Literature and cities
NoonOctober 4, 2022 – 13:38
A walk with the Libyan writer who presented here “A landing point”
from Mirella Armiero
«NIs this not one of the possible definitions of happiness: to be expected? ». Hisham Matar, the Libyan writer awarded with the 2017 Pulitzer for his intense memoir “The return”this question arises in the first pages of his latest book published in Italy by Einaudi, “A landing point”. And he certainly feels a bit of happiness when he returns to Naples, where he is certainly expected. From friends and perhaps even from the city itself.
This is why we experienced a different encounter, not a classic interview, sitting at a table, but a walk through the city, which the writer is starting to know better. On this occasion he was invited by the Campania books festival, where he spoke (interviewed by Vincenzo Trione) just about “A landing point”, a singular autobiographical text that has its center in the passion for Sienese painting of the thirteenth century. We start from the seafront, where he is staying. I meet him around 8 in the evening, he has to join his Neapolitan friends for dinner, in Piazza Dante. Very Neapolitan time of the appointment: 10pm. We have plenty of time to walk, the evening is warm and clear, the north-east wind has cleaned the air. We have not seen each other since before Covid, we had met on a previous occasion, it seems to me that I am resuming a speech that was recently interrupted.
Sienese painters
We have to talk about the book, let’s start from Naples instead. After all “A landing point” it is built around a city, Siena, where Matar spent a month, alone, looking for a profitable exchange with the works of those painters he had begun to love more than twenty years earlier. He had met them for the first time at the National Gallery, in London, where he had landed (and where he still lives, alternating periods of teaching in New York) after leaving Libya. In his hometown, his father Jaballa had been kidnapped and imprisoned, and later killed, by the secret police under Gaddafi’s regime. Painful story that Matar tells in Return. After finishing his journey into the past with some effort, the writer felt the need for a break in Tuscany. In a “thick and oppressive” solitude yet endowed with its own “temporal richness” because “when you are alone time becomes a room with two windows: one overlooking the past and the other the future”.
Places and identities
Siena is not Naples, of course. But also in South Matar feels he has territories to discover. «This is a city where you can spend time without feeling that you are here: let me explain better, here you can be with yourself, as if you were not in Naples. It’s a feeling I get in cities that have a very strong facade identity. Like in Venice. All the baggage of clichés gives you a sense of estrangement, allows you to get confused with the city. Perhaps it is a singular point of view but for me it is so. On the other hand, it is also true that here I experience feelings of familiarity, smells, noises that bring me back to my childhood ». Perhaps, in part, that “clear substance of the Tripoli light” he talks about in the book.
We are continuing through Santa Lucia, looking for a bar for a stop. A black group vigorously plays the drums, it seems an exotic rhythm, but to hear it well it is a song by Carosone, rhythmically beyond belief. Not a good place to listen, let’s go further.
Childhood memories
Hisham overturns the order of things, he asks me what I think of Naples, how we live here, what is more tiring. Then he remembers: «When I came for the first time, I saw among the first things a girl of about ten who drove a moped and it reminded me of myself in Cairo, at that age». Another familiar city for him, where he lived, where a part of his family now lives. “But she has become tough, I don’t always recognize her.”
American tourists
We arrived in Piazza Municipio, he asks me if anything has changed, I tell him about the controversy about the space that is too empty, about the choices of Alvaro Siza. He wonders if the citizens like it, then he tells me about the plane trip to get here, there were so many rich American tourists intent on listing the places they would visit. “They made me dizzy, in three days from Capri to Sorrento, Naples, Pompeii … this storm tourism is a global phenomenon, it is now sweeping Naples, even if the city still has its own space of authenticity”. Pasolini’s ability to resist modernity? I tell him that the Neapolitan tribe is quite tired of resisting. “I know, many of my friends tell me, it’s one thing to come here for tourism, to visit something, it’s another to live there, normality is a utopia for you, I understand.”
It’s time for a drink. In the conversation, some more personal glimpses, children, families, reading, desired trips … Matar has a particular way of speaking. Calm, but also amused, accomplice, as if the thought of him supported the words comfortably, without fractures. He has nothing of the neurotic or self-referential intellectual. He listens with interest.
Words and footsteps
We keep walking. Are you tired? I ask him. “In no way. I like walking ». Of course, thinking about it is a crucial point of the book. Walking for him is not pure stroll, but I would almost say a form of knowledge of a philosophical matrix. In Siena his paths always go towards the end of the city, as if to understand the concept of limit. When he then sits on a bench just outside the city walls and looks inwards, it is an explicit reference to the “frame”, both of the gaze and of the work of art. “You read the book right,” he laughs. And then he tells me that when his father showed him a painting, he always tried to imagine what lies beyond, the part of the work that the painter did not paint. His analysis of the works of Lorenzetti, Duccio, Simone Martini is profound and detailed, but it remains a very personal approach, not purely “technical”. “I think the painter himself would prefer it,” he says. For Matar, painting, like love, has a singular prerogative: “Only inside a book or in front of a painting can one really have access to another’s perspective”.
In front of the painting
He was in Capodimonte, even there he focused on thirteenth-century painting. Did you do as you always do? I ask him again. Hours or days in front of the same painting? He laughs again: “I know, it’s crazy, but I always discover new details, I need that time.” And the keepers of museums know this too, for example in Siena they ended up offering him a chair, they greeted him with familiarity.
Our walk takes a winding path, I want to show him a bit of the historic center, he certainly already knows it, at some point it seems that I am lost and that he is the guide. However we arrive in front of Palazzo Penne, where the windows of abandoned rooms seem empty orbits, waiting to regain possession of the view. Then Palazzo Giusso and finally up, towards Santa Chiara. The nightlife is quite composed, without excesses, Naples sometimes surprises you, tonight here it seems like any European city full of young people. «Particular interactions are established in places, it depends a lot on individual perception. And the place is transformed through the people, ”observes the writer.
The next novel
At the center of his new novel there will be a walk, he has just finished writing it. “It’s about friendship, the meeting of two old friends, a story that lasts two hours in all.”
When we arrive in Piazza Dante it starts raining unexpectedly. We run into the pizzeria, one of his closest Neapolitan friends comes to meet Hisham. They hug each other tightly, for a long time. The waiter looks sympathetic: «How much I like it when they know how to hug each other, what beautiful people», he observes satisfied. He is convinced too: Hisham Matar hugs well, he does it even with words and his readers know it.
4 October 2022 | 13:38
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