Episode: 30 — "Imagine You Are a Human" · Full Episode #30
Date: 16 July 2020 (Season 3 finale)
Language: Arabic, with English literary references
Hisham Matar (هشام مطر) is a Libyan-American novelist and essayist. He is the author of In the Country of Men, Anatomy of a Disappearance, The Return — for which he received the Pulitzer Prize for Biography in 2017 — and A Month in Siena. He teaches at Barnard College, Columbia University. He was born in New York City, where his father Jaballa Matar was serving as First Secretary at the Libyan delegation to the United Nations, and was raised between Libya, Egypt and Britain. His father was disappeared from Cairo in 1990 by agents of the Gaddafi regime and is believed to have been killed in Abu Salim prison.
Hisham's first story from the episode is set in a new progressive school where the teacher had alternated boy-girl seating — unusual for the time. The class was reading a story about a fly having an existential crisis. Sitting next to him, a girl's cheek caught the light from above. He described being overtaken by it: "lit from above and pale." He leaned across and kissed her cheek. She screamed. The boy behind him yelled. The teacher dragged him to the corner and made him stare at the wall. He told the story as an image of ignorance — a punishment that was not even constructive, a reaction from a teacher who had no framework for what had happened.
Hisham trained as an architect and later worked as a stonemason. The first novel began on a Sunday morning. He was on a mattress on the floor with a tissue box next to him. He woke with an idea and by the time coffee came up, the entire tissue box was covered in writing. He gave the early pages to David Dabydeen, the Guyanese-British novelist. They sat on a bench in Dabydeen's garden while Dabydeen read the first twenty-five pages. Hisham described his heart pounding, simultaneously wanting Dabydeen to stop reading and to keep going. Dabydeen finished and said: "This is excellent. You are a writer." Afterwards he walked Hisham to Sylvia Plath's grave and, hand on his shoulder, said: "One day people will walk like this to visit your grave."
See: The Tissue Box Novel
After six months in Paris, Hisham finished a second draft of the novel. When he reread it, it felt "cracked" — he used the image of a stonemason's tuning fork against a stone. Three years of work. He destroyed the draft the same day and started again from scratch, this time with the mother-son relationship at the centre. The rebuilt novel became In the Country of Men.
See: Destroying the Second Draft
He was broke, two months behind on rent, and the book was not finished. A Ghanaian novelist friend, Nii Parkes, told him to apply for an Arts Council grant and sat with him while he filled in the form. £4,500 came through. He finished the novel in six weeks.
Hisham described his twenties as "black years" — a long period of depression, anger and despair over his father's disappearance. He said explicitly that he never, once, wished revenge. His framing: "Getting trapped in anger is another victory for the event." He argued that the Gaddafi regime had taught Libyans a debased language of power in which strength means humiliation and revenge. Killing Gaddafi, he said, was the easy part. Removing that language from the Libyan consciousness is the real work, and it has barely begun. He opposed the manner of Gaddafi's death — not out of sympathy but because it was revenge rather than justice.
The most deliberate act Hisham described was refusing to let his father's identity collapse into the disappearance. He made a conscious decision to remember his father in the moments before he was taken, not as "the man they took." He called this "my only real victory — saving my father's memory from becoming only the disappearance."
See: Saving His Father's Memory
Asked what he values most, Hisham said: walking without a destination. He cited the French word flâner. The practice is of a piece with his view of literature — attention given without instrumental purpose.
"Imagine you are a human. That you are the inheritor of all that has been — all the writers, all the musicians. Bach is your brother, Shakespeare is your brother, Virginia Woolf is your sister, Ibn Arabi is your brother, Ibn Rushd. For me, it is a magnificent thing." (EP 30)
"Getting trapped in anger is another victory for the event." (EP 30)