What guilty loves, unavowed hatreds and ecstatic passions have worn away the past splendours of Cyrene, Sabratha and Lepcis Magna! The relics seem nostalgic for their former glory, where the shadows of battle-weary soldiers wander, and where new cohorts continue to raise banners of the absurd.
Kamal Ben Hameda, “Dans les sables Libyens.” Translated by the author.In his essay, “Dans les sables libyens” (The Sands of Libya; 2011), Kamal Ben Hameda (b. 1954), a Libyan author who writes in French, evokes the country's Greek and Roman ruins through the dual images of “ecstatic passions” and the vulnerability of “past splendours,” worn away. This is framed by the essay's wider description of modern Libya as “a landscape of rubble and desolation,” caught within the “shackles of history and borders.”Footnote 1 Published in 2011, the year of the popular uprising against Muʿammar al-Qadhafi, the essay weaves the country's present precarity into the “battle-weary soldiers” of its past, reflecting on its long string of foreign occupiers as “successive strata of humanity,” which, through war, “the goddess of the land,” constitutes “cette libyenneté en devenir” (this Libyan-ness in formation). Envisioning the nation's history as one of weary human passions, burdened by “banners of the absurd,” Ben Hameda concludes by looking cautiously to the future and the possibility of the land's peoples coming together in unity, and harmonizing their “diverse memories.”Footnote 2
Taking Ben Hameda's animation of the “nostalgic relics” of Greek and Roman rule as a cue, I explore how past and present are brought together in shared vulnerability in Libyan fiction from the 2000s. Focusing on Mansur Bushnaf's (b. 1954) first, and currently only, novel, al-ʿIlka (Chewing Gum; 2008), I examine how this results in strange inversions, as statues are imbued with fragile, passionate life, while human bodies turn to static stone, and all exist within marginality and the threat of fragmentation. Through this exploration, I suggest a new reading of turāth (heritage) in modern and contemporary Arabic fiction, through the explicitly postmodern framework in which Bushnaf casts it, centred on the impossibility of “story” (qiṣṣa) when confronted by the traumatic past, the oppressive censorship of the present, and the breakdown of human emotion and relationship. In this framework, heritage, so central to the building of empire and nation, and so central, too, to the conflicts this building provokes, is viewed from the flipside, not as the object of passionate appropriation, preserved, categorized, and molded to emerging narratives, but as a neglected marker of the passing of time and empire, and the human passions obliterated in the process.Footnote 3
Written in 2008, al-ʿIlka looks back on a century in which turāth has been central to national narratives, bound, in the Arab world, to struggles for independence, against the legacy of colonization. Nowhere is this better exemplified than in Libya's neighbor, Egypt, whose Pharaonic heritage, central to Britain's burgeoning archaeological activity and imperialist agenda in the 19th century, was fiercely reclaimed by early nationalists through recovery of appropriated artefacts and their creative reworking in modern art and literature.Footnote 4 Unveiled in 1928, Mahmud Mukhtar's (1891–1934) Nahdat Misr (Egypt Awakened) depicts an Egyptian fellaha (peasant woman) standing proudly alongside a sphynx, her hand resting on its head, as though calling for it to rise. Both figures are bound into the symbolic imagining of nation, embodying the country's past, and forging a vision of its future.Footnote 5 Across the Arab world, turāth has since proved vital in the imagining of postindependence nationhood, both through official state discourse, and the artistic representation that often contests it, recovering forgotten narratives, and questioning those that are privileged. Summing up this nostalgic impulse, Wen-chin Ouyang writes, “Heritage (turāth), which encompasses religion, philosophy, history, science, art, architecture, archaeology, folklore and literature, has come to serve as the hallmark of post-colonial Arab identity. The Arab novel revives, incorporates and interrogates this heritage, simultaneously manifesting a new understanding of its past.”Footnote 6
Focusing on the material turāth constituted by art and archaeology, I examine how, in Libyan fiction, the neglect and vulnerability of statues and ruins reflect the comprehensive denial of rights and political agency to humans, and contest the appropriative ideologies which deny them. In recent years, in Libya and beyond, turāth has become implicated not in the politics of national identity, but civil war, foreign intervention, and the rise of a “new identitarian politics wielded by groups operating outside the framework of the nation-state.”Footnote 7 In Syria and Iraq, war and the rise of Daʿish have led to the destruction of historical sites Nimrud and Palmyra, condemned as embodying the wrong sort of history. In Libya, centuries of Roman, pre-Roman, and prehistoric heritage have similarly come under threat. In the last year, Sabratha, one of Libya's five UNESCO World Heritage Sites, has become a battleground for rival factions, as well as a center for the illegal smuggling of migrants to Europe, with the precarity of human lives set against the obliteration of history.
Within the perspective of this current violence, I explore how the tragedy of human suffering under al-Qadhafi, from 1969 to 2011, is imagined through the weight of history obliterated. More specifically, I argue that the misplaced statue, lost between the ordered spaces of the museum, reflects the human's exclusion from rights and agency, in states of what Giorgio Agamben calls “exception” and “bare life.” Drawing on Foucault's “biopower,” through which he identifies the control and surveillance of biological life as central to the modern operation of power, Agamben locates the simultaneous exclusion of this life as the fundamental basis of sovereignty.Footnote 8 In states of “bare life,” the human is stripped of social and political being, and exposed to death in the form of sovereign violence. For Agamben, this fundamental exclusion, based on the conflation of law and life, no longer exists on the margins of the political order, but has become coincidental with it, exemplified by the Holocaust's concentration camps, which he terms the “Nomos” of the modern.Footnote 9
The concept of bare life speaks powerfully to Libya's formation as a nation in the 20th century. With a historically nomadic and seminomadic population, the land's first encounter with the modern nation-state came through Italy's violent colonial campaign, beginning in 1911, and culminating in Mussolini's Fascist rule of the 1920s, leading to the establishment of concentration camps in Cyrenaica to quash Bedouin resistance. With the population's seasonal movement restricted for the first time by borders and curfews, the camps resulted in what has been estimated at 70,000 deaths, equaling a third of the region's population.Footnote 10 Following this traumatic loss of life and freedom, which continues to resonate in the nation's consciousness, subsequent chapters of the country's history have created increased instability. The struggle for independence culminated in 1951, bringing together the historically disparate regions of Cyrenaica, Tripolitania, and Fezzan. The discovery of oil in 1959 then thrust the country into the global petroleum market, leading to rapid urbanization, loss of ties to the land, and burgeoning consumerism in the 1960s.
