A Sunday morning, a tissue box, and a walk to Sylvia Plath's grave. Told by Hisham Matar (EP 30).
Hisham Matar trained as an architect and then worked as a stonemason. He had not set out to be a novelist. There was no plan, no manuscript in a drawer. What came first was a Sunday morning.
He was on a mattress on the floor. A tissue box was within reach. He woke with an idea and began writing on the surface of the box. By the time coffee was brought up to the room, the entire tissue box — all six sides — was covered in his handwriting. That was the seed of the first novel.
Hisham gave the early pages to David Dabydeen, the Guyanese-British novelist. They met at Dabydeen's home. Dabydeen led him to a bench in the garden and sat down beside him to read the first twenty-five pages.
Hisham described the minutes that followed as contradictory in a way he had never felt before: his heart was pounding, and he was simultaneously willing Dabydeen to stop reading — even if he hated it — and to keep going forever. The suspense of having the work seen by a writer he respected, and the fear that it would be dismissed, ran at the same volume.
Dabydeen finished the pages and said: "This is excellent. You are a writer."
Then, without explaining why, Dabydeen stood up and took Hisham for a walk. The destination was the grave of Sylvia Plath. As they walked, Dabydeen placed a hand on Hisham's shoulder and said: "One day, people will walk like this to visit your grave."
Hisham told the story with the care of someone who understood it was an act of literary transmission — one generation formally recognising the next — and also, he said, a private moment of permission that he had not realised he was waiting for.
The tissue box novel became In the Country of Men, after a long detour through Destroying the Second Draft. The moment on the bench is the moment the novel was given permission to exist. Everything Hisham has written since — Anatomy of a Disappearance, The Return, A Month in Siena — sits downstream of a Sunday morning and a walk to a grave.
See: Hisham Matar, Destroying the Second Draft