Title: In the Country of Men Author: Hisham Matar Creation Date: 2006 Location: Libya / United Kingdom Collection: One Book Per Country
Brief
In the Country of Men was published in 2006 by Hisham Matar, born in New York in 1970 to Libyan parents and raised partly in Tripoli, partly in Cairo and London after his family fled Gaddafi's regime. The novel was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won several awards for debut fiction. Matar's subsequent memoir, The Return (2016), won the Pulitzer Prize and traces his journey to Libya after Gaddafi's fall to discover what happened to his father, who was taken by Gaddafi's secret police in 1990 and never seen again.
The novel is narrated by Suleiman, a nine-year-old boy in Tripoli in 1979 — the year that Gaddafi's revolution is consolidating itself through terror. Suleiman's father Faraj is secretly involved in anti-Gaddafi activities; his mother Najwa is a woman of formidable intelligence and beauty who is destroying herself with alcohol, a secret in a Muslim country that Suleiman does not understand. Over the course of a summer, Suleiman watches events he cannot fully comprehend from inside a child's consciousness: a family friend arrested, paraded on state television, publicly executed in a stadium, his father's disappearance.
The novel's great formal achievement is the management of the gap between what Suleiman sees and what the reader understands, between the child's partial comprehension and the adult horror it encircles. Matar writes in English with a clarity and precision that never sentimentalises but always attends to the emotional weight of what it describes. In the Country of Men is the first major Libyan novel to reach an international readership, and it performs — as first novels from small literary traditions often must — the triple labour of witness, literature, and cultural introduction simultaneously.
The National Voice
In the Country of Men captures Libya under Gaddafi through the one perspective that can render the regime's horror with full emotional force while preserving its strangeness: that of a child. Suleiman's nine-year-old consciousness registers everything — jasmine in the courtyard, his mother's cooking, state television, the summer heat pressing down on Tripoli — without the adult frameworks that would organise these things into politics. He knows something is wrong. He does not know the name for what is wrong.
The Tripoli that Matar renders is a city of enclosed domestic spaces — houses with interior courtyards and high walls — where life continues with surface normality the surveillance state constantly threatens to disrupt. The domestic routines are specific and sensory: couscous preparation, mint tea, the rituals of Libyan hospitality. These routines carry the weight of normalcy, the things that continue when everything else is uncertain.
Najwa, Suleiman's mother, is the novel's most vivid creation. Beautiful, intelligent, married at fourteen to a man she did not choose, she is destroying herself with alcohol — the most forbidden substance in a Muslim country, a rebellion so private only her nine-year-old son witnesses it. Her drinking is the only available resistance for a woman whose life has been organised by others since childhood and whose husband's political activities have placed the household in danger she can see but cannot address. What makes the novel distinctively Libyan is its attention to Gaddafi's specific mechanisms of control — the revolutionary committees, the Green Book ideology, the public executions broadcast on state television — rendered not as abstract political facts but as the conditions of daily life that a child absorbs without the vocabulary to name them.
The Historical Ground
Libya under Muammar Gaddafi (1969–2011) was one of the most idiosyncratic political systems in the modern world. Gaddafi seized power in a bloodless coup on 1 September 1969, overthrowing King Idris I. Over the following decade he developed the political philosophy of the Green Book, which rejected both capitalism and communism in favour of a "Third Universal Theory" based on direct democracy through people's congresses — a system he called the Jamahiriya, the state of the masses.
In practice, the Jamahiriya was a dictatorship organised around Gaddafi's personal authority, maintained through overlapping intelligence services, revolutionary committees, and tribal alliances. The committees, staffed by regime loyalists, monitored neighbourhoods, workplaces, and educational institutions, and their reports could lead to arrest, interrogation, torture, and execution.