Al-Qadhafi's forty-two-year dictatorship is the grim outcome. Profiting from oil money, his regime was characterized by inconsistency and paradox. Through the Revolutionary Decade of the 1970s, he created both a “stateless” society, and a society of omnipresent surveillance, operating through Popular Committees, supposedly encouraging participation in “direct democracy,” while really barring independent political activity, private commerce, and intellectual and artistic endeavor.Footnote 11 Infiltrating every aspect of society, these committees created an atmosphere of universal fear and suspicion, in which any subversive comment could be potentially deadly. Through the spectacles of public torture and execution, broadcast over television and radio, all lives were incorporated within a national state of exception, exemplified by al-Qadhafi's 1984 labeling of escaped dissidents as “stray dogs” to be rounded up, and of his people as “rats” and “cockroaches” during the February 2011 uprising. To this political tyranny was added economic chaos and stagnation, as private assets were seized, and commerce outlawed. While relying on oil exports to finance his revolutionary vision, al-Qadhafi further embarked on a virulently antiwestern foreign policy that ultimately led to multilateral sanctions, plunging Libya into economic hardship from the 1980s on.
As Libyan authors negotiate life within this regime, turāth is not proudly reclaimed as a legitimizing factor within nationhood, but employed as an evocation of neglect, exclusion, and mortality, as well as a reminder of the inevitable demise of once-powerful political regimes. Its literary precursors within Arabic tradition may therefore be identified in the vestiges of past civilizations that feature across prose and poetry as signs of the fleetingness of the material world. As far back as pre-Islamic poetry, it suggests the aṭlāl (ruins/traces left by a departing camp) that open the traditional qasīda (ode), immobilizing the poet as he dwells in nostalgia, and reflects on temporality. As Hilary Kilpatrick suggests, the aṭlāl represent an “archetype” of the Arabic literary imaginary, migrating through poetry, and reclaimed in modern fiction to express experiences of exile and political violence.Footnote 12 In Libya, neglect, contextualized through international marginalization, political oppression, and economic ruin, is a defining poetics, with both past and present infused with the immobilizing melancholy of the aṭlāl, in what British-Libyan author Hisham Matar describes as a fragmented, impotent landscape:
Ever since I can remember, I have found the unfinished state of much of modern Libya's architecture unsettling. It expresses neglect more actively than, say, ruins or old decaying structures. When something is built, we assume it to have been built out of a sense of necessity, intent or desire. Therefore, we associate its incompleteness with deliberate negligence and carelessness, or else sudden impotence.Footnote 13
As Matar's words suggest, modern Libya's state of ruination, born of the bare life of “sudden impotence,” brings it into unsettling confrontation with the ruins of the past, and the melancholy temporality they embody. This emerges in fiction that binds the fate of living humans to misplaced, contested, and truant turāth. Conveying the vulnerability of bare life within a broad historical perspective, ruins and statues are evocative of what Walter Benjamin terms “natural history” (naturgeschichte), signifying not the “history of nature,” but the melancholy, “natural” afterlife of cultural artefacts beyond the symbolic systems that gave them meaning. For Benjamin, the muteness of abandoned relics expresses “everything about history that, from the very beginning, has been untimely, sorrowful, unsuccessful.”Footnote 14 As Anat Pick suggests, his “natural history” reveals the past not as steady progression, but as “catastrophic pileup,” conveying “mutability, transience and decay – the passing of the historical order into ahuman nature, the passing of man into nonman, of soul into matter.”Footnote 15
In Libyan fiction, this “natural historical” awareness conveys the land's continuing cycles of violence and occupation, from the Phoenicians to the Italians to al-Qadhafi's homegrown tyranny. It also captures the absurdities of the present, in which denial of political and economic agency coincides with the influx of western goods and consumerism, in a nation both rentier and rogue, both stateless and authoritarian, and both surveilled and neglected. From the earliest works of Libyan fiction, in the 1960s, movement from the freedom, austerity, and restraint of Bedouin lifestyles to sedentary urban life, underemployed and appeased by government handouts, has been a major theme. In a thoroughly disaffected vision of modernity, authors juxtapose turāth to trash, conveying the collapse of past and present into passivity, and their subjection to destructive violence.
Fictional turāth
Following Libyan fiction's first flourishing in the 1960s, al-ʿIlka represents one of many haunting and subversive works to emerge in the 2000s, with the relaxation in censorship supposedly brought by Libya's rehabilitation into the international community. Despite this phantom promise, al-ʿIlka was immediately banned after publication in Cairo in 2008, and Bushnaf relied on handing copies out to friends. Since then, republication within Libya has been refused, with the book's own fragility reflecting the marginalized turāth it depicts.Footnote 16 In the novel, past and present are together formulated as an impossible “story” (qiṣṣa), which the novel's third-person narrator desperately seeks, conveying past traumas, which refuse to be woven into meaningful narrative, alongside the immediate danger of speaking and acting in a tyrannical regime. As its title suggests, the novel dramatizes the omnipresent “chewing” of the modern nation amidst piles of discarded wrappers. A 19th-century statue provides its second central motif, carved by an Italian adventurer, and immobilizing all men who gaze upon it in static, impossible longing. From the perspective of the treacherous and tentative 2000s, the novel reflects on past decades in which both authors and heritage have been literally and figuratively imprisoned. As renowned Libyan author Ibrahim al-Kuni (b. 1948) comments, al-Qadhafi strove to erase all of Libya's history prior to his 1969 coup, denying past triumphs to emphasize his own grandeur, and, quite literally, expelling history to the margins.Footnote 17
Before turning to al-ʿIlka, I situate this process of active erasure within examples of turāth from broader Libyan fiction, beginning with a tale of two animated statues, “ʿAwdat al-Qaysar” (2004; “The Return of Caesar,” 2007), by Miftah Qanaw (b. 1958).Footnote 18 Illustrating Libyan fiction's engagement with the concrete fate of real turāth, the story is centered on two statues, which have traversed a particularly turbulent 20th and 21st century. The first is a 2nd-century bronze of Septimius Severus, born in Lepcis Magna and Roman emperor from 193 to 211. Aware that the statue had become a rallying point for resistance, al-Qadhafi relocated it from the (then-named) Green Square to Lepcis Magna in the late 1970s, wanting neither historical legends nor voices of dissent to rival his status as the nation's spiritual leader.Footnote 19 The second is the Italian-era bronze, “al-Hasnaʾ wa-l-Ghazal” (The Girl and Gazelle), long occupying a central roundabout in Tripoli. Created by Angiolo Vannetti (1881–1962), and installed in the 1930s, it depicts a seated naked woman, curving behind her to stroke the neck of a gazelle. Reflecting Italy's colonialist dreams of a “quarta sponda” (fourth shore), the statue was originally named “Sorgente di via” (source of life), embodying, as Vannetti expressed, all the bounty Libya had to offer, of women and wild meat.Footnote 20
Designed by a colonialist drawing on the aesthetic traditions of the land's former Roman occupiers, the “Girl and Gazelle,” unlike Septimius Severus, has few credentials for becoming a symbol of resistance. Despite this, it is widely and lovingly portrayed in Libyan fiction, and, in Qanaw's story, both Septimius and the “Girl and Gazelle” are stripped of the ideologies that formed them, joining in vulnerable solidarity as they struggle through the present, with their physical degradation silently indicating the “neglect” (ihmāl) of humans themselves. Between both statues, the rise and fall of empire is tracked from Rome to Italy, excavating the layers of memory caught between them, and situating the al-Qadhafi regime as the tragic outcome of history's “catastrophic pileup.”
