Édouard Manet - L'execution de Maximilien (London)
Work in Progress in the Social Studies (WIPSS): 2017/8
10 January 2018: Land in Between:
by
Dr Norbert Bugeja
Mediterranean Institute, University of Malta
On 10 January, WIPSS hosts Dr Norbert Bugeja, Mediterranean Institute, who will give a seminar on Hisham Matar’s memoir The Return. Norbert writes:
In his memoir The Return — Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between, published in late 2016, Libyan novelist Hisham Matar gives an account of his return to and a revisited relation with the land of his birth after the 2011 uprising that resulted in the ouster of Muammar Qaddafi. Matar embarks on an intense personal journey, a quest for information about the exact circumstances surrounding the fate of his father, Jaballa Matar — an eminent political dissident and successful entrepreneur who, in March of 1990, was abducted in Cairo by Qaddafi agents assisted by Egyptian president Husni Mubarak’s secret services. The abduction of Matar’s father was in the vein of the initiative launched by Qaddafi in 1980, noted by veteran diplomat Ethan Chorin as ‘the infamous “stray dogs campaign”, designed to neutralise and make an example of dissident expatriates.’ By looking more closely into the narrative dynamics at play in Matar’s recent work, I propose the memoir form as that locus of political shelter and flight — in turns dialectical and fortuitous — that comes to be activated and accessed as a dimension of refuge, precisely at those instances when the interests of both national (re-)formation and political justice seem to resolve in an impassable aporia.
In The Return, Matar strives to find out whether or not his father was murdered in the infamous — and under-documented — Abu Salim massacre of June 29th, 1996, in which over 1200 political prisoners were extra-judicially executed. I argue that Matar’s memoir seeks a moral sanctuary for the father’s veiled fate through a negative memorial quest, one that is distinctly reminiscent of the answer that the Foreigner (Xenos) gives Theaetetus in Plato’s Sophist: to ‘forcibly, establish that non-being somehow is, and that being, in its turn, in a certain way is not.’ In this seminar, I will offer a reading of Matar’s contemplations, in his memoir, of Titian’s painting The Martyrdom of Saint Lawrence, housed at the Chiesa di Santa Maria Assunta detta I Gesuiti in Venice, and of Edouard Manet’s The Execution of Maximilian, on permanent exhibition at the National Gallery in London. I argue that The Return is both highly conscious of the attunement of aesthetic form to psychic devastation, and able, under such conditions, to ‘[induce] a state of active lucidity in the observer, which proves inseparable from political action’ (N. Bourriaud).
Wednesday 10 January 2018, 18:00 - 19:00, followed by discussion. In the Faculty of Arts Library, on the third floor of Old Humanities Building, at the end of the corridor next to Room 301. The stairs are in the corner of the quadrangle behind the Assembly Hall. Students are encouraged to attend. The public is cordially welcome.
Paul Clough, Peter Mayo, and Michael Briguglio
