(Transcript) Hisham Matar on “Moving On” From Tragedy, Documenting Family Stories, and Connecting with Art

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Hello, Hello, Hello My Friends. Wow, I Have Missed You. Welcome Back To Podcast Noor. So, Podcast Noor Is Our Storytelling Interview Series That We Do In Between Our Investigations. And Our Last Investigative Podcast, Which, Side Note, Was Nominated For A Webby, Is Titled “Rep: A Story About The Stories We Tell.” And If You’re Familiar With Me Or My Work, I’m Sure You’ve Heard Me Talk About It. But, If You Haven’t Listened To It, Please Please Do. It Really Is The Journey Of A Lifetime. It’s An Investigation Into The Concept Of Truth, Objectivity, Representation And Our Relationships With Stories. And If You Have Istened To Rep, Then This Opening Episode Of This Season Of Podcast Noor Is Actually Going To Be Such A Tremendous And Beautiful Treat. So, Today’s Storyteller Is Someone Who I Believe Is One Of The Most Prolific Storytellers Of Our Time.

 Hisham Matar Is A Libyan American Author And Professor. His Award Winning Novels Include In The Country Of Men, Anatomy Of Disappearance, And Most Recently A Month In Siena. And In Between Writing Novels He Wrote A Memoir Titled: The Return: Fathers, Sons, And The Land In Between. This Is A Pulitzer Prize Winning Memoir. 

The First Time I Heard About The Memoir Was Actually On President Obama’s Summer Reading List. And I Remember Seeing That It Was A Libyan Author, And Being Like, Woah. I Have Never Actually Read A Book By A Libyan Person And So I Got Really Excited. Life Happened And Then I Really Believe In Like, The Divine Timing Of Reading A Book, And I Had Shared It With My Brother And My Family Members. I Hadn’t Even Started It Myself And My Brother Started The Book, And He Texted Me And Was Like “Have You Read It Yet?” And I Hadn’t And He Said, “I Feel Like You Guys Are Keys To Each Others Stories And There Isn’t Two People That I Can Think Of That Need To Meet More Than You And Hisham. That’s Literally What My Little Brother Said To Me And I Was Like Woah, Ok, He’s Never Said Anything Like That. I Need To Really Take This Seriously. But I Also Felt It. And So, The Story Of Hisham Matar And His Memoir Is That He Is On This Quest To Find His Father, Who Disappears When He’s 18 Years Old, At The Hands Of The Gaddafi Regime. And This Is, Of Course, I’m Saying It’s A Memoir, It’s A True Story And It Is One Of The Most Important Books That I Have Ever Read And Not Just Because, You Know, I’m Also Libyan Or I Have A Family Member Whose Also Been Missing At The Hands Of The Regime For Decades, But It Truly Is This Journey That Interrogates What It Means To Have Or Not Have A Father, Or, To Keep Someone’s Essence Alive, In Many Ways. And I Love That In The Title He Writes “Fathers, Sons, And The Land In Between.” Cause How Many Of Us Have Had Contentious Relationships With Our Fathers Or Parent Of Ours Or Whatever That May Look Like And Mean. I Just Cannot Recommend This Book Enough And The Way That This Book Moved Me. I Read It In Two Days, Guys. I Cried Every Chapter, I Would Read And I Would Have To Put It Down And It Wasn’t Just Crying Out Of Pain Of What I Was Reading. The Writing Is Just So - It Was - Hisham Literally Put To Words, Feelings That I Had Had That I Didn’t Know Existed. And, So, I Wanted To Start This Season Out With Our Conversation That We Have Because It Meant So Much To Me. Especially Off The Heels Of Rep, Where I Feel Like Rep Has Really Broken Me Open And I’m Asking So Many Questions About Who I Am In A Way That I’ve Never Knew That I Could. And So, I Just Have Such Gratitude For Hisham And I Urge, Urge You To Read His Memoir, “The Return,” And If You’re A Fiction Enthusiast Then His Novels - He Actually Gifted Me His Latest Novel “A Month In Siena” On Our Way Out Of The Interview And I’m So Excited To Dig Into It.

So We Recorded This Interview In His Office At Barnard College. And It Was A Transformative Conversation. I Even Invited My Little Brother To The Conversation So That He Would Be There To Witness Our Connection And Just This, Kind Of Reunion That All Of Us Had. Even Though We Didn’t Know Each Other Personally, You Just Sometimes Meet People And You’re Like, “We Do Know Each Other.” So It Was Kind Of Like That. Hisham Reflected A Lot On A Question That I Had Asked Him. He Texted Me After The Interview The Next Day And Said That He Had More He Wanted To Share, He Had Been Thinking About It. So, It Was Such A Treat That We Have An Addition To The Interview At The End Of The Episode. So Make Sure You Stick Around, And Without Further Ado I Would Love To Welcome You To Our First Storytelling Session Of This Season With Hisham Matar On What It Really Means To Move On.

Noor Tagouri (00:00:04):

I've just thought about sitting down with you for constantly for the last few days. And I think most times I think about it, I kind of just burst into tears. So this is a very unusual

Hisham Matar (00:00:23):

That's sort of the effect I have on people.

Noor Tagouri (00:00:28):

Yeah, I know I got that. But I think before I ask you anything, before I say anything, I just want to start off with gratitude and just deep, sincere gratitude. And I know that many people have spoken to you and shared with you how your words have affected them. And I want us four in this room to be four more people who share that sentiment. But more importantly and more importantly not, but the thing that my brother had said to me when he texted me about the urgency to read The Return was he said, I think that he has a key to the puzzle that you're trying to figure out. And that maybe I would have one for you too. And not in the most literal sense of answers of what's happened to our respective families, but like proof maybe or hope of why we do what we do. And I think when you're a writer or a storyteller, once the story is out there, it kind of no longer belongs to you.

(00:01:42):

Everybody has their own relationship with it, or anybody who encounters it has their own experience with it. And in that way, the stories are always bigger than us. But I just want to say thank you for writing words, expressing feelings and giving context to experiences that have surrounded me my entire life that I've never been able to grasp, or that even in my own family, people have never been able to articulate. And I was talking to my dad on FaceTime yesterday about this, and I was just telling him, I don't know how I'm going to be able to do this interview. I don't know how I'm going to do this conversation. And he said, it's very clear that hem has the gift of words and that gift is one that you've passed down to so many of us. And it's not a gift that is taken lightly. It's one that gives all of us context to the puzzle of our life. And as somebody who believes in asking questions without the intention of finding answers, I think in many ways the questions that you have given us maybe led us to asking more questions. But those questions sometimes felt stronger than an actual answer because they gave me personally the capacity to imagine, to think about, to humanize people and experiences that have often just been names and numbers in my brain. So with that, I just really want to start by saying thank you.

Hisham Matar (00:03:31):

I'm very touched. Thank you so much. And also greetings to you and to your brother and to your father.

Noor Tagouri (00:03:41):

Thank you. So the way we always start out these conversations is by doing a heart check in. So I first want to ask you today, how is your heart doing?

Hisham Matar (00:03:53):

My heart, I think it's doing all right. And of course you mean it metaphorically, my heart.

(00:04:04):

That's a very difficult question to answer briefly, because my heart is connected to my concerns. It's the place that has my concerns and also my passions. So my concerns these days are beyond the personal terrain. I obviously have the concerns that we all share about the world. I feel that we are in a tricky moment. We have some really serious problems in front of us. And so I think about those, but also my passions. Passions are to do with my engagements, with nature, with the people that I love and with works of art. I feel that art for me is not this

(00:05:09):

Extra thing. It's not, doesn't reside in the place that I think our society has delegated for it. Yeah, some extra thing, some entertainment. Art for me is fundamental. It's central to any project to do with humanity, with a sense of any sense of progress. I think you have to start with, you know, cannot have a city without a theater or a library or a museum. Those are the first things, parliament, court, how library, museum, that's how you start. And so my relationship, my engagement with art, whether as a writer or as a teacher or in my own personal life, it's very central to me. So the paintings that I'm looking at, the pieces of music that I'm listening to, the books that I'm reading, it's a very serious engagement and it feeds me in so many ways. Some are intellectual and some are just purely emotional.

(00:06:15):

So my heart is a place that has in it concerns private in general, but it's also, I must say it's also a place of joy and of praise in the much widest sense. At least I try. And I'm also interested in a very personal way. I'm interested in housekeeping, my heart, tidying it up, making, what does that look like? I'm not sure, but it's something to do with a sense of quiet or a sense of compassion. Maybe my heart can very easily get cluttered with fear or I'm upset about something or so housekeeping in that sense, reminding your heart all the time of its boundless strain, the fact that it is really connected to others. This is why I go to art, because I'm very interested, even though I've written a lot about my personal experience and I'm interested in this specific literature cannot work without the specific person.

(00:07:36):

They do this, they move, they say that everything's very specific. Yet my real passion, my real enthusiasm is not actually for myself. My real enthusiasm is the ways in which I can use myself, my experiences, my as limited as they are to connect to this broader terrain, this incredible event of being a human being. That we are born in the aftermath of events that have preceded us and have authored a lot of what's around us, but we are also born into a very complex inheritance. An inheritance That means that we have a cause to be ashamed, genuinely ashamed. And we also have cause to be incredibly proud. We have an inheritance that breaks the heart, but we also have an inheritance that mends it and enlivens it and dignifies us. And so I'm interested in the complexity of that inheritance. I don't feel that any register to resolve it into an absolute verdict that we are terrible and worthy of shame or that we are some sort of noble thing and only worthy of praise unsatisfying those two verdicts.