Growing lonely now that tourists no longer visit Lepcis, Septimius returns to Tripoli, where he witnesses the city's rapid deterioration during the 1980s and 1990s: “Caesar looked around him. Everything was different. Chaos and destruction [al-kharāb] sopped up memories wherever they might be.”Footnote 21 While in Tripoli, Severus visits the sadly transformed “Girl and Gazelle”: “Over the years, her faded smile had lost its former allure, her lips cracked by an intense thirst [ʿaṭash shadīd].”Footnote 22 In Septimius's eyes, “neglect” (ihmāl), “destruction” (kharāb), and “thirst” (ʿatash) are the “distinguishing mark” (sīma mumayyiza) of life in Tripoli, and the story concludes as he and the girl join a queue, waiting to leave for Malta.Footnote 23 Contrasting the mute melancholy and paradigmatic “thingness” of Benjamin's natural history, the statues’ playful animation conversely relegates humans to mute immobility.Footnote 24 Beyond reference to a “queue,” waiting to depart, they are excluded from the story, as from the derelict political landscape it depicts.
Within the “destruction” or “ruination” (kharāb) of the modern nation, the statues’ determination to overcome their paradigmatic stasis further bitterly denies the assumption that turāth will always outlive political catastrophe, remaining as a meaningful site, through which the past might later be reconstructed into edifying lessons for the future. In an earlier work of Libyan fiction, Ahmad Ibrahim al-Faqih's (b. 1942) trilogy Hadaʾiq al-Layl (Gardens of the Night; 1992), the narrator muses on the “Girl and Gazelle” as a “constant fact of life” amidst “the motorcades of rulers, who come and go.”Footnote 25 Denying this constancy, Qanaw's story dispels even the natural historical comfort of physical permanence in a vision that has proved poignantly prescient. In 2014, the “Girl and Gazelle” disappeared from its plinth to an unknown fate, after being shattered by Islamists’ bullets. In response, author and journalist ʿUmar al-Kiddi, echoing Qanaw, quipped that she had no doubt fled the chaos into which Libya has fallen in recent years.Footnote 26
Examples of neglected turāth abound in broader Libyan literature, from Matar's In the Country of Men (2008), in which a daytrip to Lepcis Magna resonates in the consciousness of nine-year-old narrator Slooma as he confronts the torture and execution of loved ones, to Ibrahim al-Kuni's prehistoric cave art, a locus of primordial truth, threatened with annihilation. In a common thread, the authors posit the past as a vital source of knowledge for confronting the present, as well as a frightening vision of the nihilistic present itself, through acts of oppression that literally destroy history, while also defying historical explanation. Writing from exile, both depict turāth as in need of recovery, and simultaneously needed for recovery.
This tension is also central to al-ʿIlka, compounded by the debris of modern consumerism, whose artificial permanence threatens to displace turāth altogether. Providing a last theme in my review, I explore this through Libyan poet, Khaled Mattawa's “East of Carthage: An Idyll.” Published, like al-ʿIlka, in 2008, Mattawa's lengthy poem depicts a day trip to Sabratha, enunciated, like Matar and al-Kuni's turāth, from the perspective of exile. In large part, the poem is devoted to the observation of illegal migrants waiting to depart for Italy, and entangled in the speaker's memories of childhood in Libya. Sneaking past guards to gain access to the ruins with his guide friend, Mattawa presents a landscape both inaccessible and neglected, centered, in the poem's second section, on ruins:
A pair of Roman fists robbed of spear and shield; the tiles of the tapestries mixed in with popcorn that slipped from the buttery hands, aluminum wrappers smudged with processed cheese; countless cigarette butts surround the fallen columns and beams with a fringe of tarnished foam; pairs of panties still hot with forbidden passion…
The ruins are not ruined. Without all this garbage packed, stratified, how else to name our age?Footnote 27
Through the denuded Roman fists, the past is stripped of all heroism, remaining only as mute, melancholy aṭlāl. Entangled in modern, mass-produced goods, they further combine the “ruin” as heritage with consumerist “ruination.” Through reference to “our age” as that of “garbage/packed, stratified,” Mattawa evokes the global order, through which turāth must now be contemplated, and in which Libya is both included, through processed cheese and aluminum, and excluded, through its abandonment to statelessness and bare life. Woven into contemplation of the ruins, groups of African migrants, described as “passport-less, yellow-eyed,” await passage to “detention camps” in Italy, with their precarious flight juxtaposed to the legendary heroism of Hannibal's Mediterranean crossing. Transforming “idyll,” traditionally associated with the rustic and pastoral, Mattawa depicts a “litterscape,” in which the “stratification” of the modern, including and excluding human life, lurks behind the cheap foodstuffs of pop culture.
