Hisham Matar: 'I don't remember a time when words were not dangerous'

As a schoolboy in Tripoli, the author was captivated by Arabic. But when his family was forced to leave, it was in English that he came to speak, think and write

Before everything, there was Libya. The boys and I would gather on our street in Tripoli during the aimless afternoon hours. The sun would still be strong, its power seeming to increase as it descended. You feared losing it, as though it were ever possible for the sun to never rise again. One such afternoon, one of the boys suggested I draw something. He had asked me this because I had just found, in one of the empty building lots on our street, a good stick. It was long and thin and strong, producing, when I struck the air with it, a beautiful whistle. “Go on, anything,” he said. Feeling the attention of the others, I quickly drew into the sand the map of our country: a square with the wiggly line of the north coast. The boys said it wasn’t right. I had missed the step where, in the south-east, Sudan cuts in a corner, and I hadn’t got the snaking curve of our Mediterranean, where the sea sticks its tongue into Brega, quite right either. This was two years before I left Libya and would not see Tripoli and our street for another 33 years.

I was seven that year. The two things I excelled at were strange and, if anything, inspired the puzzlement rather than the admiration of my peers. I could swim further out into the sea than anyone dared, so far out, in fact, that the water became a different territory, icy, its surface the rough grain of stone and the depths, when I opened my eyes underwater, the black-blue of a bruise. I still recall the curious mixture of fear and accomplishment I felt when I would look back and see that the land had disappeared. No matter how tall I would paddle myself up out of the water, I could not see the shore or my friends, who had been swimming behind me at first but after yelling, “Hisham, you’re crazy”, one by one had fallen back and turned to swim towards the beach. I would remain there alone and let the sea’s conversation, rising and falling in gentle waves, carry me with it. Even though my heart would be pounding by now and there was no one to see me, I would dare myself even further: I would close my eyes and spin around myself until I lost direction. I would make a guess and begin swimming back where I thought the shore might be. Somehow, I never got it wrong. Not once.

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