 Hello, good evening. Thank you, Gilbert, for the introduction and for the invitation. It's particularly nice, actually, to be at SOAS. Not that I have ever taken a class at SOAS or taught a class, but for a long time and throughout my university years, some of my closest friends were students here. So it does feel like coming to a familiar place. And thanks to all of you for being here. And braving the weather. It feels very cold. I don't think it's an exceptionally cold evening, but I think coming from Cairo, it feels very, very cold. My lecture will deal in the main with old concerns, questions that have occupied me with varying degrees of urgency for many years. How to exist as an artist, or put another way, how to protect one's work from history, how to keep it conscious of the present, attentive to the present, yet guarded from public service. I must stress that I'm approaching this very much from the point of view of a novelist. And therefore, my musings and questions will have an improvisational and personal temperament. To consider the question of the novelist in history, I am going to observe other authors, namely Ovid or David Matloof's Ovid, Albert Camus and others. I want to examine the experiential life of the novelist as both artist and citizen. To explore the ongoing concern I have of how an artist can create during a time in which current events intrude into his or her imagination. It is perhaps one of literature's most cruel stories that Ovid, or Publius Ovidius Nassau, author of Metamorphosis, a work about persons and animals and things transformed and therefore separated from their true physical identity, should have become himself subjected to an endless and cruel exile from his wife, his country, and everything that he knew. Ovid was 51 when this happened, already well known for his reputation as a poet established. He had committed a karmine et erar, a poem and a mistake, which was the only explanation the poet offered for his banishment. This event, which informed everything Ovid wrote from this point on, took place over 2,000 years ago in 8 AD, the same year in which he completed the epic poem Metamorphosis, consisting of 15 books. He was at the height of his literary powers. His language, his method had never been stronger. Tomes, by the Black Sea, modern day Constansta in Romania, is where Emperor Augustus decided to send Ovid. Tomes had no library, no books, no paintings, no great architecture, and no theater. Its people did not speak a written language. Its landscape was harsh and bleak. Ovid was not only exiled from Rome, but also from language, from literature, culture, and the life of the mind. Notwithstanding his endless pleas to the emperor, he was never allowed to return. He died nine years into his exile in 17 AD at the age of 60. Ovid wrote two major works from his banishment, Trestia, a book-length poem which fulfills the ultimate exilic fantasy, a poem that returns in place of the author, and which he completed and sent back to Rome a year after arriving at Tomes in the autumn of 9 AD. The other work he completed in exile is Especialia Ex Punto, Black Sea Letters, and these two works Ovid sometimes addresses his friends, sometimes he addresses Rome, the city, sometimes he addresses his wife, and sometimes he addresses the dictator, Augustus. Or, as in the opening of Trestia, he addresses the poem itself. I'll read you the opening. Little book, no, I don't begrudge at you. You're off to the city without me, going where your only begator is banned. On your way then, but penny plain as befits an exile, sad offering and my present life. For you, no purple slipcase, that's a color goes ill with grief. No title line picked out in vermilion, no sedder-oiled backing, no white bosses to set off those black edges. Leave luckier books to be dressed with such trimmings. Never forget my sad estate. No smoothing off your ends with friable pumice appear for inspection bristly, unkempt, and don't be embarrassed by blots. Anyone who sees them will sense they were due to my tears. Go, book, go and bring to the places I loved my greeting. Let me reach them with what feet I may, and if in the throng there's one by whom I'm not forgotten who should chance to ask how I am, tell him I live, not his well, but emphasize I only survive by courtesy of a God. For the rest, keep silent. If people demand more details, take care not to blab out any state secrets. A reader once reminded will remember the charges against me. I will be condemned in public by popular vote. Those such accusations may wound you, make no defense. A good for nothing case stands beyond any advocacy. Find one who sighs at my exile, who can't read those poems dry-eyed, and who prays but in silence lest the malicious hear him that Caesar's wrath may abate. My sentence, be lightened. Tristia and the Black Sea Letters contain some of the most powerful literature of political exile ever written. They explore the territory of dislocation, alienation, and estrangement. Ovid's longing brings to mind Edward Said's words that exile is strangely compelling to think about, but terrible to experience. Said's brilliant formulation that exile is a jealous state, that what you achieve is precisely what you have no wish to share because it has been so painful to earn, rings true, particularly when you note Ovid's haughty and eaked tone in the line, find one who sighs at my exile, who can't read those poems dry-eyed. And the letters, particularly his reoccurring appeal for mercy, his poetic begging to be allowed to return home. Exemplify what Simone V, the French philosopher, meant