This vision is similarly central to Bushnaf's al-ʿIlka, in which a consciously postmodern aesthetics emerges from the notion of the nation's “chewing,” conveying, like Mattawa's “idyll,” a fragmented litterscape. Similar to the wider fiction discussed, the novel decisively removes turāth from symbolic systems, joining human and statue, present and past, in unexpected, disorienting parallels, affiliations, and experiences of vulnerability. In sharp contrast to Mukhtar's Nahdat Misr, this “joining” does not meaningfully meld past to present, but reveals the present as another layer in history's “catastrophic pileup,” upsetting all ideological claims, and emerging from the mad, deviant yearnings of imprisoned individuals.Footnote 28 Through the novel's “impossible story,” combining historical trauma and present oppression, the fragmented past and consumerist present, I therefore examine how it brings new dimensions to an understanding of both turāth in Arabic fiction, and postmodern aesthetics in Arabic fiction.
Mansur Bushnaf's Impossible Story
Set in Tripoli of the 1980s, al-ʿIlka captures the stifling existence of al-Qadhafi's dictatorial regime through obsessively returning to the “story” (qiṣṣa) of its hero and heroine, their lives ambiguously bound to a naked statue. Carved by an Italian prisoner of the pasha at the end of the 19th century, this statue frustrates “categorization” (taṣnīf) and renders mad any who “grasp” it (man yudrikuhu).Footnote 29 Depiction of this heritage is juxtaposed to the mass-produced “chewing gum” (al-ʿilka), which has become a mania within the closed state, revealing the paradoxical absurdities of its trajectory through the 20th century. Through lack of political and economic agency, citizens turn to underground trade in cheap goods and repetitive chewing, as, between statue and gum, the novel engages the process of “imagining nation,” while also denying it on political, existential, and narrative levels, descending into a conscious spirit of postmodern meaninglessness. Set amidst a litterscape, where rubbish, relics, and humans exist in equal precarity, the nation chews, while the narrative is circling, stuttering, and obsessed with its own impossibility.
Unlike the ruins depicted by Matar, al-Kuni, and Mattawa, Bushnaf's turāth is not inflected by experiences of exile, but rather by his imprisonment within and alongside his country. In 1976, he was one of many intellectuals to be rounded up and imprisoned while attending a literary conference in Tripoli. After moving to the capital from his hometown of Bani Walid in the early 1970s as a university student, his subversive plays had begun to attract a widespread audience, presenting him as a threat to the regime. Accused of Communist activities, he was imprisoned for twelve years.Footnote 30 After his release in 1988, he continued to write plays and articles, although most of his writing remains unpublished. During the 2000s, with the country emerging from the hardships of economic sanctions, he then began, as he puts it, “chewing” the idea for a first novel, telling the impossible story of the nation's stifled, fearful existence, and what he calls “the generations of chewing” (ajyāl al-lawk), marked by the “strange madness” of imprisonment:
I spent twelve lean years in Libyan prisons, during which, in the direst conditions, I learned patience, chewing and self-preservation. But I also learnt humour and laughter. This sense of absurdity [ʿabath] will have a great influence on Libyan literature and art. Libyans will write with a taste of bitterness, laughing long and hard from their strange madness [junūnihim al-gharīb].Footnote 31
Self-reflective and consciously postmodern, the third-person narrator of Bushnaf's al-ʿIlka conveys this “strange madness,” totally preoccupied by his impossible story. This impossibility is conveyed in the most physical terms, through the novel's hero who remains motionless and silent for almost the entire narrative, as the narrator attempts to state what the “story” is, thereby overcoming his stasis. Paralleling this static hero is the nude statue, central to relaying the city's turbulent history from the end of Ottoman rule to the present. Standing amidst the “litterscape” of 1980s Tripoli, imagined though the peripheral spaces of a public park and museum, the hero and statue together defamiliarize the conventions of plot, characterization, and allegory. Replacing all activities, emotions, and thoughts, the verb lāk, yalūk (to chew) is a repeated refrain, while characters are again and again depicted as being “ʿalā hāmish” (on the margins), and falling inevitably into neglect. Between statue and gum, static longing and unfulfilled desire, all characters shift between tasammur (stasis/being pinned in place) and lawk (chewing), as the narrator seeks to define their actions, and propel their “story” forward.
The resultant narration, simultaneously static and swift, reflects Bushnaf's grounding in theater. In Brechtian fashion, the narrator draws attention to the artifice of the story, focusing on setting and props rather than heroes, plot, and grand narrative. While at one point, the narrator, in a show of certainty, declares, “This is the story, everything else is peripheral,” the peripheral subsumes all as human characters are decentered by the novel's paraphernalia of props and settings.Footnote 32 With two “beginnings,” entitled, “Bidayat al-Qissa” (The Beginning to Our Story) and “Wa-Lakin Ma al-Qissa?” (But What's the Story?), these props and settings are arranged into deceptively ordered pairs, including, “The Statue” and “The Statue 2,” “The Park” and “The Park 2,” and “The Hero” and “The Hero 2.” Regardless of the resolution suggested by this duality, each story ultimately frustrates the narrator, who, in mock despair, declares, “Despite all the structural and stylistic tricks [al-ḥiyal al-inshāʾiyya al-kathīra] we have employed to extricate ourselves from this novelistic nightmare, we remain in a state of endless chewing.”Footnote 33
As one of the narrator's “stylistic tricks,” I set the statue amidst the novel's broader paraphernalia of hero, gum, and park, through which the “story” is pursued. Focusing first on the hero as “human statue,” and the heroine's “chewing,” which consigns him to stasis, I examine the modern, and postmodern, stasis, which provides the first layer of the story's attempted excavation. In the second part of my analysis, I move to the past, first through the public park, in which the novel's historical consciousness is located, and finally in the turāth embodied by the statue, set within the “litterscape” of the present, and “catastrophic pileup” of the past.
The Human Statue
The novel's impossible story is, in short, as follows: the novel's hero (baṭal) and heroine (baṭala), who only later are named as Mukhtar and Fatima, meet in a public park in Tripoli and ostensibly fall in love. Mukhtar is of a higher social class than Fatima, whose family hails from the nation's new, bourgeois middle class, enriched and urbanized by oil, and striving after the “Freedom, Socialism and Unity” of Nasserism.Footnote 34 Through this nascent love story, the path is paved for the unfolding of national drama through the ins and outs of the domestic, with the narrator declaring it to follow a “roughly Arabic template,” typical of the romantic melodramas of Egyptian cinema.Footnote 35 Specifically, the narrator aligns it with Egyptian author Ihsan ʿAbd al-Qaddus's (1919–90) short story “al-Wisada al-Khaliyya” (1957; “The Empty Cushion”) and novella Biʾr al-Hurman (1962; The Well of Deprivation). Both were adapted into popular films in the 1950s and 1970s, and both move from the complications of love stories, frustrated by psychological disorders and social conventions, to the resolution of happy ending, in which desires are reconciled, and society harmonized.