The year 1979 — when the novel is set — was a period of intensifying repression. Gaddafi had announced the "revolution within the revolution" in 1977, calling for the elimination of all political opposition. Public execution of dissidents began in earnest that year and continued through the early 1980s, with hangings conducted in public spaces and broadcast on state television. The regime's targets were broad: anyone suspected of political organisation, intellectual dissent, or sympathy with any form of opposition was at risk. The universities were particular targets, and the professional classes who might have constituted a civil society were systematically intimidated.
The Literary Landscape
Libyan literature in Arabic has a modest tradition, constrained by the country's small population, the late development of modern educational institutions, and the suppressive effect of Gaddafi's regime on intellectual life. The short story tradition — developed by writers like Kamel Maghur and Saddiq al-Nayhum — produced work of quality but limited international visibility. Al-Nayhum, whose exile in Geneva established the pattern of Libyan literary production from abroad, challenged both religious conservatism and political authoritarianism.
Ibrahim al-Koni's desert novels are internationally recognised — The Bleeding of the Stone, Gold Dust — but his relationship to Libyan national literature is complicated by his Tuareg identity and long residence outside Libya. Ahmed Ibrahim al-Faqih's trilogy Gardens of the Night represents the conventional novelistic tradition that never achieved the critical mass of Egypt, Lebanon, or Iraq.
Matar's decision to write in English places him in the tradition of Anglophone Arab writers while giving him access to a global readership that the Arabic-language Libyan tradition could not provide. His position is paradoxical: he is the most internationally prominent Libyan writer, but he writes in a language that is not Libya's own, from a position of exile that is itself a product of the regime he writes about. The principal contender for Libya's representative book is al-Koni's Saharan work, but In the Country of Men captures the urban Libyan experience under Gaddafi — the experience of the majority — with a specificity and emotional power that the desert novels, for all their brilliance, do not attempt.
The Reading
The Summer
Tripoli in the summer of 1979 is a city that has learned to live with fear. The revolutionary committees — Gaddafi's enforcers, the young men deputised to monitor neighbourhoods and report on neighbours — are everywhere and nowhere, present enough to be felt, absent enough that their presence cannot be challenged. The city carries on: the shops open, the families eat together, the children play. Beneath the ordinary surface, everyone knows that the surveillance is real and that the price of attracting it is something no one can quite say aloud.
Suleiman lives in this city without understanding it. He is nine years old, an only child in a comfortable household — his father has business interests, they are not poor — and the world he inhabits is the world his mother has made for him: the house, the neighbourhood, the school, the rituals of daily life in a Muslim Libyan family. His mother Najwa is the most vivid person in his world. She is beautiful in the way that makes a young boy worship his mother — physically arresting, intelligent, capable of enormous warmth — and she is also, this summer, unravelling. He finds her drinking from a bottle she hides under the bed. He smells it on her breath. He does not have the language for what this means.
She tells him, during one of these overheard moments, something of her own story. She was married at fourteen to a man she did not choose. This was not unusual; this was the custom. She accepted it in the way that young women accepted the conditions of their lives and tried to make the best of the person they were given. Over time she has made something real with Faraj — real enough, durable enough — but the marriage has its terms, and one of the terms is the silence around his activities, the things he does in the world outside their household that she knows about in outline and pretends not to know.
The Neighbour
Faraj, when he is home, is a loving father and a decent man — a man who has ideals and has chosen, at great personal risk, to act on them. He belongs to a network of Libyans who oppose Gaddafi; the opposition is organised, clandestine, dangerous. The regime has been in power for ten years and is entering its most paranoid and violent phase.
The neighbour Ustaz Rashid is one of these dissidents. He is an intellectual — a teacher, a man of books — and he is the kind of person around whom networks form, because he thinks clearly and speaks clearly and believes that thinking and speaking clearly about justice are not luxuries but necessities. Suleiman knows him as a neighbour, as a presence in the street, as someone his father respects.
Then Rashid is arrested. Then he appears on state television, confessing — in the manner of those who confess under compulsion — to crimes against the revolution. The television is showing something that does not seem real, that does not match the categories Suleiman has available, that requires adult language to name and he does not have adult language. He knows Ustaz Rashid was afraid. He knows that afraid men on television confessing things means something terrible. He does not know what to do with the knowing. The screen holds the image and the image holds a man he knew, and the man is saying things that the man he knew would never say, in a voice that belongs to him and does not belong to him at the same time.
