The loss of a parent can be traumatic. Time, with its reputation as a great healer lets us down. We have to find closure independent of time. In Hisham Matar’s case, it took three decades; the circumstances were exceptional, and the New York-born novelist had to travel abroad.
Hisham’s father, a Libyan dissident living in exile in Cairo was kidnapped, flown back to Libya, imprisoned, “and gradually, like salt dissolving in water, made to vanish,” as Hisham explains pithily and poignantly in A Month in Siena. Pithiness and poignancy are the warp and weft of this tapestry of love, grief, encounter with a city, and the role of art in dealing with loss.
Hisham was 19 and studying in London when his father was kidnapped. Only a decade later, after Muammar Gadaffi died was he able to return to Libya and piece together the story of the disappearance. The book he wrote of that quest, The Return, was emotionally incomplete, partly because there was no certainty about what happened to the father, and partly because the son was yet to find the peace that comes with acceptance.
After the kidnapping, Hisham found solace in the paintings by Sienese artists at London’s National Gallery. Soon, he says, “Siena began to occupy the sort of uneasy reverence the devout might feel towards Mecca or Rome or Jerusalem, and therefore I became, out of a scepticism about such privileges, suspicious of my desire to visit the city.”
Finding himself in an in-between space in his mind, his book The Return completed, and the call of Siena still unanswered – Hisham travels to Siena. Unfulfilled desire is a powerful motivator
“I knew I had come to Siena not only to look at paintings. I had also come to grieve alone, to consider the new terrain and to work out how I might continue from here,” writes Hisham. Paintings reveal themselves through the long hours he spends contemplating them; more importantly, they reveal him to himself. “A picture changes as you look at it and changes in ways that are unexpected,” he says (the paintings Hisham writes about are all published in the book).
Written in a language at once exquisite and precise, sensitive and subtle, personal and universal, A Month in Siena is a unique memoir. “(My solitude) was temporally rich,” says Hisham, “as though when one is alone, time becomes a room with double windows: one looking into the past, the other into the future.” It is a technique he uses well in telling the story, like some of the paintings that contain the past and future simultaneously.
Hashim’s instinct was right. He finds his peace in Sienese art through Giovanni di Paolo’s Paradise in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. It is a painting that imagines a union in the hereafter.
And we breathe a sigh of relief, for without that final consolation, we would have been as disappointed as Hisham, who draws us into his heart.
Unfulfilled expectations can be powerful too.
(Suresh Menon is Contributing Editor, The Hindu)