Biʾr al-Hurman provides the most consistent intertext, to which the narrator's qiṣṣa is juxtaposed. Narrated by a celebrated Cairene psychiatrist, the novella describes the cure of young, respectable, married woman, Nahid Hatim, who, compelled by the trauma of her parents’ loveless marriage, is driven subconsciously to engage in violent sexual encounters on the streets of Cairo, awaking the following day with no recollection of them.Footnote 36 Gradually, through her sessions, the story unfolds, and she is cured. Steeped in the optimism of what al-ʿIlka's narrator terms “bourgeois Nasserism,” Biʾr al-Hurman is structured around the Freudian “talking therapy,” organizing Nahid's confused memories into “story,” and ensuring her happy ending.Footnote 37 Al-ʿIlka, on the other hand, proceeds to unravel this, eschewing what is termed al-ḥadhlaqa al-riwāʾiyya (novelistic posturing), and hinting at a trauma that refuses to be formed into story within the postmodern stasis of 1980s Libya, where speech and action are violently suppressed.Footnote 38
As the narrator states, al-ʿIlka may follow an Arabic template, but it is told in the mode of chewing gum, a fad that has engulfed Libyan society, becoming a surrogate for human interaction and emotion. In keeping with this mode, the relationship of hero and heroine is oddly adrift from social and domestic contexts. They meet only in the marginal, public spaces of a municipal park and the Red Palace Museum, between which they endlessly circulate. At one point, Fatima is described tidying up, but her domestication is limited to the area around their chosen park bench.Footnote 39 The reasons for the breakdown in their relationship are also unsettlingly void of recognisable psychological intention, and attributed to a vague sense of “emptiness” (farāgh) and “revulsion” (qaraf), contrasting their friends, who meet in the park with them, before moving swiftly into “love talk” (al-ḥadīth ʿan al-ḥubb).Footnote 40
Ultimately, Fatima abandons Mukhtar because he is “strange and unpredictable,” but, above all, because he is motionless, caught first in the “repetitive cycle of visiting park and museum,” and then in total stasis.Footnote 41 As she leaves him in the park, he becomes a human statue, remaining frozen for ten years, and the rest of the novel. His beard grows long, and his clothes become tattered. Rubbish piles up around him and motionlessness thereafter defines the novel. Rhythmically, and even ritually, the same words and phrases are used to describe his “stasis” (tasammur), as “part of a neglected park” (juzʾ min ḥadīqa muhmala), “under the rain” (taḥt al-maṭar), for “ten long years” (li-ʿashar sanawāt ṭiwāl).Footnote 42
With his name echoing the renowned Libyan resistance fighter, ʿUmar al-Mukhtar (1861–1931), whose public execution effectively ended organized Libyan resistance to Italian occupation, Mukhtar's stasis allegorizes the nation's frustrated future, evoking both the long decade of Bushnaf's imprisonment, and the nation's economic decline in the 1980s. An “abandoned lover” (ʿāshiq mahjūr), his motionlessness and growing unkemptness recalls the paradigmatically antisocial Majnun Layla, similarly paralyzed by impossible love, and abandoned in the wilderness, with hair flowing and clothes tattered.Footnote 43 Both further echo the archetypal nasīb (amatory prelude) and aṭlāl of the pre-Islamic qaṣīda, in which the poet stands amidst the ruins, bemoaning a lost love, before being exhorted to the heroic movement of the raḥīl (desert journey). Amidst growing piles of rubbish, Mukhtar himself embodies the aṭlāl, a reminder of the passing of time, and the fall of human culture into neglect. Captivated both by the imagined image of Fatima, running towards him with the promise of “a kiss that never comes,” and by the nude statue's pursed lips, he represents longing, ever-unfulfilled.Footnote 44
Alongside this raw longing, Mukhtar also becomes a locus for satirizing the fickleness of contemporary ideologies, ultimately revealing the bare life at the heart of al-Qadhafi's rule. During his decade of motionlessness, he becomes a city landmark, debated by various intellectuals and professors of philosophy, economics, and psychology, all recently returned from study abroad. For the philosophy professor, returned from France and immersed in Sartrean angst, he represents the “tumultuousness of the human condition,” while the economics professor is concerned with the consumer trends revealed in the litter around him.Footnote 45 A theater director, returned from Hungary, becomes obsessed with the impossible task of capturing his fate on stage, seeing in it the heroic return of Odysseus. Each finds the knowledge they have acquired abroad rendered futile, running into the dead end of Mukhtar and the gum around him, which consign all to endless repetition.
Due to the attention of these posturing intellectuals, Mukhtar soon also becomes the focus of the government's exclusionary rhetoric. Declaring him an embodiment of reactionary trends, unwilling to work towards the country's better future and “a museum piece, a relic of capitalist values,” he is left in place as testimony to what the country must reject.Footnote 46 As a suspicious, potentially dissident figure, the mukhābarāt (security services) also take up undercover residence opposite him, with a hundred reports, complete with photos, submitted on him within twenty-four hours. From the professor of philosophy to the security services, all, like Mukhtar, succumb to a decade of motionlessness, and, through their ideological agendas, fail to perceive his fundamental suffering. Contrasting his “neglect” (ihmāl), “exhaustion” (irhāq), and “pain” (wajʿ), the narrator describes how he becomes for all a “specimen” (ʿayyina) for “jumping off” (inṭilāq) into different agendas, while he himself is “transformed into a forgotten margin, into contradictory ideas that signified everything, except him.”Footnote 47
Leaving the park, Fatima, in parallel, seeks social mobility, hoping to profit from the underground chewing gum trade. All that awaits her, however, is a life of prostitution. In contrast to Nahid in Biʾr al-Hurman, she is not driven by repressed memories but, as the narrator asserts, fully conscious of her actions. Unlike Nahid, her story is never resolved, and her desires never harmonized to that of the nation. Fatima, in fact, becomes devoid of human desire. During their courtship, Mukhtar eagerly searches her gaze for the “glittering shine of desire” that never transpires, relegating him to his fate as statue.Footnote 48 Meanwhile, chewing gum subsumes all of Fatima's desire, in a world where human relationships have been subsumed by commodification: “she altered libidinously between lemon, mint, apple and any of the new flavors that came onto the market. The act of mastication affirmed her femininity and offered her an intense sense of fulfillment.”Footnote 49 While men become obsessed with her, Fatima turns from the promise of romance, domestication, and community to the insular act of chewing, delighting in the physical experience of gum, a “pleasure” (mutʿa) which she “senses alone” (tuḥissuhā faqaṭ).Footnote 50
While seemingly divorced from broader domestic contexts, in a disorienting state of stasis, Fatima and Mukhtar's frustrated romance is gradually woven into the wider fabric of Libyan society, first through their family histories, and then through the park in which their romance takes place. Mukhtar's father is a retired high-ranking officer in the Royal Police Force, fervently faithful to the former Senussi monarchy and only reluctantly engaging with the new revolutionaries, while abandoning his wife and son to move to a farm outside Tripoli where he drinks and brings prostitutes. One of these prostitutes is Fatima, bringing the novel, as the narrator declares, further into the melodramatic Arabic template. Mukhtar's mother is “cut off from the tree,” waiting, motionless, for the return of her former lover, ʿUmar, from Istanbul, where he trades in chewing gum, and barely noticing her son's absence.Footnote 51 In contrast to the lengthier description of Mukhtar's parents, the fate of Fatima's middle-class family is then sparsely narrated in a few sentences. Following her descent into prostitution, her mother and father commit suicide, and her brother abandons his fight for social equality, surrendering to robotic bureaucracy, and chewing, like the rest of society.