(00:09:14):

We are, I'm much more interested in how one can sustain think about, hold these contradictions and use them as a means to enliven the lived experience and thought and feeling. That's where art for me becomes so central, because art at its best is a host of these conflicts and it's such a concentrated place. Somebody has spent a lifetime learning something and has in invested so much, at least I'm thinking of the great paintings or books they have. So much is contained in them and often it's complex. So this is a very long way to say that my heart is a place of contradictions. It's a place where I rejoice, but also where I am, I burdened with grief, with concern, with very genuine concern about this moment. Yeah,

Noor Tagouri (00:10:24):

I love that when reflecting on your heart, you go straight to art as almost a mirror or a reflection and ability to see more clearly maybe the contradictions that typically exist inside of us, but people have been able to make that contradiction appear on canvas or appear on the page. And I know you have this beautiful tradition or habit, whatever you want to call it, of consistently going to museums and sometimes spending weeks or years looking at just one piece of art over the same painting over and over. So

Hisham Matar (00:11:05):

You're very kind to call it tradition. It's more like a tick or a disease or

Noor Tagouri (00:11:09):

I love it, but I mean, I wish it for more of us because even the way that you talk about how you no longer could do that habit of just walking through a museum within an hour of just looking at every painting, but just becoming immersed in it. I mean, to me, I started painting a couple of years ago at simply because it was the only way I could get things out when I was working on Rep. And it started with that first episode,

Hisham Matar (00:11:37):

Oh really? Is

Noor Tagouri (00:11:38):

When I started painting and I was like, I, there's something that needs to come out and I feel like this is the only way that it can make sense for me. And the fact that, you know, are someone who spends years maybe even looking at the same painting for however many times, and you're essentially building a relationship with that piece of art. I would love to know in this moment in your life, what is the painting that you're building a relationship with or the piece of literature?

Hisham Matar (00:12:09):

That you building. I would love to tell you about that, but before I do, I'm curious, when you said I started painting because it's the only way that I can, I think you said get things out or express things. And what have you found, what has come out in the paintings that isn't possible for it to come out in any other way?

Noor Tagouri (00:12:33):

Well, I'll have to show you after this too, so that I can explain. But I think for me, it's funny, as I was growing up, there was this line, I started speaking at a very young age, public speaking, and there was this line I used to always say just as a joke where I would say I wasn't really good at, good at sports. I wasn't good at art, but I knew I was really good at asking questions. And so I think I had it in my head for so long that I wasn't good at art. And art was something you needed to be good at. Nice. And um, then when I was working on rep, I had gone through a box that my mom had kept of all of my old paintings and drawings from elementary school. There was this one, there was a couple of abstract pieces, and there was this one that was a magnet actually, that I was so happy that she had it because I had remembered painting it or drawing it.

(00:13:28):

And it was like this magical bird with and behind the bird was a waterfall and a cave. And I started crying when I saw that I did it in 2003 actually, so exactly 20 years ago. And I remember as a child, when I drew it in my art class, I remember I was drawing something I kept seeing in my head. And when I had found rediscovered, this drawing, this magnet, which now resides on my fridge, I realized that's where I live now. I live on the land that I live on, has this little enclave and waterfalls and this. This morning I jumped into the water, I jump in every morning,

Hisham Matar (00:14:14):

Okay, stop it. Stop

Noor Tagouri (00:14:16):

I promise. That's what I'm telling you have to come right at the cabin. And I was in the cabin and I had found this, and I just started crying because at 10 years old, I had drawn the place that I live on now, the land that I live on as if it was in me the whole time. And so after I had found that, and I'd gone through some other drawings and paintings, I decided that I was going to just try it again and see what happened. And at the time, a couple of my teammates had actually gifted me this entire paint set. It was canvases and beautiful paints. And I just kind of left it aside and thought, what am I going to do with this? And I decided to break it open. And in the cabin I started painting, but instead of trying to paint something, words kept coming out.

(00:15:09):

And so I started painting words. And the art of painting words became so profound to me because I was forced to take my time with what I was writing so, or what I was painting essentially. And so every stroke of a letter that I was painting, it felt like this really this stream or this download that I was getting. And so I started just, it almost kind of became poetry where all these words were coming out in this flow and it became a hack that I figured out. So when I was stuck, most of rep was actually written up in the cabin. I'm very much like I write on yellow legal pads, like try to be off my computer as much as I can. And so I would literally write the questions I was investigating onto a canvas and then the answers would follow. And that's what I kept finding over and over again. And then I found a pallet knife and I just started going crazy with abstract. And so I kind of mixed that with the words and have found a lot of answers since then.

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Hisham Matar (00:16:14):

So the painting that I'm looking at, yes, I'm looking at, well, I mean just to say about my tick about the returning to the same painting every week. I don't really stand in front of it for a very long time. It's usually about 20 minutes or so.

Noor Tagouri (00:16:36):

That's a long time to most people

Hisham Matar (00:16:38):

It is a bit of a long time, but not, and then I look at a couple of other pictures and that's it. I don't, but I find the companionship of a work of ours interesting. I'm not enthusiastic by attempts to approach a work of art transactionally. I'm going to go look at you and you're going to make me feel good, or I'm going to look at you and then you got to teach me something about the specific thing. I'm not enthused by that register. I am much more excited by engaging my curiosities about it, my questions. So the painting becomes a lively location for me where I go and feel and think. I'm not entirely always clear what I'm going to get, and that's exactly what I'm excited by that I don't know what's going to happen. A bit like certain kinds of conversations that there are certain people you sort of know you might enjoy very much their company, but you have a sort of sense of the repertoire of things that they're going to talk about depending on the mood they'll be in. And there's another kind of very rare conversation, at least in my life, extremely rare, where you really don't know what you're going to get, but whatever you're going to get is going to be very interesting. And great works of art usually do that to me. So I'm engaged in this conversation and then when I exhausted or it exhausts me or I basically get bored, I move on to the next thing. And that usually takes a while for me. It takes quite a long, depends.

Noor Tagouri (00:18:36):

Can you walk me through the process you're engaging with? And maybe this is with the part, the piece that you're looking at right now, but like what's your first layer? What's your second? What's your third? Like How are you getting deeper and deeper and deeper every time you engage?

Hisham Matar (00:18:48):

Hard to account for in that way, but say right now, for example, I'm looking at this painting by Goya called the Forge. It's at The Frick here in New York. It's a very unusual painting because it's very large and usually paintings. Then if you're going to do an oil painting that large, it's usually somebody really important because they've paid for it. It's quite expensive to paint the painting that big. And Goya is very interesting because he exists at that cusp where the patron was still the dominant motivator, facilitator, but there was also a register where you could sort of do your own thing that you're not painting for somebody or for a commission. And he did a lot of drawings that way many. But there are very few paintings of that size that I know of at least that were not commissioned. And so the subject is very humble, these three smiths who are around a forge, around a flame and hammering at something, but they're mid hammering.

(00:20:06):

So the hammer is up in the air and you look at it narratively like that. Everything I've said about it now is the least interesting thing about it, right? What's really interesting is the way that he creates of a painting, a kind of energy of motion that these three figures seem to be involved in some physical momentum that you are not entirely sure whether they're even in control of. Like you don't know where is the hammer exactly going to fall? Is it going to fall in the right place? And so you feel that he's created something quite amazing for a painting to do. He's created a kind of dance of some sort, a very slightly unsettling one. And so I'm writing about it. And so I don't always write about the paintings I'm looking at, but this one I know I want to write about.

(00:21:05):

So I why? Because I've been asked to on some level, I mean it's a painting I've always been interested in, but somebody said, The Frick said, would you write about it? And I said, I'd love to write about it. So I've been, well, no, actually the Frick said, would you choose a painting in our collection and write about it? And I thought, that's the one I want to write about because I've had a question mark over it for a long time. I'm not really sure how it works. I'm intrigued by it. I'm led to it by questions very much like the books that I teach, I teach the books that I haven't quite resolved yet that I want to think about more deeply. Initially, when I first started teaching 12 years ago, I thought, you teach the thing that best and you have all your opinions are set on it.

(00:22:02):

And I did that once and it was terrible because it was just the class, just they just sat there, listened, received, there was no nothing dynamic there. So I learned the hard way that you should actually teach the thing that you are deeply fascinated by, but have questions about. And so I'm looking at the Forge and the book that I'm reading right now, rereading for the Upteen Time, and I am teaching, it is a book that frightens a lot of people. So I'm a bit of an advocate for it because I want to encourage people to read it. And it frightens them because it's very long. It's Marcel Prust French novelist, and he's really only written one work and it's made up of seven volumes. And it's called In Search of Lost Time. I teach only the first volume because there's in time to teach all the others.

(00:23:04):

But it's just incredible. I've been reading this book for a very long time. The first time I read it, I think I was in my mid twenties and it still takes my breath away. I still can't quite, I don't know how he did it. It shimmers and moves in ways that are very difficult to account for. So teaching it is a joy because I get the pleasure of being in conference with young, smart readers thinking about this magnificent sort of object. So yeah, things, I suppose the short answer for why what happens with a painting when I'm looking at it over a long period of time is I feel a deepening acquaintanceship with it. I feel I get to know more to it about it. It's a bit, maybe another analogy is editing. When you're editing a work, you are admitting secretly that you are never in one instant as intelligent as your book, that the book is an accumulation of insights over a long period of time.

(00:24:20):

In my case, it takes me three, four years to write a book. And in that time, all of these accumulations add up. And so the book will always be smarter, will always be better than me always. And this engagement with a painting, the things that I accumulate over that time cannot be done in one for me at least. Maybe for some people they can, but for me, I can't do it in one or even a month. I need quite a long period of time to accumulate those things. And also it feels like it. Companionship is really the word I feel that the forge, I've been now looking at it for two and a half years. And the forge is not oh, the whole time because I only live in New York for four months of the year. So in those four months I've been looking at it and the Forge is been with me with, as I am looking at other paintings, reading other books with friends in my moments of quiet. It's in some aspect of it, of course, not all the time, thankfully, not all the time with me. And that companionship is enriching it. It's enjoyable. Yeah,

Noor Tagouri (00:25:54):

I love that companionship that you are able to not only engage in but articulate what a relationship looks like with a piece of art or something that, or just the affirmation that life exists in this stillness too. I would love to know what question you are asking yourself these days in this moment in time as you're engaging with these pieces.

