Exile City
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In 1916, as war raged on the western front, the British government asked Joseph Conrad, famous for his sea stories, to write a piece of morale boosting propaganda for the merchant marines of the Admiralty. His task was to paint a stirring picture of British valour. He agreed and spent ten days aboard The Ready, anchored at the widest point of the Thames estuary (one thinks of Marlow on The Nellie, waiting for sunset, surrounded by his faceless listeners). The result of this mission was a peculiar piece of writing called ‘The Unlighted Coast’ – a reference to electrical blackouts across Essex at the time. In the essay, rather than tout the heroism of the marines or recycle some German atrocity story, Conrad recounts instead the experience of looking back towards England one moonless night and seeing nothing but darkness. At one point, as if remembering the nature of his job description, he insists that he does not mean this in ‘a symbolic or spiritual sense.’ It’s just a fact – the power’s out, it’s dark over there. But he can’t help himself and soon slips into full-blown Marlow-speak, telling the bemused officer beside him that ‘surely neither Caesar’s galleys nor the ships of the Danish rovers had ever found on their approach this land so absolutely and scrupulously lightless as this.’ Unsurprisingly, the government never published the piece. The Admiralty conveniently lost their only copy.
On this evidence, Conrad might be the worst war propagandist in British history. Asked to brighten the spirits of his adopted home, he ends up wiping it from the face of the earth. In my view it’s a point in his favour. I don’t say this in a glib anti-patriotic way (which is, of course, a very English sentiment in itself). I find there is something charming, almost noble, in the way he sabotages himself. It’s amusing to think of Conrad – with his unrelenting irony, his gloomy temperament, his eye for darkness, his suspicion of power and empire and ideals – trying his best to ape the voice of a state-sponsored pamphleteer.
Of Conrad’s heirs at work today, one of the most interesting is Hisham Matar.
Though he certainly wanted Britain to win the war, his failure on The Ready illustrates his profound ambivalence towards the country. Arriving as the disorientated Polish sailor Józef Konrad Korzeniowski, he became the English novelist Joseph Conrad, and stayed for fifty years. He once told another Polish refugee that ‘the word Home always means for me the hospitable shores of Great Britain.’ But he never felt comfortable or appreciated. Until the end, he despaired that people treated him ‘as a sort of freak, an amazing bloody foreigner writing in English.’ After his death, as if determined to prove him right, Virginia Woolf wrote an obituary full of condescending praise, commending the ‘stiff and sombre music’ of his prose style, while stressing his appeal to ‘boys and young people’ and the idea that, in the end, ‘Conrad is concerned merely to show us the beauty of a night at sea.’
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Woolf, like the Royal Navy who sent him aboard The Ready, fundamentally misread what Conrad was saying about the sea – about England and Empire. It is often those who have left or been forced from their homes who understand him best. Edward Said called him ‘a cantus firmus, a steady groundbass’ to the experiences of dislocation in his own life. A bewildered V.S. Naipaul wondered how it was possible that Conrad ‘had been everywhere before me.’
Of Conrad’s heirs at work today, one of the most interesting is Hisham Matar. His third novel, My Friends, charts more than three decades in the life of Khaled Abd al Hady, a Libyan who moves to Britain to study. The plan was to return to Benghazi after university. ‘Don’t be lured in,’ his father warns, gripping him tight in their airport farewell. In other words: Please come back to us. This all changes when Khaled gets caught up in an act of political violence at a demonstration against the Qaddafi government outside the Libyan embassy in London. In a fictional retelling of a real 1984 incident, Khaled has barely joined the protest in St. James’s Square when a gunman inside the building opens fire at the crowd. Khaled gets hit in the chest and spends six weeks recovering in hospital. In the aftermath, fearing imprisonment or death should he return to Libya, he claims asylum in Britain.
The clock stops at the hour of exile, said the Russian writer Alexander Herzen. So it goes with Khaled: He sets up camp in a Shepherd’s Bush flat and stays for thirty years. London is an eventless place, a vast waiting room where nothing ever happens. None of his relationships with women last long. Decades pass; life is a suspended sentence. ‘London is a city of shadows, a city made for shadows, for people who like me who can be here a life-time yet remain as invisible as ghosts.’ The main image of that time, Khaled tells us, is of outdoor furniture sinking into the earth.