Chewing Gum
Originally called Sarab al-Layl (The Night Mirage), Bushnaf changed his novel's title to al-ʿIlka following its translation into English, moving away from the poetic image of “mirage,” evocative of desert geographies, and identifying gum at the heart of the novel as litterscape. A variation on motionlessness, chewing becomes the nation's “overriding concern” (shughl al-nās al-shāghil), tantalizingly hinting at personal, social, or political progress, behind which a true lack of agency is concealed.Footnote 52 Born of the country's economic, political, and social ruin, alongside its marginality within the global order, the underground chewing gum trade replaces all economic activity, with its value elevated “to the status of a bond.”Footnote 53 Two decades from the discovery of oil, Libya's population has shifted from the struggle for subsistence to the frivolous excesses of pop culture, its consumption driven by a fundamental awareness of the need to stay still and keep quiet.
As the narrator declares, the nation's preoccupation with gum, alongside the other consumerist inventory of bananas, jeans, and pop music, reflects its premature state of “postmodernity” (mā baʿd al-ḥadātha).Footnote 54 While other Arab nations are immersed in debates over “modernity, the arms race, Palestine, Arab unity, social justice, UN amendments, OPEC and the price of oil, and American and British conspiracies against Libya,” Libya itself shifts into postmodern, intellectual “chewing”:
In debates, leftists and rightists argued the finer points of the issue. The former were of the opinion that teeth were a metaphor for the human race while gum represented time, whereas the pessimistic rightists, or “nihilists” as the leftists called them, upheld the view that the gum stood for human existence, while the teeth were eternity and the act of mastication a motion that would continue ad infinitum.Footnote 55
As with Mukhtar, the intellectuals’ rhetoric becomes entangled in the stasis of gum, and, as they debate the possibility of human agency—do we chew or are we chewed?—the question arises as to whether gum stands for the meaninglessness of all existence, or just the meaninglessness of life in al-Qadhafi's Libya. By extension, the question arises as to whether the narrator's “story,” and story in general, is inherently impossible, or impossible only in Libya. Ultimately, both lead to the question of how the novel's and the nation's postmodernism might be understood within its broader excavation of the past, leading to the stasis of the present.
Set in the 1980s, the main events of al-ʿIlka coincide with the heyday of postmodernism in Europe and North America, with new forms of art, architecture, film, and narrative being theorized as a “mode,” “condition,” and “logic,” notoriously controversial and difficult to define. In his landmark 1984 essay, “Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” Fredric Jameson understands it as an outcome of the commodification of culture within a newly global and technological world, identifying various defining traits that resonate with al-ʿIlka. Some of these include: a merging of elite and pop culture; a shift from modern concerns with “depth”—typified by Freud's “repressed”—to surfaces and multiplicities; a similar move from modern emotions of anxiety and alienation to “intensities” and affects; and a weakening of historicity.Footnote 56 All are underpinned by a fundamental breakdown in the certainty of metanarrative, and a relativizing of truth claims and totalizing systems.Footnote 57
While hugely influential, Jameson's suggestions are by no means a conclusive statement on the postmodern. They do, however, chime with Fatima's emotionless chewing and Mukhtar's extreme, immobilizing longing, as well as the mockery of al-Qaddus's Freudian “talking cure,” and the narrator's eschewal of all “novelistic posturing.” Above all, however, they chime with the commodified “chewing” that overtakes the narrative, reflected in its fragmented structure and frustrated narrator. As Bushnaf states, “chewing” was central to his first conception of the novel, which posits itself as the inevitable outcome of Libya's postmodern mode, with its “impossible story” reflecting the breakdown of metanarrative. From newspaper to academic articles, photos, films, poems, and paintings, al-ʿIlka is filled with different forms of representation, all preoccupied with how life might be captured in art, and “our hero” put into words, onto canvas, or into film. All, like the narrator's story, drift into the realm of chewing gum wrappers, littering the novel's pages. Those who embark on story-telling are further destined to motionlessness and marginality, an existential commentary, but also a real reflection on the concrete difficulty of telling stories in Libya, and of having them heard, through threat of imprisonment, and international marginalization. Al-ʿIlka thus posits a brand of postmodernism born of tyranny and marginality, which compel confrontation with the limits of language, meaning, and the human.