The public execution follows. It is broadcast into the home, because the regime broadcasts executions into homes where families are eating dinner, where children are doing homework, where the ordinary machinery of domestic life continues in the presence of state murder. The stadium is full. The crowd has been assembled — some willingly, some under compulsion, some because they are afraid that not attending would itself be noticed. The camera holds the shot with the steadiness of state television, which does not look away because looking away would defeat the purpose. The purpose is that everyone sees. The purpose is that the seeing itself becomes part of the architecture of control — that the knowledge of what happens to dissidents is not abstract, not rumoured, but witnessed, carried in the eyes of every person who watched, including the nine-year-old boy in his family's living room who did not choose to watch but who could not be shielded because the regime does not believe in shielding children from the consequences of their parents' world.
The execution itself is not described in detail — but the aftermath is rendered: the silence in the house, his mother's face, the knowledge that something has crossed a boundary and that the boundary cannot be uncrossed. Suleiman goes to bed that night and lies in the dark and the dark is different from any dark he has known before. It is darker. It has weight.
The Mother
Najwa, in her better moments, tells Suleiman stories of before: before the revolution, before the fear, before she was married at fourteen, before Libya was the country it has become. The Tripoli of before is a Mediterranean city of cafes and bookshops and evening walks along the corniche, a city where people argued about politics freely and visited each other's houses without fear and read newspapers that reported what was happening rather than what the Leader wanted them to believe was happening. This Tripoli is gone. Its destruction was not dramatic — it was the slow, systematic replacement of civil life with revolutionary surveillance, the steady draining of oxygen from a culture that once breathed freely. What Najwa mourns, in her drunken monologues, is not luxury or power but normality — the ordinary condition of living in a place where you are not afraid.
These are the passages where the prose reaches its most tender register. The mother and son in the dark house, the father gone, the revolution outside the walls, the woman talking and the boy listening, the knowledge between them that neither can fully articulate — that this is ending, that the life they had is dissolving, that the father may not come back. Najwa does not say this. She speaks around it, through it, in the way that people in danger communicate the things they cannot say directly. Suleiman hears what she does not say as clearly as what she does.
The Disappearance
His father disappears that summer. The mechanism of the disappearance is the mechanism the regime uses: men come, the door opens, the man goes, the door closes. There is no explanation. There is no warrant. There is no phone call. The apparatus of the state reaches into the private household and removes its male centre, and what is left is two people — a woman and a child — in a house that is suddenly too large and too empty and too visible to the neighbours who are now watching to see what the family of a disappeared man does, how it behaves, whether it provides any further evidence of disloyalty.
The house itself becomes a different space without Faraj. The rooms that were his are now empty with a specific kind of emptiness, the kind that the person's absence generates — more presence than their presence did. His books are still on the shelf. His clothes are still in the wardrobe. The objects wait for a return that the objects do not know will not happen. Najwa moves through the house with the careful efficiency of someone who is preparing to leave but has not yet been told she is leaving, maintaining the household in a state of readiness that is also a state of refusal — refusal to acknowledge that the household, as it was, has ended.
His mother is left to manage: to explain to Suleiman that his father is away, to negotiate the suddenly unmanageable practical dimensions of a household without its male head, to continue to drink in secret, to send messages through networks she pretends not to have. The wife of a dissident exists in a kind of social quarantine — people who were friends become careful, careful becomes distant, distant becomes absent. The women who used to visit stop visiting. The invitations stop coming. The isolation is not announced; it accumulates, like dust.
Suleiman, in the absence of his father and the collapse of his mother, is required to become something a nine-year-old should not have to become. He becomes watchful, responsible, the male presence in the household in ways that are absurd given his age. He answers the door. He speaks to the neighbours with the careful politeness of someone who has understood, without being told, that every word is potentially evidence. He manages — because he cannot not manage — but the management costs him something: the particular childhood that was possible in a country where things went differently, the boy he would have been.