He is not completely alone. He shares the experience with the friends of the novel’s title, two fellow Libyans, Mustafa and Hosam. Mustafa is the one who convinced him to attend the fateful protest, a man who stays obstinately committed to his exile. ‘You can’t stay connected to the homeland if you share your bed with a foreigner,’ he says. Hosam, arriving ten years into Khaled’s English life, is a talented writer who, far from the urgency of Libya, has stopped writing. Indeed London is ‘where Arab writers came to die’ – that is, grow old and tired and irrelevant, safe and bored, at a dangerous remove from the everyday energy and depth of Arabic, which they used now only among themselves, or in self-censored letters to loved ones back home. In the weightlessness of exile, the muscle of poetry goes soft.
Still, literature remains Khaled’s only solace. With Hosam, he creates a set of ‘author’s maps,’ something of a blue plaque tour of literary West London – visiting the former residences of Pound, Eliot, Lawrence, Woolf, Conrad. Always Conrad, whose ghost pursues them everywhere across the immigrant city. Together they visit an alleyway in Soho, where, according to Hosam, Conrad slit the throat of a man he thought was a Russian spy. (This never happened, as far as I’m aware.) Two hundred pages later, Khaled is astounded by the fact that Conrad, on his arrival in England, burned his late father’s letters. ‘It’s an accomplishment, I think, a genuine achievement, to forget one’s father. I would like to do that. To wake up one morning and commence life without giving him a thought.’ In a way, Khaled and his friends are all tragic versions of Yanko, the survivor of a shipwreck in Conrad’s story ‘Amy Foster’, which comes up at several points in the novel. Yanko is a stowaway from the Carpathian mountains who washes up on the Kentish shore. Wary of his alien language and appearance, the locals shun him, but he sticks around, learns a spattering of English over the course of years, even gets married and starts a family. At the end of the story, Yanko falls badly sick, and in his fever dreams mumbles endlessly in his native language. Spooked, fearing he is possessed by the devil, Yanko’s wife abandons him to his illness, and his death. Matar directly alludes to this conclusion when, in one of the novel’s most emotionally arresting scenes, the lapsed writer, Hosam, terrifies his long time Irish partner, Claire, by yelling in Arabic and hallucinating, emptying a fire extinguisher on a non-existent fire. In ‘Amy Foster’, Yanko, too, was only asking for water.
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Matar’s attraction to Conrad is easy to understand. Both men lost their fathers to the political turmoil of their countries – Poland and Libya. (Conrad’s father fought Russian subjugation; Matar’s was a prominent dissident against Qaddafi). Both men committed themselves to a literary life in a second language. Most of all, they both recognise and capture something of London’s duplicity for the outsider – its cold apathy to you on the one hand, and the freedom this affords on the other.
If the city makes no offers of belonging, it makes no demands either. In that sense London is the exile city par excellence.
When Conrad arrived in 1878, London was the largest city in the world, ‘a monstrous town… a cruel devourer of light.’ A few weeks beforehand he had tried to shoot himself in the chest in Marseille, and London was a good place to hide and forget yourself. This was the world he evoked in The Secret Agent, the only novel he set in England yet one peopled entirely by foreigners. The story concerns a bomb plot gone wrong and the lives of fin-de-siecle revolutionaries in immigrant Soho, home to a host of nihilists, anarchists, proto-fascists and general malcontents from across Europe.
Given the rabid anti-immigrant atmosphere in the country today, it is easy to forget that for most of the nineteenth century a confident Britain fancied itself an ‘asylum of nations’ – a refuge for persecuted people. Anyone could come and stay with no bureaucratic oversight. In 1849, even a short term measure to limit foreign arrivals was overturned in parliament. Only after the collapse of the Paris Commune, when thousands of refugees brought their radical ideas with them to London, was there a pronounced public reaction against immigrants. By 1905, when Conrad was writing The Secret Agent, the main targets of resentment were Eastern Europeans, mostly Jews escaping Tsarist pogroms. More than 100,000 ‘Russians or Russian Poles’ lived in the capital, and the press was warning of an ‘alien invasion’ (how that language persists today). Many didn’t want to stay in England; the real dream was America, not a slum in the East End. Emmanuel Litvinoff, in his underappreciated memoir of Jewish Brick Lane, describes his parents leaving Odessa by ship, under the impression they’ve bought passage to New York. On arrival, huddled eagerly on deck, they peer through the mist. ‘Where were the Statue of Liberty, the Brooklyn Bridge, the highest buildings on earth?’ Their tickets, it turned out, only covered the journey to England. ‘They were herded ashore and the sour smell of London choked their nostrils. They recognised it at once. It was the odour of a new Exile.’
