I was born in 1970 in Manhattan, in New York City. Three years later my parents returned to Libya and we moved into a series of houses before we settled in the one by the sea in Tripoli. Perhaps there are no borders apart of the sea, and that the sea is the only divider, and therefore the only bridge. At least that was how it seemed to me back then.
I think something happens to us around the age of 5, 6 or 7, when our sense of ourself contracts, becomes more specific, and we realise that besides being part of a family, a society, etc., there is something in us that belongs to us alone. The landscape where this happens is likely to forever remain charged.
This for me happened beside the Mediterranean. I remember how consoling and eventful living near it was; how it changed, and how the companionship of its alterations accompanied me. People disappeared. Buildings were demolished. Books were burned. People got married and divorced. But not births nor deaths altered it. The sea was untouched. Constant in its variety. Decadent in its obliviousness.
Part of the wonder I felt was that the waters that I swam in, that filled my ears and mouth and open eyes, were the same waters that had come from distant shores, places such as Cyprus and Crete, Barcelona and San Remo, Gaza and Marseilles; or nearby places, such as Alexandria, which held, for my family, a mythical quality. It was where my maternal grandmother was born and both sides of my family lived for a time when, after resisting Benito Mussolini’s occupation, they left Libya for neighbouring Egypt. Such proximities filled me with wander, but also the practical knowledge that the world existed all at once: that then was now, and there was here, and that all divisions, both of time and space, were, perhaps like all declarations of belonging, approximate.
The moment we feel specifically ourselves is the moment we yearn for connection. It seems most of us carry in our pockets our elsewheres. We belong, if we belong, to the tribe of those who are yet to arrive. One of our earliest stories, that of Adam and Eve—the original story for many of us—is that of exile and wandering. It is impossible to lose that story. If you were born with it, it’ll be with you till the grave. A story that stains the mind.
One of the great texts that remains largely unknown outside those interested in Arabic literature is The Epistle of Forgiveness, by the 10th century poet Abu al Ala al Ma’arri, in which, three hundred years before Dante, a poet-protagonist descends into the underworld. Driven by a curiosity to find out who it was that had written the first poem, al Ma’arri’s hero enters inferno but also climbs up to the heavens, where he meets the first man, Adam. He questions him about whether he had written the first verse. Adam neither admits nor denies it. He is, in fact, a little coy about it. If he did write a poem, Adam suggests, then it would have been an elegy for his murdered son. Al Ma’arri’s man then finds our mother, Eve, who casts doubt on the matter, suggesting that she might have written it. If she had, she claims, then her poem would not have been an elegy but rather about the future, the future of her family—which is to say, us—now cast asunder to roam the earth for eternity. Whereas Adam’s poem would have been about the past, Eve’s would’ve been prospecting, containing, we imagine, her hopes and fears for her damned and fallen family.
This detail in Al Ma’arri’s The Epistle of Forgiveness is pertinent to the nature of literature itself, for one can claim that, since time immemorial, books have been concerned with either one of those two perspectives: how things came to be; and how the drama of human life might playout tomorrow. In other words, books, regardless of their subject, are often motored by a concern with bridging the distances, with disparate situations, with difference, with dissimilar states of being, with characters who stand poles apart, and figures who, in their solitary hours, are running against their own hearts.
‘What shall Cordelia do?’ Cordelia asks herself in King Lear. And the answer that comes to her comes quickly: ‘Love, and be silent.’ Cordelia verdict contains a simple and yet complicated truth. How can we truly know another person, and how might we make ourselves known to them? There is a well spring of confidence required in order to love and be loved. A confidence that verges on faith. A faith in correspondence, in the simple fact that what we feel most deeply does not need to be uttered. In fact, this sort of faith worries about utterance, is suspicious of it, of the damage that can be caused by spelling things out. In that light, Cordelia’s answer, ‘Love, and be silent,’ is a form of prayer. Perhaps the most profound prayer of all.
Such fear of correspondence, and the need for it too, is literature’s territory. Books are the place for the unsaid and the unsayable. Literature has a passion for silences. It trusts in the vaguest, most subtly made connections. All stories do this. (Even the poor and haphazard one I am attempting to tell you here about my relationship to the sea and libraries.) What books, and I would argue the best among them, do is bring together seemingly disconnected elements and expose the natural connections between them. This is why one way to define a library is as a collection of surprising coincidences and connections, an amalgamation of seemingly disparate points.
That peculiar mixture of excitement and fear, of melancholy and joy, of boredom and wonder, which I felt as a child standing beside the Mediterranean, is strangely analogous to that feeling I get on walking into a good library. Both represent the potential of liberal travel, of surprising encounters, of aimlessness, the danger of drowning, the temptation of being lost and the fear of being lost.
This is why the banning of books, and the silencing or dismissing of voices—as happened only recently in Frankfurt, for example, when an award ceremony celebrating the novelist Adania Shibli was cancelled on the grounds the author’s nationality—she is Palestinian—offends in us an essential human need and freedom. The same freedom that we, perhaps, inherited long ago from Adam and Eve, our first two poets, one reaching backwards and the other one forwards, like a pair of feet of a walking figure, hoping to connect the past and the future to the present. Our age fears books. It is worried about ungovernable expression. It often mistakes the author for the authority on her work, when only the work is the authority on itself. Anyone who had written an honest line knows this.
In the first half of the 20th Century, Albert Camus attempted to lay a claim on his time, to define it: ‘The seventeenth century,’ he wrote, ‘was the century of mathematics; the eighteenth of the physical sciences; the nineteenth of biology. Our century, the twentieth, is the century of fear.’ If we were to try to update that statement, we might still call ours, the twenty-first, the century of fear, but also, perhaps, of fragmentation. Very few of us, even those who have lived where they were born, feel connected to a sense of community. But I also mean fragmentation in the wider sense, from being connected to universalist principles of justice and human rights, for example. To conduct ourselves as though we truly believed that human life, no matter where, was equally precious, and not to a lot our outrage depending on the nationality or race of the victim. War is horrific for all the reasons that we know it to be, but it is also horrific because it is invested in this fragmentation. And we have now, for so long, been living with wars.
Although neither question is easy to answer, most people ask how a book starts, at which point did you decide to write it. Few ever ask how it ended, how you knew when it was finished. The poet Marianne Moore worried about the second question. How was she to know that she had enough poems for her book. She shared her doubts with her editor, the poet T S Eliot, who was then publisher at Faber & Faber. In a letter dated 31st January 1934, Eliot replied: ‘The point at which one has “enough” for a book (of verse) is not a quantitative matter alone… One only has not enough, when one feels that the poems written require the cooperation of certain poems not yet written, in order to be themselves quite.’
This autonomous or inner collaborative nature of a work of literature—that it needs itself and all its disparate parts not only to make it whole but also to make each part of it itself quite—is also true in a library. Which is to say, a library is also a metaphor for a collaborative and diverse society. An excellent library is our most diverse and divergent structure of human knowledge, the most accepting of opposites, the most enthusiastic for the accidental as well as the curated points of contact, the most porously curious and promiscuously hungry.
Speaking of how a work ends, or is judged to be finished, I would like to close by reading to you the last lines of my first book, In the Country of Men. When they fell on the page, they surprised me. I knew then that the book I had been working on for close to five years was done. But I did not know how I knew that, except to say that it felt as though I had been shut out, no longer required. To set the scene, the protagonist of my novel is here 24 years old. He had been living away from his family in Libya since the age of 9. Here he finally meets his mother, after 15 years of exile, in a bus stop in Alexandria.