Hisham Matar (00:26:33):

I don't know if there is one singular question mean, there's a set of questions.

Noor Tagouri (00:26:43):

Well, you're really good at asking questions too, so I'm glad to hear them

Hisham Matar (00:26:46):

I mean, there are a set of questions and they're very intimate to the work. Cause I'm working, I, I've just closed the book and I'm sort of at those very last moments where I'm just looking at the final proofs. And something interesting happens when, for me, at least when a book is finished because you have the journey is a bit like this, at least for me, the beginning is a love affair. You're very excited. You feel like you really feel that the idea of the book, the first lines 20 pages or you really feel that somebody has gifted them to you, that they don't really belong to you and you feel so excited and enliven and then you get deeper and deeper and deeper. Urban Arab is, I think, whatever is it 13, how many stages of love that he does.

(00:27:47):

He does this meditation on the different stages of love. It's beautiful text. And he uses the Arabic words, the many Arabic words that describe love. And he uses them to describe the different stages. And one of the early ones is in al-laheeb, which is the word comes from flame. So he says that's the early stage because the lovers need to be welded, they need to be welded together. And one of the very latest stages is [inaudible], which comes from the words to describe how a plant passes through the trellising. So it's something to do with intertwining and becoming part of the same structure. And those stages both in love perhaps, but certainly in a work can feel the stage of alek can feel anxious making because you think, oh, I'm really now I'm really bound up here. I'm really here now. And I feel that with the work, when you come to the midsection of it and you think, okay, I still don't resolved everything and I'm now, in my case, that usually takes about a year to get to that stage. And I'm not even certain that the things that I know it wants from me, I can supply.

(00:29:15):

In fact, usually every book I've written, it's never been obvious to me that I could pull it off. And that's somehow part of the enterprise because I need to be challenged in that way. I need, if I knew I could do it, I won't, won't be as exciting somehow.

Noor Tagouri (00:29:34):

But how do you get over that bridge? How do you get over that in your head? You have the idea that it's possible, but you're not entirely sure if you are going to be able to do it. And then is it you just start and then you see what happens? Or is it then you blink and you realize you're halfway done? How do you cross the threshold?

Hisham Matar (00:29:57):

Very slowly. You do it through work. In my case, I just work, I do it through the work. And there are moments of sometimes of genuine despair where I really can't see my way through and you know, cultivate in you. I mean, I'll tell you the things that I found are helpful. You cultivate a humility that teaches you that the work isn't about you. The work isn't in service of whatever it is that you are excited about. Your ego, the ideas in the book or some mission or some message or it's not, the work doesn't exist in order to serve your purposes. It's actually the other way around. You are here in service, you are lending everything. And when it comes to literature, it wants everything. You cannot hold anything back and you have to put that, you lay that down at its feet and you serve it.

(00:31:06):

And so that helps. Getting yourself out of the equation for me really helps in moments of despair. The other thing that helps is an acquaintanceship with your own practice, with what works for you. And every one of us is different here. So in my case, for example, the morning hours are my best hours. I like to work very early in the morning. And it's also very good for me not to work because when I get into trouble, I work 12 hour days and it's, that's not really good. So I work the mornings and then I take the afternoons off, do something else, go for a walk, look at a painting.

(00:31:56):

I have to manage these things somehow, make sure I sleep well. And then I make sure I see certain kinds of people. I have a very small, I know a lot of people, but I have very few friends. I think maybe most of us, it's hard to have many, many friends. But even amongst my friends, and I'm sure I'm not alone in this, some friends demand certain things from us that we can give readily in certain states. And when we are compromised like that, in those moments I feel very compromised because I'm totally, I'm involved in a kind of battle very that is invisible and it's very difficult to explain to anybody who doesn't know it. So I just make sure that I frequent the people that fill me with gentleness and a sense of ease and intellectual. Similarly with works of art and so on, I might avoid certain things and go for other things.

(00:32:59):

Music suddenly becomes much more important during those times. And thankfully in London, where I live most of the year, I could go to a concert hall three times a week because they're cheap by comparison to New York. So just sort of learning whatever it is, whatever it is, baking, I don't know, it could be anything, right? That works for you. And those things work for me and make me patient with it. But really there is no other way through except to go through it to literally work your way through it. Interesting. That happens on the other side of it. That difficulty is that suddenly you feel the book is on your show, is on your back in a sense that it's pushing you forward. Things become a little bit less difficult, more. And then actually they become so effortless at certain moments that you even have to think, was it really that difficult? You start to doubt whether it was that difficult anyway. And then when you finish it, now, this is the stage where I'm at when I'm sort of looking at the proofs. You really see what you've done. And it's wonderful.

(00:34:13):

Look, I'll tell you something, I am, I've been very fortunate with my work. It got published and that in itself is not something to take for granted. It got read widely and by very thoughtful people. And I have encounters like this, the one I'm having with you now, which fills my heart and what you've said about it. So I'm, all of that I really take to heart. And it's been, but I must admit, the central joy, the real joy, the real joy is that part when you get to the end of the book and you really can see that you are not crazy that you've done it. And also what you were imagining in the beginning, you weren't mad. It actually is. It's happened. A form of it has happened. Not exactly, but a form of it has happened. Yeah.

Noor Tagouri (00:35:11):

Thank you for sharing. That is, I mean, what a gem. And that's, so I think I just appreciate your openness with all of that because it's so clear and you can feel it and appreciate it. In the words that you write, you traditionally consider yourself a novelist. You've written a couple of novels and you also have written a memoir. And I've been thinking a lot about, especially today, where even in the United States, books are being banned from schools

Hisham Matar (00:35:46):

Yes.

Noor Tagouri (00:35:48):

As someone who enjoyed reading and enjoyed writing so much growing up, but had a different kind of appreciation because you knew the power of a book because books were often banned when you were trying to read them or trying to enjoy them. How did your relationship with what a book even feels like in your hands?

Hisham Matar (00:36:15):

Yeah,

Noor Tagouri (00:36:16):

Contribute. How did that contribute to your motivation to write your family's story, your story name, the names that you did, even as, I mean, it doesn't feel like the war is over. And when you published the return in 2017, it definitely wasn't. So how did your relationship with books and reading in that way allow you the courage or gift you the courage that you had to do what you did?

Hisham Matar (00:36:53):

I mean, books were always, well, first of all, I wasn't really that great of a reader. When I was young, I read poetry. I didn't read novels unless I had to for school. I really only fell in love with novels when I was 19, the year, the month that I lost my father. And I remember that very clearly. I remember being in the arms of a novel feeling that I remember really being so gripped and that it became a host, a very hospitable host, and really deepened from there on. Before then, I only really read poetry. I thought, that's really the literature, that's what I thought. And it's a great thing,

Noor Tagouri (00:37:53):

A lot of poetry because I think that,

Hisham Matar (00:37:54):

So we had a very good library at home. We had a very good library. And my parents, somehow poetry was a very important thing. And I had an uncle who was a very good poet. So there were these dinner parties that usually in the end, someone will recite a poem. No, you, you're shaking your head the dinner party. And I loved the images and I was the kid, sounds like you were too. I was the kid in them where whenever a poem was read, I was secretly thinking, please don't stop. So I recognize that. And just to back the back up a little bit, I was also very early on acquainted with the fact that books are complicated, dangerous things. So I remember for example, when Gaddafi sent, the Libyan dictator sent these, it's actually quite an interesting moment. It's a complicated moment because he sent these young military kids, really, who, nobody's they, they're, it's not their idea.

(00:39:03):

He sent them to cleanse the bookshops and gave them a list of all these books. So basically everything was collected and put in the square and lit up. And I'm always, I don't know, I'm always fascinated by those boys who did it. So I was thinking, because I remember there was a kind of thrill. I mean, there is a thrill when you're young to burning things. I suppose there's right, but also it was clear in other words that they weren't I ideologically driven, they were just sort of following a thing. And it was probably a day where they didn't have to do something else that was less pleasant or they were out and about. So, but this idea that you would send kids or young conscripts to bookshops and take books and burn them. And then later on, when we lived in Cairo, my father's favorite bookshop, when we would go there, the man Al always the book seller, knew my father.

(00:40:06):

And so there would be this ritual, we would arrive. And I was a kid, I just enjoyed being with my dad, but I'm sort of, they're talking and I go around and look at books and they'd have a coffee. And then there would always come a moment when the book seller would lean over to my dad and say, shall we go upstairs now? And my dad said, would say, yes, yes, let's do that. And we'll go out of the bookstore to the next door building, go upstairs to this flat, very high ceilings in the old parts in Cairo, very high ceilings. And you could imagine every room is covered in books. And these were the band books. These were the books that the sensor wouldn't allow. And you'd be surprised what's there. I mean, it's the sort of books you and I would have on our shelf.

(00:40:57):

It's not very clear. Why is Milan condura censored by the Egyptian censor? I had no idea, or not all of his books, just that one testaments portrayed, which is a book that I don't know. I have no idea. There's no logic or not an apparent logic. I remember for example, when Manif published his trilogy, what is it called? Days of Salt, I think about Saudi Arabia, that moment, Saudi Arabian novelist, very interesting novel about that moment when modernity enters the country and the conflict between traditions and modernity. And it was banned in Saudi Arabia and was, I don't remember if it was banned in Egypt, but I remember the thrill of it when I was published and we're going to the bookshop and getting the copy and my father disappearing in his study for three days. You couldn't speak to him cause he had to read this trilogy.

