Review: In the Country of Men by Hisham Matar

By Steven Carter

Hisham Matar's debut novel, "In The Country of Men," is the powerful, emotionally-wrenching story of a nine year old boy coming to terms with life in an unjust, intolerable world. Most of the story is set in Libya in 1979, ten years after Muamar Abu Minyar al-Gaddafi staged a coup d'etat against the then king, effectively becoming the nation's dictator. He is referred to throughout as 'the guide' or 'el-Fateh', and though he is never seen in person, his presence is always felt. Many of his people have learned to live in fear of him, cowering in his shadow so they will not be 'put behind the sun' (as one character says, referring to the Revolutionary Committee's vicious and inhumane treatment of dissenters). The novel was a huge success, being short-listed for the Man Booker prize, and has already been translated into 22 languages.

One can't help but love the narrator, Suleiman el Dawani, the young boy desperately trying to cope with the madness all around him. His father leads a group of political dissidents, whose main activity is distributing pamphlets on democracy to the neighbor's doorsteps at night. In this cruel world, an action as innocent as this is punishable by a public execution, which is turned into a spectacle in the nation's basketball stadium, where the crowd roars with fervor when a man is gently nudged up the ladder into a noose. Suleiman sees his best friend's father (who is also his father's best friend), a professor of art history at the university in Tripoli, dragged out of his house by the Revolutionary Committee and taken away without any explanation, any justification. Suleiman, the boy, is powerless in this "world full of men and the greed of men."

All seem powerless in this country of men, but the women most of all. Being an only child, Suleiman spends much of his time with his mother, who is always 'ill' (with worry and illegal alcohol) when her husband is away. His mother, Najwa (whose name is rarely spoken), was forced to marry his father at the age of 14, when she was just a little girl and he, already an 'ugly' man. She was seen holding hands with a boy in a café, and this crime sentenced her to a life-long punishment. On the night of her wedding, she saw her father stuff a pistol down his pants, and later learned that he had said "blood is going to be spilled either way." If she had not been pure, her own father would have taken her life.

Matar's portrayal of women (in a country controlled by man's evil) is elegant, beautiful, and almost tear-inducing at times. Najwa is a noble, but powerless woman, who is forced to choose slavery over death like her son's heroine Scheherazade, who told the stories of "A Thousand and One Nights', stories even her illiterate mother had memorized. Suleiman "had always thought Scheherazade a brave woman who had gained her freedom through inventing tales," but his mother tells him (while 'ill') "Your heroine's boldness was to ask to be allowed to … live… not because she had as much right to live as he (the king), but because if he were to kill her his sons would live 'motherless'… Stupid harlot," she continues. "My guess: five, maybe ten years at the most before she got the sword."

Suleiman is too young and still too innocent to understand his mother's anger, and can't understand why she seems so miserable. This drives him to anger throughout the book. He wants to be his mother's prince, to rescue her from the deserts of Libya and the "occasional grey patches of mercy carved into the white of everything," and take her far away from the world of men to a place where she could be that little girl again, a place where she could hold hands in a café with anyone she wanted, instead of "accepting-always accepting- a life forced upon her."

Matar is a master with words. He uses simple, accessible language that soars to poetic heights through the narrator's whimsical innocence. At one point, Suleiman has a heatstroke after gorging himself on mulberries. This leads him to believe that they were put on earth by the dissenting angels, so we could have a small taste of paradise here, in a world ravished by heat and greed.

By showing us government-sanctioned brutality through the eyes of a child, Matar is able to show us the horror of his home country, juxtaposed against the glistening beauty of the Mediterranean. The novel is a work of fiction, but closely mirrors the events of Matar's real life, lending it an authentic, imperative air. All the chapters are short, averaging out to be about ten or so pages. This book is an accessible masterpiece, and its only flaws are found near the end, when a grown Suleiman glosses over later parts of his life, neglecting that beautiful, childlike attention to detail.

This book should be required reading for every high school student in the U.S. Though the names and culture are different, any American would be hard-pressed to find a character they couldn't relate to. We may laugh when Suleiman recalls an instance where he was 'unlucky', saying, "I had thrown a date in my mouth before splitting it open, only discovering it was infested with ants when their small shell-bodies crackled beneath my teeth." But even men with hearts of steel may cry when his luck changes, and he is given the choice of life, instead of being forced to choose between slavery or death.