when she wrote that to be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul. David Maalouf, not a writer in exile, but a writer born out of exile. His Lebanese father and English mother moved to Australia, and he was born in Brisbane in 1934. In his second novel, An Imaginary Life, published in 1978, Maalouf takes up Ovid in Tomesh. The novel is written in the first person in the voice of the Roman poet. Maalouf doesn't indulge in trying to sound like Ovid or like a period poet, but rather assumes Ovid's intellect and sensibility with such artistry that Ovid seems so natural and contemporary. What sets Maalouf aside as an artist is that he is not satisfied by merely creating a curious musing on what life was like or might have been like for Ovid in his banishment by the Black Sea, but uses the poet's harsh fate to write a meditation about the civilized mind and nature, the tame and the wild, home and exile, and ultimately a meditation on language. What is the use of a refined, cultivated and complex language such as Latin when no one understands it? What is the use of writing if you are not read? How to approach the world now? And would this crisis of language and exile from a shared tongue provoke an older human language to emerge, a language before language, a forgotten, lost language? Maalouf takes the particular and isolating state, the jealous state of banishment, and extracts from it universal and timeless themes. A proposition made by an imaginary life is that exile is an nascent, in sepence state that is almost regressive, returning an adult to stages of infancy, but also exile as death and therefore part of nature. Exile, nature and language are connected in Ovid's life through Maalouf's book. Latin, the language of sophisticated and courtly Rome is the language that pronounced Ovid's banishment. The barbarian language of the Getai, the people now Ovid was living with in Tomesh, is earthier, more fundamental, more rooted in the physicality of agrarian life. But even more fundamental than this is a language of childhood whose quote from Ovid's book, every syllable is a gesture of reconciliation, end of quote. Ovid has learned this language under the tutelage of child, the boy brought up by beasts in the wild and that Ovid encounters in his walks. Ovid captured and befriended child, unless the irony be lost, child is the creature Ovid exiled, the boy upon whom Ovid becomes Augustus. His relationship with child enables, quote, a kind of conversation that needs no tongue, a perfect interchange of perceptions, end of quote. And as he approaches death, Ovid declares that, and this is of course from Ovid's book, quote, between our bodies and the world there is unity and commerce, end of quote. The poet's identity is being as a subject, separate and indistinguishable from everything else, dissolves into this unity of the body and the world around it in an annulment of all alienation and its concomitant desire. The novel ends with Ovid watching child, his guide into this new landscape moving ahead of him. He is walking on the water's light and as I watch, he takes the first steps off it, moving slowly away now into the deepest distance above the earth, above the water, on air. It is summer, it is spring. I am immeasurably, unbearably happy. I am three years old, I am 60, I am six, I am there. Ovid uses language and the imagination to remake the world, the world he remembers, Rome, from which he has been excluded and the new world he finds in his banishment. His exile excites his imagination, but it also limits it. One intention behind Ovid's exile was the desire on Augustus's part to retard the poem. It is the intention of most dictators for involved in the dictatorial project is the intent, either through fear, dispossession or alienation, to retard society and the individual. The extraordinary thing about Matluv's novel and imaginary life is how modern it makes Ovid and Ovid's condition. Not only modern, but also radical in the true meaning of that word, in the sense of relating to the root of things. And therefore it is hard to escape the suggestion that writers from Ovid from 2000 years ago till today have shared a fundamental crisis with society and the will of history. That writers have always existed intentionally or otherwise in opposition to power. The Swiss German painter Paul Clay compared the artist to the trunk of a tree and the work of art to the crown. Quote, from the root, the sap flows to the artist, flows through him, flows through, flows to his eyes. He does nothing other than gather and pass on what comes to him from the depths. He neither serves nor rules. He transmits. His position is humble and the beauty at the crown is not his own. He is merely a channel, end of quote. The tragedy of the modern artist Clay maintains in his essay on modern art is that the sap does not flow sufficiently from human roots. The participative life of the community. Artists suffer from social disunity, a sort of permanent existential exile. We have found parts but not the whole, he says. That the tragedy of which Clay speaks is exhibited in his own works. They are exquisite and refined, but they belong in their intense and wayward subjectivity to a private universe and thus contribute to the very schizoid tendencies that he deplores. This is not the plight of a single painter or of a few artists only, I'm suggesting. It is much more pervasive. There seems to be a profound maladjustment between the creative life and the existing social order. That, quote, the writer exists under siege, as W. H. Auden put it. Adorno echoes the sentiment in his