(00:41:57):

He loved manif. And then I also remember being sent to the bookshop to get something else. And then finding these limousines that turn up from the Saudi embassy and these Saudi officials, diplomats, I don't know, addressed in traditional robe, walking out at night with sunglasses on and going to the bookshop and walking out with bags and bags of that book in black plastic bags, which is what people bought vodka. You've tried sort of to hide the right. So these were all very early experiences that brought it home to me very vividly, that books are actually quite interesting, complicated, possibly dangerous things. And then when my father disappeared, his library became a very important place for me. I would go and read his books and read the books that were in the library. And then Reed, he fell in love with novels. I remember very much from 19 to 25, those were the years of very hot reading. I read a lot of books. And there were lived in central London in the West End National Gallery is free to enter. And so I would go there and look at paintings. And on the way there, chair and Crossroad has all of these old, then now a lot of them closed secondhand bookshops where you could buy a book for a pound or so. I bought a lot of books and read a lot in that time, and I discovered things I didn't know. But the most exciting moments is when I found myself in these books.

(00:43:59):

Yeah.

Noor Tagouri (00:44:03):

Well, actually aside a little side reflection, so having had that experience, do you have any thoughts on the fact that books are being banned in the United States now or attempting to be banned?

Hisham Matar (00:44:17):

Yeah, I think soon. Well, I think first of all, as soon as a book is banned or people are enliven by the need to ban books, that's always a warning sign. That's always, that's a symptom of an ill moment. And so that's, I think very important to register that and then know how to engage with it and why is it happening? And it's also a moment, so it's a system, a symptom of a bad time, but it's also a moment where somebody wants to impose their authority. All attacks against books are usually to do with power, almost always.

(00:45:11):

And I've always found that interesting because on some level you think, why is a dictatorship, when we're talking about the Libyan example, why is a dictatorship concerned about books mean how many people read? And it's not like haven't seen people walk out on the street and say, I've just read Doki now I want a revolution. So it's almost a mystery to me. Why would you want to put writers in prison? Why so they're not that dangerous. But actually they're deeply dangerous because one of the things that a novel does is that it suspends authority. It's not very clear where the power is, right? Novels are usually about contested spaces. They're enliven by contradictions. We are drawn closer to characters, men and women who are running against their own hearts who don't know what the right answer is. And if you want to impose an authoritative narrative, whether as a dictator or as some dogmatic, extreme bureaucrat in some city in America wanting to ban in books in schools.

(00:46:26):

And so then you are actually wanting to impose a narrative and say, this is the way. It also, I think signals a very deep anxiety, almost, I want to say a trauma, but almost an anxie, an anxiety on the behalf of the person who wants to ban it. There's a very good writer called Adam Phillips. He writes these very thoughtful essays that are, they're thinking on the page. And he has this essay, I think it's called On Self-Criticism. And your readers can read it. I think it's in the London Review of books, don't think it's behind a paywall. It's a very interesting essay. And in it, he thinks about that voice that many of us, maybe all of us have. I certainly do The voice in your head that says, oh, you're not good enough. Or that when you drop something say, oh, you idiot, that voice.

(00:47:34):

And he sort of think, he takes that voice seriously, really thinks about it. And one of the things that he says, he says, well, it's very clear that that voice exists in the aftermath of some terrible event that they're sort of traumatized by something. And then he says, imagine meeting that voice in a party. I mean, the first thing you might think is that they're very boring, that they're very anxious. And I think of that when we think about banning books, because I think it is whoever is doing the banning exists in the aftermath of some terrible event.

Noor Tagouri (00:48:12):

Well, that's also very empathetic of you to think, to consider, to give context, to make the person the banner a human who might have their own anxieties or who need for control.

Hisham Matar (00:48:27):

Of course, they're not just a human, they're my brother and my sister. This is what I meant by the complexity of this inheritance have that Virginia Wolf is my sister, but Gaddafi is also my brother, and Hitler is my brother, and Bach is my brother. I mean, that's a very complicated situation, very complicated. And not in some abstract sense. I say the word brother or sister,

Noor Tagouri (00:48:56):

How do you say it?

Hisham Matar (00:48:57):

In a very direct sense. I mean, they are literally my fellow human beings. We belong to the same culture, tradition, roots, all of us. I really do believe that our equality to me isn't an abstraction. It's a lived experience.

Noor Tagouri (00:49:22):

That's an interesting reflection because what came to mind when you said that was that my original question had been about how did you decide that you were going to write this book with everyone's names and the truth and the truth, ist truth that you could, yeah. And all I heard, as you were saying that is it's all loving. You wrote this book lovingly. You were speaking to people who agreed with you, people who didn't agree with you, people who harmed you, people who oppressed you people. And it's still coming from almost a loving kinship.

Hisham Matar (00:50:01):

It's very interesting. You should say that. It's very interesting because the word love is, see, I've learned that in my first book in the Country of Men, which is a novel set in Tripoli at a very interesting moment in the late 1970s because that's the moment when the Qaddafi regime having exhausted the goodwill that it benefited from in the beginning, starts to do what all dictator ships need to do, which is find new enemies, rejuvenate the passions of its followers. And I've always wanted to set a novel at that moment because it was genuinely a moment of national psychosis.

(00:50:46):

But then there's a scene, there's a moment based on historical event where more than once, sadly, where people were called to come to the stadium, in this case it was a newly built basketball stadium, state of the art thing. And they come into the stadium and then they don't know why. So they're called to come to the stadium, they think there's a celebration. So they come, men, women, children, they all go there and the stadium is, all the gates are all locked once they're in. And then it's very quickly becomes clear what's going to happen, summary trial of a dissident who's pulled, weeping onto the court and then is hung from the basketball thing. And that's a moment of national psychosis because everybody's traumatized by it and nobody wants to talk about it. No one talks about it in Libya. Nobody talks about it. They talk about it only within family settings, but no one has ever written about it.

(00:51:54):

And I remember when I wrote that scene in the novel in the country of men, I remember the day, I remember we were living in a place that there was a garden and there was a little shed in the garden, and I would ride in the shed and it was a sunny day. And after I finished, I went up to the bathroom, take a shower, and the shower was beside a window. The sun is streaming in late afternoon, sun streaming in the water was hot. And yet I was shivering under the water because I realized I had crossed a line, I had written something that no one has written bef about before. And this sort of thing can get me into a lot of trouble. And those moments of knowing how to navigate these moments of what is allowed and what's not allowed. But the question of love is very important because as I wrote that scene, which I remember, it was charred into my mind from seeing it o on television because not only those people are in the stadium, but it was televised.

(00:53:11):

And Qaddafi regime was very clever in using the television as a way to enter the house. And so I don't mean here to focus on the Qaddafi regime, I'm talking more about how power works, but also when I wrote that scene, I had to be the executor and the executor. I had to be the noose. I had to find a way to, if you want to write it properly, I'm not saying I did, I made an attempt at it, but that was the intention. And so love here is the kind of love that I think we are implying, the very active, serious, complicated love where you want to, not the love of approval of course, but the love that wants to really understand and with the return. This was on a very personal level because the return focuses on events that are very intimate, obviously to my life. It's when I returned to Libya after 33 years of being away and trying to find answers to the question that had dominated my life since I was 19, which is what happened to my father, where is he?

(00:54:43):

Might, his remains be, what were the final hours, et cetera, all these questions. But to engage with the places and the people that I love, there was a lot of pleasure and joy and I found with it, I learned that first of all, this is not a book. This is not a book anyone would want to write because no one wants to go to those places. I don't want to go to those places where I think about what were the might have happened to my father, what were the final moments? I mean, that's not something I want to think about. It's certainly not on the page and preferably not at all if I can help it.

(00:55:35):

But it was a book that had a deep paradox in it. There was that, I don't want to do this, I don't want to be there. But the book itself was a gift. And I really think your books are your fate. Maybe just like your podcasts are your fate, your paintings are your fate that you know, can't choose them really. I mean, you could choose not, I could choose not to write it, but I don't feel like I have this sort of array of books and I can, now, which one do I want to do next? It's not like that. I feel it really does capture me. But this book had such broad appetites. I really do think a book comes with its character, it comes with its appetites, with its likes and dislikes. Sometimes the book wants you to do things that you are not keen on or you want to do things that the book is not keen on.

(00:56:41):

And it stiffens up a bit like when you turn up to a party and you didn't read the note about what you were supposed to be wearing. And it's the book too kind of stiffens up. So it has its own soul. Yes, it does. And its own voice and color and register and tempo. And this book, it was just this incredible horse. So I used to ride horses when I was young. It was a big part of my life. And I remember the moment when you get on a horse that's better than you, that it's got just better than you and you need to figure out a way how to handle it. And this felt like that. It just always was egging me on. It always, it was like, we want to have these different registers. We are going to have the journalistic register, and then we're going to have the vernacular one, and then we are going to do the landscape thing and then we're going to do the philosophical one, reflections, intimate family, friendship, love, all of it.

(00:57:42):

We're going to do all of it. Politics, we're going to do all of it. And I was like, okay, alright, I'll try to keep up. And so really as well as being so difficult to be in those spaces that was taking me, I felt so lucky and I felt like I was really handed this incredible gift of a book that was so rich and structurally so complex, the way it handled time. It's a book that pre ambulates, the present moment is very short. It's only about a week of it. You can write it in 12 pages if you want, but every step forward conjures up the past. And so it's always perambulating in this way. And structurally, architecturally was so rich, so intricate that it attended to all of the things that I liked and headed to poetry and philosophy to architecture, to the social gesture of who said what and a bit of humor and a bit of tragedy.