The friend from the neighbourhood, Kareem, whose father is also taken — they process this together in the incomplete way of children, through play and silence and the occasional conversation that gets closer than either of them intends. These friendships are among the most affecting passages: the way children create solidarity without having the vocabulary for it, the way they protect each other from knowledge they both already have.
The regime's presence is never confined to the dramatic moments — the arrest, the execution, the disappearance. It is in the daily texture: the way people speak on the telephone knowing it may be monitored, the way conversations in public spaces are conducted in code, the way children are taught, implicitly and explicitly, which subjects can be discussed and which cannot. The Green Book is everywhere — in the schools, in the government offices, in the rhetoric of the revolutionary committees — and its language has infected the language of daily life. People say "the masses" and "the revolution" and "Brother Leader" with the automatic fluency of people who have learned that these words are the price of moving through the world without attracting attention.
There is a betrayal. Suleiman, under pressure from an adult connected to the revolutionary committees — a man who understands how to extract information from a frightened child — says something about his father, or about the household's secrets. The betrayal is not dramatic; it is the kind of thing a child does when an adult asks the right question in the right tone of authority. Suleiman does not fully understand what he has done until later, and the understanding, when it comes, is devastating — the recognition that he has participated, however unwillingly and unknowingly, in the machinery that is destroying the people he loves. The guilt is a child's guilt, which is the worst kind, because a child does not have the framework to forgive himself.
The Departure
The Tripoli of 1979, viewed from a nine-year-old's height, is a city where fear has become architecture. The revolutionary committee headquarters on the corner. The portraits of the Leader on every wall. The green flags. The slogans painted on buildings that no one reads because everyone has memorised them. Suleiman moves through this landscape with the acceptance of a child who has never known anything else — this is simply his city, the only city, the place where jasmine grows in the courtyard and men disappear from their homes in the night.
The summer ends with Suleiman leaving Libya with his mother — they are allowed to leave, which itself says something about who his father is and what the regime wants — to join relatives in Cairo. The father is still disappeared. He will remain disappeared.
The journey out of Libya is rendered with the specific sensory intensity of departure — the last look at the house, the drive to the airport, the flat expanse of Tripoli visible from the car window, the sea. Najwa is composed in the way that women in crisis compose themselves for the sake of their children: she has packed, she has said the necessary things, she has performed the departure as though it is temporary. Suleiman knows it is not temporary. He knows this in his body if not in his mind, the way children know the things adults try to protect them from — through the quality of adult silence, through the way his mother holds his hand, through the fact that she has packed too much for a short trip.
The plane lifts above the city. The Mediterranean appears, the shoreline where Tripoli sits, the white buildings and the date palms diminishing into geometry, and then into a pattern that could be any city, and then into something too small to see, and then into coast, and then into distance. He is nine years old and leaving his country and does not know if he will come back. He has seen things that will not leave him. He does not know yet what they mean. He will spend the rest of his life finding out.
The country of men that the title names is both Libya under Gaddafi, where men hold all power, and the world of the absent fathers, the world of the men who are gone and whose gone-ness shapes everything — the houses they leave behind, the women who wait in those houses, the children who grow up in the silence that the disappeared leave in their wake. It is also the country of the nine-year-old boy who carried more than he could hold and who set it down, decades later, in a language that was not his country's own, because the country that should have held his story had made it impossible for the story to be told there, and so the story was told elsewhere, in English, from exile, and the telling was both an act of love and an act of mourning for the place that made exile necessary.
This post is part of the One Book Per Country series — 195 countries, one defining book each, working through the literary map of the world.
The Penguin paperback (2007) is the standard edition — widely available, elegantly designed. Matar writes in English, so there is no translation question. His memoir The Return (2016), which won the Pulitzer Prize, is the essential companion volume.
The Penguin paperback. Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.
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