essay on commitment which argues with references to Kafka and Beckett that it is not the office of art to spotlight alternatives but to resist by its form alone the course of the world which permanently puts a pistol to men's heads. End of quote, very optimistic. Artists are not necessarily outsiders and outsiders are not necessarily artists, of course, yet there is a point in history in which we could detect this gradual existential exile of the artist. It coincides with the romantic period of the 19th century when the individualistic nature of Western civilization became firmly established. The artist began to be seen as a bohemian and eccentric and impractical dreamer, perhaps a genius, but certainly not a normal, well-adjusted member of society. And it became fashionable to read external marks of nonconformity, dress or residence in an artist's quarter or unconventionalities of behavior such as infidelity. It became commonplace to read such eccentricities as superficial signs of an inward detachment and estrangement. More significant than outward nonconformity was the alienation exhibited in the artist's creative role. In England, for example, the following groups spring to mind. The back-to-nature prophets such as the lake poets, the romantic rebels against almost every form of authority such as Shelley and Swinburne, the mockers of convention such as Byron and Wilde, quote, a gentleman is one who never hurts anyone's feelings unintentionally, end of quote, or a man can be happy with any woman as long as he does not love her, end of quote, as of course Wilde. The religious critics of social materialism and mass standardization such as Blake, Ruskin and Carlisle, quote, the tree which moves some to tears of joys in the eyes of others, only a green thing that stands in the way. Some see nature all ridicule and deformity and some scarce see nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself and that's of course Blake. And the art for art's sake as such as Patter, Whistler and to a certain extent, I think Hopkins. The vast quote, this is Whistler, bemoaning. The vast majority of English folk cannot and will not consider a picture as a picture apart from any story which it may be supposed to tell, end of quote. And through this rebellion, the artist has attained a kind of freedom. All taboos are off, any style, any subject matter is now permissible. It is a considerable achievement, as Herbert Reed wrote, of modern art to have made the world tolerant, intellectually, if not politically, of variety. It would be foolish to suggest that all of these artists are outsiders but all exhibit some symptom of cultural estrangement. In his book, The Rebel about alienated artists and writers and through his lyrical and critical essays, the author Albert Camus invited the description of a moralist in the tradition, in the French fashion, in the sense that a moralist is a commentator on the human condition. Camus was born into a working class French colonial family in Alderaan in Algeria in 1913. And of course, for 132 years from 1830 to 1962, Algeria was under the French. Like the philosopher Jacques Derrida, Camus was also a pied noir or black foot, a term referring to French citizens of various origins who lived in Algeria and who were, to a certain extent, outsiders in Algeria and outsiders in France. He was a novelist, playwright and philosophical essayist. He was also a working journalist, expressing himself from day to day on questions of current affairs. He was intensely conscious of the nature of his duty as a writer and indeed of the function of writers in general. On this question, there had been a good deal of discussion in French literary circles. The old answers to amuse, to instruct, that's what writers do, to distract, to refresh, to depict another world more satisfying than this, to make people real to themselves by words, to turn a perfect sentence, to create the sentence in itself beautiful, meticulous seas, daffodils that come before the swallow dares, to set a chime of words, tinkling in the minds of a few fastidious people. These and the like were rejected as the delicate superfluities of a softer age. Modern conditions, we were assured, needs turner stuff. Writers were asked, no, commanded to plunge into the social and political battles of their time, to take a stand and to fight for that stand, in a word, to commit. Camus asks whether any man can ever be as sure as all that. He proclaims his own allegiance to the party of those who know that they are sometimes wrong. And even if men are so sure, he says, does their sureness give them the right to spill blood? Camus sees humanity at a crossroads. And on the signpost is the challenge, shall thou or shall thou not kill? The plea, although for peace, is not for what is generally called pacifism. Camus fought in the French resistance and agreed that there are occasions when violence has to be met with violence. His point is rather that in our time, the use of violence has become a recognized mode of public action, both usual and accepted as legitimate. Crimes of violence, there have been always. It is only in our time, he suggests, that they have become legal. Current ways of thought have turned the murderer into a judge and judges into murderers. Murder as a means, terror as an instrument of policy. These are the accompaniments and consequences, he suggests, of blind faith. The course of the world, according to Camus, or the logic of Camus' fiction, sorry, the curse of the world, according to Camus, or the logic of Camus' fiction, is the idealist. The writer akin to Camus in English