(00:58:57):

And it had all of those things. So I didn't really intend to write it. I went to visit, I didn't want to write anything. I didn't want to commit to anything. I kept a diary. David Remnick at the New Yorker magazine wanted me to write about it and wanted my wife, Diana, who's a photographer to photograph. And he thought this would make a beautiful piece. And we both thought maybe, let's see what happens. And David knows me and he's a wonderful editor, but he, he's a marvelous editor. And proof of that is that he really knows what will facilitate, what will make it easier for his writer. And in this case, he knew me and he knew that letting me go without any commitment was exactly the right thing to do. And I came back and didn't write for two, three months, didn't write a word.

(01:00:03):

Writing is a thing I do every day. It's part of my life. And it was totally gone. I didn't even write emails or anything. I didn't write at all. I didn't write. And I thought, fine, because I've never had a kind of careerist commitment to writing. I just want to be true. I want to do the thing that is true. I don't want to write a book that didn't need to be written just to whatever it is to satisfy my career. And so I thought, maybe I'll do something. I'll go back to architecture, maybe I'll fancy sculpture that I'll have a go at that, a baker, I'm a very good baker. Maybe I'll open a bakery. I really was thinking those things. And I went to visit a dear friend of mine who lives in the Piedmont in North Italy. And this guy is very, dunno how to describe it.

(01:00:55):

He really knows how to enjoy life. He really, he's just food and nature and just had, so I enjoyed the sort of lushness of his company. And maybe in that setting I thought, well, let me look at the, I brought my diaries with me, the Libyan diaries with me, and I thought, let me read them. I hadn't read them for these three months, so I thought, this is very good. I've sort of almost forgotten about them. I thought I'll read them as though they belong to someone else and see what happens. And I didn't go beyond the second sentence. And I just lifted those two sentences and I put them on a page. And I thought, if this were to be the beginning of a book, what would be the third sentence? And I wasn't thinking of writing a memoir or a novel or wasn't thinking of those things, say books to me are structures.

(01:01:52):

So I thought, I'll, I'll just start. Okay, I'll write the next sentence in the next sentence. And before I knew it, I had about 5,000 words. And the 5,000 words, I hadn't arrived to Libya in them. I was still in the airport. So I sent them to David and he said, great, give me another 5,000 because the piece was supposed to be around 5,000. So I wrote another 5,000 and it ends when I literally land in Libby, not much else happens. And that was the piece that was published in the New Yorker. He then told me, you realize this is a book. And he said this at the same time as my dear and much missed friend and publisher, Susan Campbell, who passed away in 2019 and broke many other writer's hearts. She's a very special editor, very special woman. And she read it on a flight.

(01:02:55):

I sent it to her. Same time I sent her to David, she read it on a flight. Ironically, I was in New York and she was flying from New York to London for work. And she landed London and called me and she said, this is a book. So those two people who are very, Susan, particularly very close to my work in a very deep way, somebody I trust, I that confirmed the instinct that I had. First person that told me it was a book was myself. The second person was Diana, who's a great reader. Diana's a very important part of the story because yeah, because Diana in a way, Diana's a very well, she's a marvelous artist and very seriously committed to her work in ways that I've learned a lot from.

Noor Tagouri (01:03:46):

Can I ask when you guys met, how old were you when you guys met?

Hisham Matar (01:03:48):

I was 26, 27 I think when we met. Okay. Yeah. And so we have been married for 24 years. And her approach to work is so rigorous and thoughtful and deep that I've learned so much from her. And she, and I don't know, we haven't figured out why this is the case, but we become pregnant around the same time and we deliver around the same time. So we have these projects that extend for a long period of time. And for some reason they're always like now her book, she's printing her book in the summer and my book is going to go to the press around that same time. And it's just, these are books that hers, she's been working on for six years, mine for three or four years.

Noor Tagouri (01:04:42):

So how does your energy intertwine in the process of both of you creating? Are you feeding off of each other? Does her being in her work mode energize you and vice versa?

Hisham Matar (01:04:54):

Yes. We work separately. She has a studio and I have my studio. So when we are working, we're not in the same space, but our conversations, we have a lot of conversations about one or another's work. I'm the first person that sees her work. She's the first person that sees my work. And we read, we attend to one another's work very seriously and very closely. And we have the sort of conversations that you can't have really with anyone else. Moments in the evening when there's a very particular detail that you are working with or you're wondering about and you want to hear yourself, just hearing yourself describe it is useful. But also receiving really sensitive insights. And also I think in a wider sense, not just on the work, but in our lives as artists that share a life together, that our engagement with other works of art, with how to live, how to be present in the world.

(01:06:01):

Those things I think are also very rich for me, at least for both of us. But with The Return, Diana beat me to it. Diana started a very important work where she was thinking about the evidence of my father's disappearance. She's never met him, but she has all of his evidence around her, myself, of course, my family, the house, his things, his books, his pocket squares or ties. And she is acquainted with all of that. And most vividly and importantly, his absence. And so you would think, well, there's nothing to photograph here. Literally, there is nothing to photograph because he's not here. But then she produces this photographic work that is incredible and it's very evocative and sensitive. And what's powerful about it is that it's inspired, starts with my father, but then goes beyond him. And she goes and photographs places in Rome. Rome is the one European city where quite a number of Libyan dissidents were assassinated.

(01:07:30):

And she would find the nearest tree to where someone was assassinated and she would photograph it in this very haunting way because the tree was there. Then it was a witness. And then she would go to places in Libya where political prisoners were held and she would photograph those. Now she really went right into the dark spaces and try to illuminate them with her camera and produce this wonderful project called Evidence, toured around museums around the world and is held in many collections. And this book called Evidence. And she did all of that before I even started writing the return. So I could see from her example, she was sort of lighting a torch in front of me and saying, not deliberately, I mean, she was doing it because it was a work that she wanted to make. I don't mean that she was making it for me, not at all. She was making it out of her own independence. But she showed me as an artist, as a fellow artist, and as my wife, o o, of how one might engage with the unspeakable because this experience of what happened to my father is unspeakable. It's, it's impossible to describe. And she showed me how it's exactly the impossibility. That's interesting. It's exactly the things that we don't know. And The Return delves into these spaces of darkness, the spaces where there is no information and tries to fill them with the imagination, with remembrance. Yeah.

Noor Tagouri (01:09:16):

I love the picture that you just painted with Diana, and I'm so grateful that you got to share the way that she held that light for you, because I can feel it. Even in the brief mentions that you wrote about her, you mentioned her presence is very strong throughout the entire thing. 

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Hisham Matar (00:13):

You know what I told you about the connection between evidence and The Return. I don't think I've ever said that before in this exact way. I've alluded to it, but not like this before, so

Noor Tagouri (00:27):

Well we're honored that you shared that with us. Yeah, it's a beautiful reflection and I can't wait for Diana to hear it. So the unspeakable,

(00:43):

I want to talk about this because this is what's really been on my heart lately. There's the unspeakable, the unfathomable, what our brains physically cannot comprehend. And I think that that's really what has been disturbing me and my dad who grew up in Benghazi and was a witness to the hangings on the university campus who I interviewed during Rep. And when I told him that I still had a responsibility to fact check some things that he had said, and he got emotional. What do you mean this is what's happened to us? He actually had me call Amo Hussein Shafei who I think you mentioned in the book with not by name, but potentially the person who was the cooker, the chef,

Hisham Matar (01:41):

Right? Last name. I thought so. Yeah, I thought so. Listening to when

Noor Tagouri (01:44):

I read it, I was like,

Hisham Matar (01:45):

Yeah.

Noor Tagouri (01:47):

Yeah. And I remember when I interviewed him, he had this also this life and this vigor of, and this confidence in sharing and speaking on the unspeakable. And something that you wrote as well was that to be Libyan is to have many questions. And I think that as someone who is of the younger Libyan generation or the Libyan American generation, I've only been to Libya twice and I was very young and there's this weird thing of bicultural identity. I'm not all the way American, I'm not all the way to Libya, and I'm something in between. But you piece together that identity with the stories of your family. But something that consistently comes up too, is that it's taken me several years to extract the stories of my family. And the reason The Return shook me so much specifically is because, so in our family, my grandmother, my grandmother's brother, my great uncle's brother Khalo [inaudible] has been missing for decades as well.

(03:07):

And he was a pilot for Gaddafi. And there's pieces to the puzzle of he had witnessed or overheard or saw an interaction or an arms exchange that had happened and he was young, and then one day he left on a job and he never came home. And so it, I've heard traces of that story and then traces of the 1986 bombing in the aftermath of that. And I've seen, but more than hearing the traces of the story themselves, I've seen what that trauma looks like and what that hope looks like in my own family members, in my grandmother, in who every conversation that I have, I piece together a little bit until it's too much for her. If I feel like it's too much for her or she'll tell me straight up, I can't talk about this anymore. And my grandfather, who also went through traumatic instances of, I just found out because I had dreamt of a little girl who had told me what her name.

(04:12):

She told me her name. I see a lot of my family and my dreams. So I kind of also have been piecing together. And I noticed that you also have had those experiences. And it was because of that. I ended up asking my family about it. And I had learned that my grandfather had a little sister who had died in the caves during the Italian occupation when they were hiding from them. And no, not even my grandmother had known about this. And it's like my grandfather, he doesn't speak anymore. He doesn't, he's very silent. And it's, I have this burning thing inside of me of I'm trying to document, I'm trying to piece together the stories of our families so that we can also just better understand who we are and who we come from and what is is our culture, what is our identity.

