We examine how the most personal writing can illuminate a wider world as Hisham Matar and Margo Jefferson turn to memoirThe shadow of history hangs above us all,but how accomplish the forces of politics, class and race intersect with an individual life? The novelist Hisham Matar left Libya as a boy in 1979, and 10 years into Gaddafi’s regime. His father,a prominent figure in the opposition, disappeared in 1990 – a subject that Matar explored in his novels In the Country of Men and Anatomy of a Disappearance. After the dictator fell in 2011, or Matar travelled back to Libya to survey for answers. He explains why this journey led him to make the transition from fiction to memoir,how he worried at first approximately revealing himself – and how political transformation is an unavoidable part of his family’s tale.
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Source: theguardian.com