is George Orwell. Both Camus and Orwell write clearly. Both Camus and Orwell know clearly the infamous thing to destroy. Quote, every line of serious work which I have written since 1936, wrote George Orwell, has been written directly or indirectly against totalitarianism, and for democratic socialism, as I understand it. It seems to me nonsense in a period like our own to think that one can avoid writing of such subjects. Orwell wrote this in 1948. In the same year, Camus wrote these words. The 17th century was the century of mathematics, the 18th of the physical sciences, the 19th of biology, our century, the 20th century is the century of fear. And he proceeds to explain the new turn in the human scene whereby the human voice and the human appeal has lost its power, and men no longer speak or understand the language of humanity. He says, we have seen lying and degrading and killing and deporting and torturing. And every time it was not possible to persuade those who were doing it not to do it, because they were sure of themselves and because one cannot persuade an abstraction. That is to say, the representative of an ideology. We live in terror, he says, because persuasion is no longer possible. In this recognition of the nature of the immoralism of their time, Orwell and Camus speak with one voice. But Camus goes deeper than Orwell in that he has tried to excavate its historical origins and therefore unravel its universal character. Orwell's intense vision was of the present and he saw it clearly, so clearly in fact, as to make him over sharpen the issues and to invite the censure of exaggeration. Albert Camus' most influential work is Lutronje, the outsider. It is the story of a young clerk who loses his mother, attends her funeral, returns to the office, takes out a girl or two, goes on a visit to a friend, joins in an obscure dispute, lets off a gun, kills a man, is tried and condemned to death. That's basically the plot. It's brittle, splintery, fragile style, it's paratactic simplicity, the placing of clauses or phrases one after another without words to indicate coordination or subordination, reflects the delicate and yet insecure nature of its action. If action is the right word, things happen and not very interesting things at that. Incident attaches itself to incident, triviality to triviality. A cigarette is taken out and smoked or put back. The stranger, the outsider, himself is not a hero, hardly even a subject. He is the person to whom what happens happens. He's an anonymous nobody who is casually involved in this or that casual event. For Camus, the present is rooted in historical conditions that require and repay study. Seven centuries was the century of mathematics, the 18th of physical sciences, the 19th of biology, our century, the 20th century is the century of fear. In his view, our situation is neither a momentary lapse nor an all engulfing present. It was prefigured long ago and is not, therefore, out of the way or accidental. But at the same time, our own experience suffices to show that the collapse is not total and more importantly, the making of the next chapter, the 21st century, our century, is in the making and therefore in our hand. Camus, therefore, implicates us in our time. In the modern era, something new begins to afflict the condition of the artist. He or she becomes dislocated from a viable, tangible sense of community and belonging. Not only do they feel separate, but that their work and existential survival relies on this separateness. And this sense of separateness creates a melancholy between the artist and society, between the individual and the group. It seems irreversible, like a loss of innocence, but it has gained artists a certain facility, a necessary distance, or to use Tolstoy's immortal phrase, the necessary weakness, necessary to make the world tolerant intellectually, if not politically, a variety. This sense of separateness, of course, existed long before the modern era, from over, then arguably from the very beginnings of when human beings felt the impulse to express, to comment, to record, to reflect their reality. I remember, for example, my father taking me to see the cave paintings in Fazan, in southern Libya, which date back to around the time Ovid was banished to Thomas. The prehistoric pastoral paintings of animals and hunting scenes from 2000 years ago show that even then, the artist had to step back, literally, had to take a step away in order to record, to document. So even then, the sense of separateness I am looking at was present, but the clear rupture occurred perhaps more dramatically and perhaps more irrevocably in the mid 20th century, around the time when Kafka and Camus were writing. In this light, we can look at Camus, the outsider, as a marker in the sand. It asks the simple yet profound question of what happens when a man acts with naked honesty. What happens when a man refuses to lie? One of the answers offered is a phrase, to borrow a phrase from the book, a melancholic truce is set in, a sort of pessimistic optimism. Decades words, you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on, could have been spoken or thought by Mechso, the hero of the outsider. Camus' novel is an elegy, too, to the mother. We forget that everything that takes place in that book, including the central tragedy, the murder of the Arab, takes place as a response to the death of the mother. It is also, I believe, a meditation on what it means to be a man, on masculinity. Mechso is like a trapped animal. Whenever he's indoors, he is still or wary. When he leans his head on the belly of