(05:01):

And I had brought it up. We had a really, our first really big family reunion this last summer, and I was interviewing all of the elders, and every time I was asking them questions, it came back to the resistance or what they did when they got to Amika to continue fighting for liberation. And my aunt came and whispered in my ear and said, try to get them to talk about something that isn't political, just about themselves. And so I attempted and my uncle grabbed Mike. He came up and he said, well, the reason that we can't do that is because our entire lives have been this, their entire life has been this fight from the moment that they came into the world until now, that's what has been on their mind. And it's like, it's really difficult to articulate, but I can feel it in my heart when your identity is shaped by an oppressor or by politics or it's been stripped away and it's kind of banning books, but it's banning identity.

(06:07):

It's banning your story, your own stories until they're constantly replaced with the fight. And so beautifully asked questions and shared feelings that have happened inside of your body, of what it's like to search for answers about what happened to your father. And I, I sobbed a lot of while reading, because I felt like I was hearing my own family member's words about their own missing brother or their own difficulty until now, still having hope that maybe he's still alive. And I don't know if it's like, I don't have to try to philosophize if it's a cultural thing or for whatever it is, but it's just like how do we begin to digest the unspeakable so that we can still document it so that the stories don't get lost?

Hisham Matar (07:15):

I mean, obviously this book would mean something much more intimate, I think, to a Libyan who has suffered some of these events. But what's been striking about it is that I've had a lot of people, I've had things happen with this book that have been really quite interesting. Yeah, I've had lots of people in Korea. The Korean publisher, my Korean publisher, wanted me to write an introduction to the Korean edition

(07:58):

For the Korean reader. And I said to her, why? And she said, because it's obvious and like a fool. I said, what is obvious? She said, well, lots of people here have disappeared. So there were together, and now they're not because the country has been divided. And I've had very similar things from Argentina, obviously because of the disappeared in Argentina, Lebanon, another country with the disappeared. So there there's been those responses, which you could somehow, now in hindsight, you can say, well, that's kind of predictable. But then I've had things like when I'd be signing books at the end of an event, there will always be with the return, there will always be a hand, two or three, usually men, middle-aged men like me, sort of in their forties, fifties, sixties in that range, who would leave me a letter, a sealed envelope with no return address. And they'll say, please read it later. In every event, I'd have one or two, maximum three would do this. And I'd take the train back to wherever I'm going, and I'll open the envelope and it'll be a letter for someone telling me about his relationship with his father. And a lot of these letters belong to men who have lived with their fathers who did not suffer exile. But there was something about

(09:51):

The loss of one's father, regardless how commonplace the circumstances are or extraordinary as are. There was something shared and those that meant so much to me because I think one of the things that I am, that I am careful about is I don't want the strangeness and idiosyncrasy of the details of the experience to be either done away with or to dominate. I want them to connect to the deeper reservoir of human emotions, to do with, do with memory, to do with the past is in the present. And how do we move on from here, given everything that has happened,

Noor Tagouri (10:48):

What does moving on look like to you? What does that mean? Because when I ask my dad every single time, I say, well, what did you do? How do you process this? How do you process what you got? I move on, I move on, I move on. And I don't think I understand what that means because I don't think it's possible to just move on and let go. It's always in you.

Hisham Matar (11:15):

Yes. I mean, I don't think the two are mutually exclusive. I mean in the sense that I think

(11:22):

My commitment to the present is very serious. I think this moment is to be treated with great care and presence of mind. I am very interested in everything that has happened. I am not interested in it dominating me. For the longest time, my father Wasright at the center, and I would be hovering around him, searching for him. My whole life was organized. Now I can see my whole life was organized around this. And I thought, and I write about this in the return that I thought that's what genuine fidelity is. And I found out it's not that, well, first of all, fidelity has to be exploded. You have to look at it in a much broader sense, fidelity to who and to what.

(12:26):

I spent half my life looking, my F, looking for my father. I'm still looking for his remains now. But I'm not as haunted or dominated by the task anymore. And something extraordinary has happened. I'm now at the center and my father is on the margins, and he is very pleased with that. And what's very strange is he's more vivid to me than he was when I put him in the middle. So I am, and that has just gi given everything that I do, everything that I do, more power, more force. And so I think if you are us, come from places that are very complicated and you grow up in a house that has really been exposed to the flames of the troubles of these places. And you have people around you whom you love more than anything, but who are deeply affected by this, and you've grown with the inheritance of their grief and you want to put it to right, because you're young and you have energy and you think you can remake the world, and you should definitely have a go at it.

(13:50):

If you have grown up in that situation, it stands the risk of cramping the muscles of your imagination towards the past. And it makes you forget that the present is actually what's really incredible. It's the fact that all of this has happened and we are here. That is really magical. So I really think this turning towards the, I describe in the book this reoccurring dream I used to have where I would appear to myself as deformed, and my face is, my head is turned and my face, face is backwards. It's very vivid, obviously dream. But this turning your face forward and facing forward is not a betrayal of the past. It's actually, it dignifies everything that has happened. Yeah,

Noor Tagouri (14:46):

I also, I had this overwhelming feeling as soon as you, that which when you said, and your father likes it better this way because I feel maybe it's also because you're finally giving him the space to show up as your father, rather than the roles reversed. And so when you put yourself at the center, he gets to be the father presence that that is no longer victimized. Yeah. He's actually fully the hero.

Hisham Matar (15:17):

Yes, absolutely. But also even one step after that, it becomes creative. My father used to have a really, it's a really lovely idea about what a conversation is, right? Because he spotted when I was young, when I was about 12, I was obsessed with debate and I was this annoying kid that would debate the hell out of everything. And I was very good at it. I would beat men, adults, and I was very, very good at it. And my father could see my pleasure, the pleasure that I took in it. He both admired my abilities, but he also could see the pleasure and he didn't like it. And he told me something. He said, listen, when you put someone in a corner, and I said, yeah, no, like what it's like. So when you put 'em in a corner, he says, back up, give them a graceful way to come out and told me about the French roots of the word debate is to beat someone with something, right?

(16:20):

Wow. So he says, what if debate isn't actually you beating me with your idea? What if conversation is as follows? You put forward your proposition and I'll put forward mine. I will defend my proposition and argue for it for a bit not too long. And you do the same. And then after that, we turn them around and you adopt mine and I adopt yours. And then once we're done with that together collaboratively, so it's not a competition, we go off and find a third proposition that neither of us knew and a fourth one and a fifth one. So conversation as a generative. So I think this

Noor Tagouri (17:03):

Is a very, very good take on debate practice in general,

Hisham Matar (17:07):

But also I think of it also in terms of what we're talking about, of how do we relate to the past. Yeah. You and I now have come up with several propositions of how to relate to it, but maybe we can find in ourselves the energy and the creative will to go and search for other possibilities of how to relate to the past. That in other words, how to relate to the past is never fixed. It's always open for investigation. Right.

Noor Tagouri (17:34):

So what is your

(17:35):

Relationship with our complicated inheritance now?

Hisham Matar (18:15):

What is my, I think, no, I think the trouble with answering that question is defining the word our, because it depends on what context you see it. Because I think something else you and I share, and thankfully it's becoming more and more commonplace. We are engaged with different cultures, we're touched by different languages. And certainly when I was young, that was represented a kind of, it seemed to me often as though it were a problem, as though it was something I needed to resolve. I am a Libyan writing in English,

Noor Tagouri (19:03):

Right?

Hisham Matar (19:05):

That's an issue. And I need to resolve it. It's a problem. Or that I live here and all of these various contradictions that happen with people who move and live elsewhere. But now, for me, actually, I don't feel that these things exist in contradiction at all. I think it's actually very interesting that I am Libyan and I write in English. Yeah. It's not that it's more interesting than me writing in German or in Arabic, but it's just interesting. So fostering a kind of curiosity towards these things that isn't a narcissistic curiosity to do with, oh, it's me, how unique? No, but a genuine curiosity towards it is something that I'm interested in. So for me right now is a very rich place. Our for me is, and abk and Dante and Shakespeare and Virginia Wolf and Prust and so on and so on and so on by sala. And so many hours become an it. It's expanded. And our is also, of course, in a very specific sense, Libyan, but also I've lived in London for the majority of my life. I'm now 53, and I've lived the last 36 years of my life in London. And I have a very deep passionate relationship with that city. Not always easy.

(20:44):

So that's our too for me. Yeah. That's also mine. Yeah. So I, I've want to give you a sense that I am somehow this person who's at ease with all of these contradictions, but I think more often than not, I'm curious and grateful. Those are the two most consistent sort of things. I think it was Spinoza, he has this idea about, if I'm not mistaken, I think it was him who has it, or if it wasn't, I attribute it to him. Spinoza is one of the few philosophers in my view who wrote very well. Sentences are pleasing to read. Schopenhauer for me is wonderful writer, but very few philosophers. Plato of course, but very few philosophers write in a way that you can enjoy it as literature. And I hope I'm not offending philosophers, but Spinoza had this idea that you measure your intelligence, not by at least the way I remember it, not by how many things or how quick you are to figure out the answer, but your intelligence is the health and vitality of your curiosity, the more you want to know. So that to me, for me, is what I try to foster towards all of this.

Noor Tagouri (22:08):

I mean, because I think curiosity allows you to be a witness and an observer to the human experience that you're having rather than a victim to it.

Hisham Matar (22:17):

Yes.

Noor Tagouri (22:19):

And I feel like from that place, we see so much more clearly. Thank you so much. Okay. So I have two more things. One is, can you tell us anything about your upcoming book?

Hisham Matar (22:33):

I would love to tell you about my upcoming book. It's a book that's been with me for a long time. I thought since 2012, because immediately after the events in Libya and in Egypt and Tunisia and Bahrain, I thought, I want to write a book about friendship and about these three friends, three Libyan friends in London who start at the same place and end up in a completely different place. And I just didn't know how to do it. And I felt it was too soon to write about those events. And a couple years ago, the British Museum invited Diana and I to do an exhibition, and they wanted me to collect Diana's work. So they wanted her to bring sketchbooks for evidence for the book evidence. And they wanted me to use the collection to do a display around the return. I'd never been asked to do this by a museum before.

