, stories about morality, power dynamics, etc.
Of all the books I read this year, one stood out and touched me deeply: My Friends by Hisham Matar, a meditative novel that felt like a long Umm Kulthum song (the cynical, not the romantic type). The book’s themes are expansive, spanning the political (authoritarianism, exile), the personal (emotional growth, family, friends), the philosophical (the idea of the homeland, individual agency), and the aesthetic (poetry, art, London).
The novel recounts the story of Khaled, a young Libyan student whose fatal sin was to attend a protest against the Gaddafi regime by the Libyan Embassy in London. While the demonstration is peaceful, the student protestors are suddenly shot at (a true event that occurred in 1984). From that moment on, Khaled is unable to return to Libya, nor is he able to resume his life at the university. He lives in constant fear, terrified that he would be discovered as a dissident and that his family would be in danger because of it. But Khaled did not even choose a life of dissent. His was a miscalculated risk born of youthful naivete and peer pressure.
Following the protest, Khaled becomes suspicious of his surroundings, using a pseudonym and applying for asylum, the spectre of a vindictive regime cast upon him for his entire life. He writes to his family in coded language and feels that he is followed at all times. While I grew up in a country free of severe punishment for reasonable dissent, I inherited the memory of the brutal Arab regimes of the twentieth century, and was taught to be careful with what I said lest someone happened to be listening. I suspect this book would resonate with Arabs from the Atlantic Ocean to the Persian Gulf, regardless of the degree of authoritarianism in each of these countries. “To be from countries like ours … is to continually feel obliged to explain them” says Khaled’s Lebanese friend Rana, echoing feelings of inadequacy layered with a subconscious plea to be accepted and assimilated into the host country, often a Western one.
For all his years living in London, Khaled yearns for home and struggles to build one in London, wondering if “it was possible to live a happy life away from home, without one’s family” and if anyone had done it. This exact question, one I have asked myself many times, is perhaps at the core of my fascination with this book. While Khaled’s exile is exacted, mine is completely voluntary, and I sometimes wonder if and when the price becomes all too high. Towards the end of the book, events in Khaled’s life leave him “with the conviction that no one should ever leave their home. That no matter what happens to you when you are at home happens to you at home.”
The book is as concerned with emotional wounds as it is with physical ones, evident in Khaled’s inability to articulate his emotions, his fear of intimacy and his aversion to romantic attachment. Early in the book, as he readies to leave Libya, his mother and sister both cry as they say goodbye to him. He does too, but only behind the closed bathroom door, while his father does not speak for a few days. Later, after he was shot, Khaled is convinced that for him, “crying is not an option. That is one thing that is certain.” Khaled’s inability to freely cry reminded me of society’s conditioning of men to not show vulnerability or emotion. In my tears I have often found a certain comfort and a release to my distress, and it saddens me to imagine that they are not as easily accessible to half of humanity.
When Khaled meets and connects with Seham, he is overcome with joy and feels that he could have any life he wants. Yet he “did not know that joy could be so painful.” When she attempts to deepen their connection, he promptly does not “lend” himself and “did not know how to backtrack, make myself available again, and it was a door closing inside me.” Later, well into his adult life, he meets the love of his life, Hannah, and opens up to her about his hurt to the point that he “glimpsed it, the possibility of being free, the work it would take, the turns and conversations and confessions and time.” Yet Khaled never fully commits to Hannah, who blames him for being “constantly at the threshold.” She leaves him and builds a life with someone else.
Above all, this book explores the idea of friendships, the people who help us fill the emotional void of living abroad, away from our families. In Matar’s words, the novel is about “the emotional country that certain deep friendships can come to resemble” in exile. Khaled’s two closest friendships, with fellow Libyans Mostafa and Hosam, bring support, cheer, and a sense of home. They drift apart at times, yet they remain steadfast in their commitment to each other, understanding deeply that to be Libyan in exile means to live a life of painful courage and longing. As the Libyan revolution rages on in 2011, Mostafa and Hosam return and take up arms to fight the regime, yet Khaled prefers to remain in London, perhaps because he considers his mere existence to be political enough.
Having left home fifteen years ago, I have also relied on close friendships to build community and discern some sense of purpose. And while my existence is not necessarily political (it’s not apolitical either), this book cemented my belief that no, a homeland is not just about land and blood. It can also be about emotional connections we build with people whose paths we cross and whose lives we choose to weave with ours. In the wise and timeless words of James Baldwin: “Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.” To me, this condition is human connection.
For all its melancholy and sad boy energy, My Friends is not without hope. Three decades after the tragic event at the Embassy, the Gaddafi regime eventually falls, confirming Khaled’s deeply-held belief that “as sure as blossom, freedom would come, and even though winter is just as certain, it can never last.” At last, Khaled and his friends have the option to return to their motherland unburdened and unafraid. Khaled also reconnects with Hannah, who is divorced and has two kids. A regretful Khaled wants to “get it right this time,” and I got the fairytale ending I needed to wrap up this wonderful and wondrous read.
When I finished this book in February 2024, I wrote in ink on the first page: This book is poetry, a song to my heart. It is only apt that I close this year with a review of it.
