In the Country of Men

Book Review

Hisham Matar

In the Country of Men is told from the point of view of Suleiman, a nine-year-old boy living in Tripoli , Libya in 1979, under the rule of Muammar Quaddafi, the “guide.”

To Suleiman, life in Tripoli is a mystery. He doesn't understand why his father tells him he is going abroad on a business trip, but then sees him wearing dark glasses in the middle of the city's Martyrs Square . He doesn't understand why, when his father is away, his mother becomes curiously ill, and must drink a clear liquid “medicine” that she secretly procures from the town's baker.

During the course of the novel, Suleiman is plagued by many horrors. His best friend Kareem's father, Ustath Rashid, disappears. Men from the government come to his home to question his mother about the whereabouts of his father. After that visit, his father's friend Moosa and his mother burn all of his father's books – except one. Suleiman believes that he is helping his father by saving one book, called Democracy Now, and hiding it under his mattress. He talks to the government agent who is constantly parked in front of their house, and is duped into providing information about his father's friends, thinking that he is helping vouch for his father's character. His father, too, has been taken into custody. Suleiman witnesses Ustath Rashid being publicly executed in a basketball stadium, on national television. After his mother intercedes on his father's behalf with a neighbour with some pull with the Guide, Suleiman witnesses his beaten and broken father returning home.

This is a life that no nine-year-old should ever have to experience. Matar renders the execution scene in the basketball stadium with horrifying emotion and detail. This is a simple, but poignant story.

“How could it be so easy? What was absent in the Stadium? What didn't intervene to rescue Ustath Rashid? Perhaps it was all the cowboy films with their logic of happy endings that made me think this way, that perhaps it wasn't God but they who had invented hope and the promise that just at the point when the hero had the rope round his neck, suddenly, and with the Majesty of God, a shot would come from nowhere and break the rope. The hero would kick the man beside him, and the rest of the mob – the cowards – would jump on their saddles and ride off, up and over the hill. Everyone at the cinema would jump and shout and clap and hug one another as if it was a football match. Tears would come down my face, but it wouldn't matter because many cheeks, grown men too, would shine with tears. I recalled the joy of such moments, and how they seemed to burn a hole through my chest. Where were the heroes, the bullets, the scurrying mob, the happy endings that used to send us out of the dark cinema halls rosy-cheeked with joy, slapping each other's backs, rejoicing that our man had won, that God didn't leave him alone in his hour of need, that the world worked in the ways we expected it to work and didn't falter…”