(23:33):

And so I went into my archive to find what sketches, images that I notes from the time that I was working on, on the return. And I found an envelope on the back of the envelope from 2003 when Diana and I lived in Paris. And on the back of the envelope, I had written three sentences about a book that I, one day one to write. No. And it's this book that I've just finished. No. So I thought I had the idea in 2012, but I think for a very long time I wanted to write a book about male friendship in particular. You love that. These one, my favorite topics. So it's called My Friends.

Noor Tagouri (24:43):

The concept of male friendships is something that we talk about all the time now, and I think that we need more people talking about it and more stories around it.

Noor Tagouri (25:04):

And what does it come out?

Hisham Matar (25:05):

Comes out in January. Yeah.

Noor Tagouri (25:09):

Okay. And the way that we like to wrap up is just kind of a fill in the blank. So this statement, if you really knew me, you would know, and you can do one, two, or three things.

Hisham Matar (25:24):

I mean, the fun thing is that I am such a good cook.

Noor Tagouri (25:29):

I love that you keep bringing that up and it's just like somebody want, does anybody want to invest in this bakery?

Hisham Matar (25:34):

No. No. I don't want anybody, I don't want to do it for work, but I'm just really a good cook. I mean, it's really embarrassing, but I really think I'm a really great cook.

Noor Tagouri (25:44):

Why is that embarrassing?

Hisham Matar (25:46):

Because it's, well, first of all, it cannot be objective, but I enj, it's something I really enjoy and I love cooking for. What is your favorite thing to make people I love, and I love a very long dinner party where it just takes, there's like six courses. I love that sort of stuff. And I think about it, and when we invite friends or family, and part of my brain the whole afternoon is designing the meal, and I go to the market and I find I'm a market cook is the best way to describe it. So you're your mother's son? I look at, yeah, exactly. I look at what's fresh and what's what I feel like, and I am improvising all the time. I never cook from books. I've been taught by very good cooks by mother's family are just amazing. And certain friends who are like this friend I mentioned in Italy who are just very good cooks. And so I love an evening together in the kitchen with friends, to me is something I enjoy. So that's something you would know about me. What else?

Noor Tagouri (27:00):

You have to give me one meal. What's Diana's favorite meal that you make?

Hisham Matar (27:04):

Well, it changes because it depends. I'm not very good at repeating things, but, well, the other day I made hab, libi, and then really likes that, and I basically nail it. Classic, no humidity. See, this is why it's embarrassing. It's very embarrassing. If you're going to, I make pasta. Nobody else makes pasta from

Noor Tagouri (27:30):

From scratch, obviously

Hisham Matar (27:31):

The whole thing, or not from scratch, whatever you like. A good roast for

Noor Tagouri (27:37):

You, for yourself when you're sad, like your comfort food?

Hisham Matar (27:45):

No, if I am sad that I want to cheer myself by cooking, I want to cook for others, the thing that secretly horrified me. Yeah, tell me, this is something else you need to know about me. Is that when you go out with, say, say somebody's cooked something amazing and you're all sitting to eat and someone eats it and there's absolutely no, nothing changes about them. That to me really disturbs me. I cannot trust them. On some level, I think something is wrong, something that's, have

Noor Tagouri (28:18):

You ever called anybody out for doing that?

Hisham Matar (28:20):

No, but I'm just in secretly in secret outrage is what I do. I'm very good at that.

Noor Tagouri (28:29):

I love it. Just have one more. If you really knew me. For us,

(28:32):

Those were

(28:33):

Really good ones.

Hisham Matar (28:37):

When I was a university student and I had no money and I fell in love with music, I discovered that I could sneak in to the second half of a concert for free. And so what I did, I had is this is a clandestine education in classical music. I would go to the bar because always in the bar you can have a glass of water for free, and you had to have on a shirt, try to look a bit smart and put a book, a very slim volume in. Your books are very important here, and you have your glass of water, you're reading your book, and you're totally immersed in this book. No one can tear you away from this book. They ring the bell. Third time, everybody's going up. You wait till most of them have gone up, and then you tail behind them reading the book.

(29:23):

Nobody likes to disturb a reading, man. Just read the book. And then you just sleep, walk into the auditorium, and you stand there and you're reading the book. You can't let it, can't look away from it, and then the lights come down and you sort of wake up and you look around and there's always an empty seat. The musicians love it because nobody likes an empty seat. And if you go to chamber music, which is what I did, you're not getting the second half of an opera or something. You're getting a full piece of music. And because you can't choose, beggars can be choosers in this. I had a very wide musical education and I just followed my instincts and I owe a huge debt to public libraries. Yes. Because yes, you know, could rent CDs out and so on. And so I just taught myself, followed my passion, but I was clandestine. Yeah. I did that for a good three years or two, three times a week I did that. Yeah. Well,

Noor Tagouri (30:22):

Maybe it's Libyan thing, because I'm really sad that my younger brother just had to leave because he is a wizard of being able to do exactly that. That is

Hisham Matar (30:32):

Now I'm not so good at it, but, well, I was good then.

Noor Tagouri (30:36):

He has taught us some good tips, and I love that that's how you got your musical education. Hisham. You've been so generous with your time, with your stories, with your truth. I know I started on gratitude, but I want to end with such sincere gratitude.

Hisham Matar (30:49):

Thank you so much. I'm so grateful for this conversation. Thanks. And it's so nice to meet you.

Noor Tagouri (30:54):

It's great to meet you. Thank you.

*AD BREAK*

OUR EPISODE IS NOT OVER YET! THE DAY AFTER OUR CONVERSATION, HISHAM REACHED OUT SAYING HE HAD BEEN THINKING ABOUT WHEN I ASKED ABOUT MOVING ON…HE REFLECTED ON IT AND WANTED TO SHARE MORE..AND BEFORE WE GET INTO THAT HERE’S A LITTLE REMINDER TO LISTEN TO OUR WEBBY NOMINATED INVESTIGATIVE PODCAST “REP: A STORY ABOUT THE STORIES WE TELL.” WE DIG INTO MEDIA REPRESENTATION, OUR RELATIONSHIP WITH STORIES, TRUTH, AND OBJECTIVITY…AND YOU CAN CONTINUE TO SUPPORT OUR WORK AT AT YOUR SERVICE BY FOLLOWING US ON INSTAGRAM, @AYS OR CHECKING OUT OUR WORK AND TRANSCRIPTS TO OUR PODCAST EPISODES AT AYS.MEDIA…OKAY…BACK TO HISHAM. 

Hisham Matar:

Noor!

Noor Tagouri:

Hisham!

Hisham Matar:

Kayf Halek? (How are you?)

Noor Tagouri (00:21):

I feel really clear today and I feel very grateful today. How are you?

Hisham Matar (00:28):

Oh, that's, that's very good. That's very good. Well, yeah, I enjoyed meeting you and Adam and Mohamed and Sarah, and you guys obviously are very, very, very special. So it was a pleasure. I just wanted to add something because I have been, something you said yesterday remained with me and I was thinking about it. So I forget how you framed the question, but something like, how does one move on and Right?

Noor Tagouri (01:36):

Yeah, I was referring to my dad talking about moving on and I was asking, what does that even look like? What does that really mean?

Hisham Matar (01:43):

Yes. Yeah. And I was really, it remained with me that question sort of echoing, cause I know I answered it, but there was more I wanted to say, and it had to do with

(02:01):

The fact that moving on must involve I think a gesture of expansion, by which I mean taking the specific facts of whatever event we're talking about here and connecting it to a much larger landscape of events and ideas and so on. And for example, I felt that it was always, there was a moment in my campaigning for the whereabouts of my father in the early days when I was young and consumed by the pain and urgency of it. I was focused primarily on my father. And that was fine, but it had the feeling of something growing in the wrong direction. And

Noor Tagouri (03:13):

Remember you actually writing about that and that's why when you reflected and you said, now you are at the center of the story and not your father. And I felt like I, I love that because you give him the opportunity to show up as a father. Because I remember you saying in the middle of the campaign, the more that you were publicly looking for him, the further away he felt.

Hisham Matar (03:40):

Yes, yes. That, that's analogous. I mean that's connected to what thinking about now, but it's not exactly the same thing because within the campaign, the moment things shifted was when we connected what was happening to my father, to so many other people, and we looked at structural causes. So it became less of a family story and more of something much broader that was looking at causality in a much larger sense. And I felt that a bit with listening to your podcast. It reminded me of that because obviously you do so well in looking at sort of cliched responses to Libyan, like the film that you mentioned and so on, things that sort of ease the ground for one country to go and bomb another country. And I think you do that very well. That's a very important conversation. And then you do extremely well in exposing the nature of the damage and the pain generationally on different generations in your family who all I felt spoke very eloquently about it.

(05:17):

And so you do all of that. Well, I felt, and then at the final episode, when you are speaking at Harvard and this unlikely event happens where there's somebody in the audience who happened to be there at the location of the, it's very powerful moment, but then it's there that I felt that things suddenly stopped evol evolving because then it stops being, it remains to be just a story about, or not just, but mainly a story about a family and about the relationship between this family's place of origin and their adopted country, the United States. And it remains there and I think mean that's all fantastic, but yesterday when we parted ways, and I had your question ringing in my ear about how does one move forward? I thought of that, I started thinking of your episodes and I thought one form, well, the short answer is I don't know how one moves forward, but in other words, I don't have a recipe for it.