While the narrator suggests that this condition arose somewhat prematurely in Libya, and was characterized by particularly intense “chewing,” it resonates with the wider disaffection sweeping the Arab world from the 1960s, as the optimism of nationalism and Nasserism was replaced by the rise of Islamist ideologies, and outbreak of violent political confrontations. The concomitant shift in literary discourse, from the reassurance of realism to uncertain, fragmented representation, can certainly be understood as a postmodern “mode,” albeit marked by continued political commitment, rather than what Andreas Pflitsch suggests as the “postmodern laissez-faire” of the west.Footnote 58 Expressing an overriding skepticism in political and religious ideologies, Arabic postmodernism, as Pflitsch suggests, is precisely located in the breakdown of metanarrative as political protest.Footnote 59 Both deeply political and deeply despairing, al-ʿIlka would seem to confirm this assessment, with its narrator's “impossible story” infused with the immediate danger of speaking and acting, while also refusing to shy from a critical vision of the present, rooted in an awareness of the catastrophic past. This awareness, too, reflects broader trends within Arabic fiction, with Pflitsch observing how authors’ weaving of literary turāth into fragmented narrative upsets the neat boundaries of tradition and modernity, thereby formulating what might be called a “postmodern” aesthetics.Footnote 60 In al-ʿIlka, material, rather than literary, turāth is central. Aptly, Hisham Matar describes “excavation and memory” as one of the novel's defining poetics, yet both are bound into an overriding awareness of fracture and obliteration, conveyed through the rubble of Mukhtar's park and the turbulent fate of his beloved statue.Footnote 61
The Park
Describing the 1920 Paul Klee monoprint, “Angelus Novus,” Benjamin formulates his best-known statement on “natural history,” through the “angel of history,” entangled in “debris.” Suggestive of the relationship between al-ʿIlka's statue—and, indeed, of Mukhtar as statue—and the “debris” in which they are located, the statement reads as follows:
This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.Footnote 62
In al-ʿIlka, the “debris” that constitutes Mukhtar's park sets his and Fatima's romance within a broad historical perspective, conveyed through fragmented and loosely contained stories. Frequented by those on the margins of society, from prostitutes to drug dealers, Sufi charlatans, chewing gum smugglers, and, of course, Mukhtar, the park reflects all the changes to have traversed the land across the centuries. Vulnerable to the vicissitudes of nature and warfare, it transforms from peasants’ farmland to pashas’ pleasure park, battleground between Libyans and Italians, and an elegantly landscaped Italian garden from which Libyans are barred. During the Senussi monarchy (1951–69), it witnesses the police's violent backlash against student protesters, and, under the revolutionaries, following the ineffectual nationalization of the sanitation company, it becomes a neglected rubbish dump. Finally, an evironmentalist, recently returned from the United States, grants it a new lease on life, cleaning the rubbish, and leading, among other initiatives, to a “Flower Security Squad” (jiḥāz aman al-zuhūr), imposing fines on any who illegally pick its blossoms.Footnote 63 In each era, the narrator concludes, the garden is built on the “rubble” (anqāḍ) of previous orders, and survival becomes its defining feature: “It was constantly threatened with annihilation and yet it remained a park.”Footnote 64
The park is haunted, above all, by the ghosts of women raped, murdered, or imprisoned within it, and situating the fate of static Mukhtar and chewing Fatima in a genealogy of violent desire. One woman, caught by her husband in the arms of a pasha, transpires to be Mukhtar's great grandmother, who, after the consequent murder of both husband and lover, wanders the park mad before being found dead in the fourth year of Italian occupation. Another story concerns a singer from Fezzan, killed by another vengeful pasha, and whose songs of “longing” (ḥanīn) haunt the city women, offering solace when “places begin to suffocate them, and they long to fly away.”Footnote 65 Dramatizing Libya's conflicted history, from the chaos of the 19th century, the women contextualize the park's current condition, in which all have retreated to their private spaces and personal chewing. Representing the collective trauma of past, unassimilated events, rooted in imperial, colonial, and patriarchal violence, the women's stories provide the backdrop to new forms of power and surveillance.
These new, particularly modern, forms are the last to be excavated within the park, as a network of gazes, directed endlessly onwards, without reciprocity. This is exemplified in one of the security services’ many photos of Mukhtar, likened to a Salvador Dalί painting, and capturing all professors, intellectuals, and mukhābarāt, frozen in time, gazing at one another, and constellated around Mukhtar:
The first Director appears, observing the Director recently returned from Hungary, who in turn is observing our hero, followed by the Professor of Economics recently returned from America and the Professor of Philosophy recently returned from France. A journalist is also present, and a security agent. The security patrol considered this photograph to be the best, not knowing that they, too, were part of a larger canvas.Footnote 66
Subsuming the aesthetics of surrealism, like that of postmodernism, within the absurdity of a surveilled state, the photo captures a nation in which human relationships have collapsed, with the shadow of dictatorship over all. The park, while temptingly suggestive of what Foucault terms a “heterotopia,” in which society's dominant spaces are “simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted,” categorically denies the possibility of contestation and inversion.Footnote 67 Within it, all are simultaneously exposed to dominant structures of power, and excluded from them, while the statue emerges as the frightening, and ultimately futile, potential of breaking out of these systems, and opening history to alternative readings.
The Statue
As the narrator repeats, the statue channels the curse of the 19th century, recognized across the Arab world as the period of nahḍa (renaissance), rooted in rising nationalist consciousness and processes of social, economic, and political modernization. In Libya, waning Ottoman control, exemplified in the pasha's pleasure park, was threatened by the colonial encroachment of France, Great Britain, and finally Italy, with the Banco di Roma expanding its control over commerce, industry, and agriculture.Footnote 68 Meanwhile, the ascetic religious and political force of the Senussi grew in Cyrenaica. Out of this confluence of waning and growing powers, the statue is born, offering yet simultaneously denying the promise of nationhood, to be followed only by the continued operation of absolute power. A nexus for the novel's depiction of love, desire, and madness, negotiating the fragile imagined community, the statue's immobilizing influence on all those who encounter it disrupts straightforward notions of affiliation and identity through physical experiences of desire, longing, and captivity.