New York once offered its immigrants a grand bargain – shed the clothes and manners of the old country, and become American. London makes no such offers. The city may not have noticed the newcomer’s arrival at all, as they stand there shivering on the dock, or in the airport terminal. England provides no oven-ready immigrant mythology, and becoming English is a near-impossibility, as Conrad discovered. This indifference has its advantages. If the city makes no offers of belonging, it makes no demands either, unlike in America, which insists on a daily pledge of allegiance. In that sense London is the exile city par excellence. In My Friends, Khaled feels protected by ‘its maze-like streets turning upon one another as though designed for the purpose of keeping secrets.’ In a recent event for the novel, Matar told the audience that the very thing he loved about London was also what he found so difficult – that it is tolerant. ‘Who wants to be tolerated? You want to be loved.’
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If the revolutionaries in The Secret Agent are ‘shams,’ as Conrad called them, it is not so in Matar’s world. The final third of My Friends reckons with the uprising against Qaddafi as Khaled’s friends Mustafa and Hosam return to Libya, take up arms, and partake for better or worse in the remaking of their country. Time starts up again. Khaled equivocates and stays behind, and in that way he is closer to Conrad himself, who, despite his commitment to Poland as an idea (which doubled as loyalty to his father), couldn’t bring himself to believe in any revolutionary ideals.
Most narratives of return, if they are at all honest, are stories of disappointment and grief.
This part of the novel suffers on a technical level, as the action in Libya can only be recounted to the reader in long, improbable emails from Mustafa and Hosam. The real theme of this section is Khaled’s refusal, after decades of yearning, to rejoin his friends and family. ‘Soon you will be home,’ his mother says, when Benghazi falls to the rebels, but to her dismay he can’t bring himself to go. At this point, the novel becomes a sister narrative to Matar’s astonishing memoir The Return. That book begins at the airport as he is about to board the plane to Libya. Like the character in his novel, Matar has not gone back in over thirty years. In line, passport in hand, he gets cold feet and wonders if he’s making a mistake. ‘Return and you will face the absence or the defacement of what you treasured.’
This is a familiar idea, that the memory of home will not face up to the reality of change, that to return will only deepens one’s sense of alienation and rootlessness. (On his one return to Poland with his son, Conrad felt like no more than a ‘grizzled foreigner holding forth in a strange tongue.’) In My Friends, Khaled has a related but different concern; the end of exile, he worries, may require from him the total denouncement of the life he has built away from home. Return is possible, but there is a high price for reintegration, a hidden condition: London must be rejected. For Mustafa, always the most resistant to England, this is not a difficult choice, and to be back in Libya is ‘like being brought back from the dead.’ The revolution, he says, ‘has washed him clean of exile.’ Hosam, too, abandons his partner, Claire, with little explanation and falls in love with a woman in his hometown. Khaled, however, is loath to wash himself completely clean of his adopted city:
The life I have made for myself here is held together by a delicate balance. I must hold it with both hands. It is the only life I have now. I would have to abandon it to go back, and although I wish to abandon it, I fear I might not be able to reconstitute a new life, even if that would be in the folds of the old one.
Most narratives of return, if they are at all honest, are stories of disappointment and grief. They describe the moment of collision between memory and anticipation, and the final defeat of both. The present arrives to sweep the past away, and the future surrenders once more to the unknowable. Narratives of staying put in exile may be even harder to write, because they reject the release of narrative altogether. The novel ends where it began, in the waiting room of the eventless city. Khaled walks back to his eternal flat in Shepherd’s Bush. ‘I slide the key into my door,’ he says. ‘The place is unchanged.’
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Kasra Lang is a writer from London. His work has appeared in The Threepenny Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books and other publications. He lives in Los Angeles, where he is a doctoral fellow at the University of Southern California.
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