(06:32):

But one possibility would be to connect those events, what happened in 86 and what happened to your family, to a much broader set of causes that have allowed that continue to our day to day that have allowed the United States to do that, not just in Livia and so many other places. And very recently under the Obama years with the drone attacks in Afghanistan and in Pakistan, an argument could be made that actually what happened in Libya in 1986 was the beginning. It wasn't the end. It was the beginning of a trend that has become not less acceptable, but far more acceptable because many, many more people have died in ways that your relatives have died. And so I felt this is basically my worry about the desire to find closure because the desire to find closure as well intentioned as it is, because nobody wants to live in suffering if closure means the end of suffering.

(07:51):

But oftentimes I feel the desire to find closure trumps the actual issues and therefore it inverts the story and makes it about us as individuals rather than about the broader picture. And I think that it's not an easy thing to do what I'm saying, but I think a heroic victory here would be to take the specific pain that has been dealt us and use it as an instrument to expose the wider structural maladies that have made that possible. I think about that a lot these days in America, particularly with question of police violence and how there's a real desire, I think, in America to explain these things away by only by problems of racism, which of course are endemic and exist. But I think there is a much more uncomfortable truth about the country to do. The fact that it has together with all of that is marvelous about us.

(09:00):

It has this brutal ability to be incredibly violent and to be able to kill innocent people at home and abroad, much more abroad, of course, in ways that are careless and should really shock everybody, right? Yeah. So I felt that those were some of the thoughts that were going in my head as we parted ways that I was walking at night to meet my friends. And this was on my mind that I was thinking, I must speak to Noor because these conversations happen in an instant, and yet they remain, no, they remain sort of working on us in some ways and unfolding. So yeah, that's why I wanted.

Noor Tagouri (09:55):

Wow. Well first of all, I'm honored that you were still thinking about the conversation afterwards because I absolutely was as well. And I think I still am processing all of it, and it means so much to me that you would shared what you just shared because I completely agree with you. And it's interesting because I'm so eager now for you to listen to the rest of the series because that was, that's essential. So the first and the last episodes are the personal, and then the middle of the series is taking that zoomed out effect of understanding how we got here structurally. And so the story of my family, it was only meant to be a very short example in an episode I called America's Greatest Export, which is this theory that America's greatest export is her story or American exceptionalism. And so we break that down.

(10:55):

I mean, the series is a story about the stories we tell. And so to me, something I think about a lot is to, in order to digest these structures or these cycles that continue, I feel like stories are how we can understand them. And that's why I think reading your work is so important to someone like me because you did that so beautifully with, I had never learned so much about Libyan history and Libyan culture until I read, read Your Work. And also understanding when the work compels you to ask what is the role that I'm playing in all of this? And I think that is, I know it's a really big task and an ongoing task to analyze the structures at play. And sometimes it can feel so overwhelming because it's like, well, what can I actually do about it? But the reality is there's always a role that we are playing in this, and I feel like reframing our stories or retelling or analyzing and interrogating our stories is my entry point.

(12:05):

It's how I want to do that. And it's interesting because after the Harvard talk, we didn't include this, but there was a woman who stood up and she was, I believe from, she was from Tibet, and she had shared that she wasn't even meant to be at the event. And she was so emotional and she felt like there was this anger that she had inside of her. And she asked this question of, but how do we even begin to tell these stories if we have so much anger inside of us? And to me it was like this, it's going through this healing process of being able to tell your story from a reflective place to really understand and analyze and almost regain authority of the pen to write your story. Because a lot of we're, we are talking about a people who, the reason your book is so radical is because we never hear this story from your point of view.

(13:08):

I mean of whenever you often hear the stories told from the oppressor. I mean, that's why we were talking about the banning of books in America, and especially when it comes to something like critical race theory. We are trying to control who gets to tell it. And you recognize the power of, even in the word, even in the book, even in the story, it's bigger than you and it doesn't belong to you. And I feel like that is maybe the weapon of choice in, I don't want to say destabilizing structures, but creating new paths. Because I feel like that to me is when I think of moving on, maybe it isn't trying to fit our footsteps in the footsteps of the past, but rather continuously pave a new one and then bring people along the way until we're able to, I guess, create the structure that feels more true to us, that feels more healing, that truly is of service.

(14:08):

And that's kind of how I've been thinking about it. And I love so much that you, you're bringing this up because that was what we spent investigating the last couple of years. But my entry point ended up becoming this personal story because I realized the pattern, which was that there, the Back to the Future episode had come out, then this attack had happened, this political attack had happened, and then it changed the way people thought. So throughout the, we call it the three Ps and rep, so it was politics, pop culture, and public opinion. And we kind of analyze that dynamic. And it's essentially a tool that you can use now when you're confused about why you feel a type of way about a story. Because there are always these cycles at play. And it's in understanding the stories that were being presented that I feel like we begin to almost discredit the structures that give them so much authority to begin with.

Hisham Matar (15:07):

And I think starting with the personal is very powerful to do that. Really, it's a very good choice. And to do it the way that you are saying, then you lead it into something much broader. I think that's very powerful. Also, right now, I think particularly nor because there's this sense of a fragmented narrative, right? Yeah. Isn't one story that we all share, we're all listening to something at a different time. We don't all watch the same thing at the same time. Yeah. There is no meeting places where we gather and congregate and exchange ideas. So I think it, it's very important.

Noor Tagouri (16:03):

There was the breakthrough that I had, I'll share this with you. It was such an interesting point in the journey because when I started Rep, I had had all 10 episodes planned out and I knew what it was going to be and all of this stuff. And then of course it took a turn, it took its own turn because I came across all of my great uncle's archive and I was like, wait, this, there's a bigger story. There's a bigger starting point, and what happens if we start with the personal and we work our way out? And so there was an episode, it's the fourth episode, it's called Shikata Ga Nai, which is Japanese. It translates, it's Japanese, and it translates, it cannot be helped. And a friend of mine who's a musician, he is also a Japanese American. And when he heard about my project, he was like, you should to need to talk to internment camp survivors, Japanese internment camp survivors.

(16:59):

And I was like, huh, why is that? Originally the project is supposed to be about Muslims and Arabs and representation, because that's the angle that I know and what I needed to interrogate for myself. And he had mentioned this, and I had had it on my heart as an intention

(19:39):

And then towards the end, this one woman who was actually there with her twin sister, she looked at me and she just said, actually, I've always empathized and related to Muslim Americans, actually. And whenever I marched with them too, and I was so taken aback, and I was like, why is that? And she said, because as soon as we heard President Trump saying certain, verbalizing certain rhetoric, it sounded familiar to us. And I knew what that meant for our community. And so I immediately related, and it was like her finally sharing these personal stories for the first time in this way, the zoomed out picture, it was at the very end of the interview, I understood why they needed to be a part of this process. And it was just constantly this zoom out of we are not the only ones. We are never the only ones in our stories.

(20:41):

And that's an interesting thing because after “REP” came out, I had so many people reach out about their own family members who had died in bombings. And it's so chilling because I Sure. Because it's like I, they're not numbers. And that's the thing that was so haunting. It was that there is no such thing as collateral damage. People are not numbers, and they have descendants. And we are the descendants who get to witness them and share their stories. And that's how I feel like we are able to actually process and digest the structures of power, because sometimes those structures are so big that our brains can't fully comprehend them. Sometimes the evil is so passionate and so strong, and it's confusing. It's so confusing. And I think especially when it's being done by people who look like you, who have similar names to you, it's really hard to actually understand or fathom it. And it isn't until the personal details are presented where you're just like, this is the truth and no truth can be ignored, and we can't continue ignoring this.

Hisham Matar (21:55):

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Wonderful. Well, I'm very glad we reconnected and I'm, I'm going to listen to the episodes that you mentioned. When I get some time

Noor Tagouri (22:13):

I would love to hear what you think after. If you have the capacity to listen to it. It would mean so much to me because your perspective, I really do seek to do that work. And if you have any feedback or anything comes up for you, please share that with me because I only want to get better at doing this.

Hisham Matar (22:36):

I will. I will. And that's very clear, and you're so good at it. And you've got this incredible format that works so well. And you have, I'm sure many, many, many fans and listeners. And so you're very well placed to inspire others and inform them. And so that's just so exciting. And yes, now we will remain in touch, I'm sure. Absolutely.

Noor Tagouri (23:08):

Thank you. Thank you, thank you. Yeah. And the goal is always to be of service. So if there's any way we can be of service, please let us know. And I can't tell you enough how grateful I am that you would even think to reach out, to share a reflection about the work that I've put out. It really means the world.

Hisham Matar (23:28):

Thank you, Noor, thank you so much. Well have a lovely time. Is it sunny there? Here?

Noor Tagouri (23:35):

It absolutely is. We're still in this city because we're recording a couple of more episodes, but I'm actually about to go to the New Museum with some friends because I've just had this itch and I'm hoping to make it to the frick this week to go see the Forge, and I can't wait. And sit in front of the painting and ponder on the questions that you presented.

Hisham Matar (23:58):

Let me know when you see us. See we get a chance. Absolutely.

Noor Tagouri (24:03):

Have a great rest of your day.

Hisham Matar (24:05):

Thank you.

Noor Tagouri (24:06):

Bye, salam.

Hisham Matar (24:07):

Bye bye.

PODCAST NOOR IS AN AYS PRODUCTION. 

PRODUCERS INCLUDE, MYSELF, ADAM KHAFIF, SARAH ESSA. 

EDITING, MIXING AND MASTERING BY BAHEED FRAIZER. 

EXTRA GRATITUDE AND THANKS TO OUR STORYTELLER HISHAM MATAR. MAKE SURE YOU CHECK OUT HIS NOVELS AND HIS MEMOIR THE RETURN.

AND AS ALWAYS, AT YOUR SERVICE.