The statue is housed in Libya's national Red Palace Museum, another suggestively heterotopic space, displaying artefacts from prehistory to the 20th century. However, as the narrator declares, the statue, unlike the park, reflects none of the wider changes to Libyan society, and cannot be neatly relegated to any one symbolic system. Carved by an Italian prisoner of the pasha, in the dungeons of the Red Palace, it is affiliated with no aesthetic school, and simply sculpted according to its creator's “pain and longing,” and expressing his subjection to stifling heat, bitter cold, and longing for affection, comfort, and freedom.Footnote 69 As in the myth of Pygmalion, the sculptor becomes infatuated with his creation, which, following his fluctuating moods, embodies both “surrender” (istislām) and “headiness” (tahawwur).Footnote 70 With head thrown back, eyes closed, and mouth formed into the longing expectation of a kiss, the statue is, as the narrator emphasizes, a “real being,” which gains its life through “the eyes, emotions and imagination of its audience.”Footnote 71
After the prisoner's death, the statue embarks on what the narrator calls “its own journey through time,” proving of little worth to the Italians, British, monarchists, or revolutionaries.Footnote 72 In the 1970s, it is supposed to be transported to Lepcis Magna with Septimius Severus, but is instead abandoned in the dungeons of the Red Palace, in “a corridor between and outside every age” (mamarr bayn wa-khārij kull al-ʿuṣūr).Footnote 73 Eventually, an archeology professor attempts to claim it as the work of an early Libyan, but cannot verify his nationalist hypotheses, exposing him to professional ridicule. Repelling all ideological claims, the statue, like Fatima, frustrates the symbolic equating of woman, nation, and heritage, expressing only history's chaotic pain, madness, and longing. Combining the essence of Da Vinci's Mona Lisa with Michelangelo's David, it blurs all dichotomies: “Our statue is an embodiment of smoothness and violence, stillness and propulsion, pleasure and pain, the angelic and the demonic, the feminine and the masculine, all dryads born in captivity, in the absence of freedom.”Footnote 74
Through its blurring of dichotomies, the statue induces intense infatuations and mad desire in all men who encounter it, whether Italian, Sicilian, American, or Libyan. Caught in the paradigmatic immobility of the aṭlāl, the men pleasure themselves before it, turning, like Mukhtar, to kharāb (ruination, dilapidation), as, in seeking to escape history through the statue's impossible dualities, they are simultaneously excluded from it.Footnote 75 Mukhtar himself locates the desire and surrender that Fatima withholds in it, while Fatima realizes he can relate to her only as he relates to it—an impossible, static idol. For Mukhtar, the statue offers escape from stasis, not, like Fatima and her gum, in the future, but in a relic of the past that simultaneously offers escape from that past. Like Fatima's gum, however, this escape proves deceptive, as statue, like gum, leads only to greater immobility:
He would spread his arms as if to hug the stone woman. It was as though she were running towards him without ever reaching him, while he could never bring himself to embrace her. From that fateful moment, long before the Professor of Philosophy returned from France, his existence could be summed up as a slow succumbing to the fate of the “existential gum.”Footnote 76
Offering the utopic promise of reciprocal, consummated desire, outside of all “ages,” the statue simultaneously refuses it through its eternally expectant lips. Like Fatima, its eyes are alluring but unresponsive, mirroring the insular gazes of the security service's photo, and depicting human relationships, once again, as fragmented chewing. Through complex processes of narrative mirroring, both Fatima and Mukhtar become bound to the statue, conveying the lifelessness of the present through the animation of the past, and dramatizing the impossibility of any harmonious “embrace.” Like chewing gum, the statue ultimately ends up as another layer of rubble as, freed from stasis by a psychology professor, who diagnoses his condition as the product of childhood stuttering, Mukhtar uses his newfound mobility to smash it.Footnote 77 After locating Fatima in a coffee shop, changed beyond recognition through a life of prostitution and chewing, he rushes in panic to the statue, “flinging his arms around it so violently that it fell to the floor and shattered in pieces.”Footnote 78 With this collapse, the novel concludes, suggesting, on the one hand, a potential liberation from the “curse of the nineteenth century,” and, on the other, the fate of wider Libyan turāth, subjected to acts of destructive annihilation that transform it from longing and desire into mute rubble. In the final paragraph, Mukhtar, the “hero,” becomes a vague “memory” (dhikrā), described, once again, as “exhausted and emaciated” (mutʿab wa-hazīl), as he roams, stuttering, through the city streets.Footnote 79
Returning to Freud, through the psychology professor's identification of Mukhtar's repressed childhood malady, the narrator proposes stuttering and, by extension, shattering as “the escape route that we propose for our text.”Footnote 80 As the wider novel suggests, however, no such escape is possible. As in Qanaw's “ʿAwdat al-Qaysar,” the statue's departure, conveyed through the bitter humor and “strange madness” that Bushnaf associates with Libyan fiction, poignantly emphasizes the people left in its wake, in continued states of exception, as history escapes and can no longer inform the present. In the writing of both authors, who remained in Libya for most, or, in the case of Bushnaf, all their lives, heritage is first reclaimed through shared experiences of vulnerability, and then irrevocably lost. As Bushnaf states, his statue was inspired by a real counterpart, which he spent hours contemplating in a real park, binding his own precarity, as author, to that of the nation's turāth, and demonstrating how personal connections, rather than grand narratives, emerge through shared experiences of neglect, exposure, and vulnerability.Footnote 81 As an alternative historical storehouse, al-ʿIlka shatters the museum's solemn veneration, revealing the states of exception that lie behind the acceptable face of modern nationhood.
Conclusion
Tracing the fragments of Italian, Roman, and prehistoric turāth across Libyan fiction reveals surprising affiliations, born of passion and vulnerability that transcend the nation's official discourse. Through the coming together of humans’ vital, vulnerable bodies and the “thingness” of mute, historical aṭlāl, disorienting inversions are further staged. Statues become invested with the human drives of hope and longing, while humans fade into static chewing, or disappear from narrative altogether. Ultimately, through this inversion of flesh and stone, stasis and mobility, all collapse into the universality of fragments, while a further complex equation takes place between what is a “ruin” and what is “ruined.” From turāth as identity and authentication, and aṭlāl as source of contemplation, authors shift to the despoliation of ideological violence, processed cheese, and gum. As the consumerist goods of a globalized world infiltrate their way into the closed state, the present, like the past, is conceived as kharāb, perennially excluded, and with the eroded fragments of history covered by the stubborn, artificial permanence of litter.
Weaving these impulses into a complex genealogy of postmodern existence within totalitarianism, Bushnaf's “litterscape” posits itself as the inevitable outcome of 19th-century demons, excavated through the struggling voice of its “story-less” narrator. Simultaneously indicating the precarity of speaking and acting freely in Libya, and past traumas that immobilize the present, it eschews metanarrative in favor of commodified gum. Titled Chewing Gum, and with its English edition mimicking a Wrigley's packet, the novel presents itself, like the subjects it depicts, as entangled in global capitalism, and, like its statue, as a simultaneous product of neglect, bare life, and exclusion. As a rare work of Libyan fiction to have come to international attention, al-ʿIlka resonates with an expectation of marginality and silence, initially confirmed by its immediate banning in 2008. Nevertheless, it asserts itself despite its “impossible story,” indicating the pressing need to recuperate narrative, and reinstate agency, no matter the void to which they may be destined.