a girl he took swimming, he takes note of the sound of her body. I want to stay with this theme of masculinity and the sense of separateness of the artist. The two are evoked further by two events that took place in the latter half of the 20th century. Although they have nothing to do with Libya, these events say, I believe, something about the existential pull and thrust of politics and literature. The nature of the dislocation mentioned of the artist from a viable, tangible sense of community and belonging. And in turn, they bring to mind the Libyan writer and the Libyan male. In 1945, shortly after liberation, a charismatic French general manages to convince an award-winning French author to be his minister of information. Approximately 45 years later, an internationally acclaimed Peruvian novelist puts his pen down to run for office. Although wholly unconnected, these events share a detail that is telling and curious in its mirror likeness. General Charles de Gaulle had been trying for some time to convince the reluctant André Malraux, a man 11 years his junior, to take on the job of minister. He used the guilt argument. Your country needs you. He used flattery. You are the best man for the job. And I'm sure de Gaulle also used the mildly threatening argument of, so much would be lost if he turned this down. Every tactic failed. It wasn't until all three were employed with equal skill and fine balance that the general succeeded. That night, Victoria's de Gaulle tiptoed into his marital bedroom and woke up Yvonne de Gaulle. This is recorded in Yvonne de Gaulle's memoir. I didn't make it up. It's exactly us. Yvonne turned on the lamp beside her bed and squinted at the figure of her husband unbuttoning his military jacket. I imagine the large brass buttons eased out of the slits with more willingness than usual. He apologized for waking her up. Where have you been? She asked. Tonight, he told her, then perhaps here he paused or perhaps he went straight on speaking the words quickly. Tonight I assassinated André Malraux. By this time Malraux had published La Conditione humaine, published in English under the title of Man's Fate, a novel about the existential plight of a diverse group of people after a failed revolution. He had also written Le Spoire, published in English under the title Man's Hope about the Spanish Civil War. Another historical drama, by the way, in which the fated Malraux had played a significant role, fighting on the side of the Republican forces. And indeed, it's an incredible fact about him, is that he set up the legendary Esquadrone España, which had inflicted serious losses on Franco's nationalist army. André Malraux ended up serving the goal until the end of the general's presidency in 1969. First as minister of information, then as minister of state, and finally as the first minister of cultural affairs. And he was, by all accounts, an excellent minister of cultural affairs. In a different continent, and about 20 years after Malraux retired from public office, the 54-year-old Peruvian novelist, Mario Vargas Llosa, already noted for novels such as The Time of the Hero, Conversations in the Cathedral, and The War of the End of the World, was running for the presidency of Peru. And again, I'm not making this up, this was recorded in his memoir called Fish Out of Water. Late one night, Mario Vargas Llosa writes, he too walks into his marital bedroom and silhouetted by the light begins to unbutton his dinner jacket, waking his wife, Patricia Llosa. Like Yvonne, Patricia too turned on the lamp beside her bed and squinted towards her husband. But she did not ask, where have you been? She knew, he was in a political rally. His combed hair and his shoulders were sprinkled with confetti. No, Patricia did not need to ask where Mario had been. All she said was, once, and perhaps here too, she paused. Once, I was married to a novelist. Malraux and Vargas Llosa's example illustrates the paradoxical reality of the novelist, that whilst he or she are obliged to be intimately acquainted with the details of social life and be intellectually and passionately involved, their work demands them to remain outsiders. Their example also says something about domestic space, about the marital bedroom. In Malraux's example, Charles de Gaulle, the man, is perhaps superficially lamenting his actions. Tonight I assassinated Andrei Malraux, but also showing off to his wife, his powers, his dominance, his self and historically aware violence and influence. But with Vargas Llosa, it is Patricia, the woman who leads the assault once I was married to a novelist, placing her husband's very identity under question, declaring him a stranger or the stranger in the bedroom, whilst accusing him of the ultimate betrayal that of the self. The silence of the marital bedrooms of Yvonne and Charles de Gaulle and of Patricia and Mario Vargas Llosa, the way history, politics and literature, assassination and identity has found its way in, makes me think of how the Libyan marital bedroom changed in the years under Colonel Gaddafi's rule. To explain, I have to first draw a quick picture of what life was like under the Libyan dictatorship. Throughout its rule from 1969 to 2000 any level, Gaddafi's dictatorship penetrated every sphere of civic life. It implanted its agents, the so-called revolutionary committees, who were obsessed with finding enemies in every institution and organization, every club and union, in the lecture halls and in the theaters, corrupting society's cultural vibrancy. They subjugated the press and dismantled one of the most progressive and independent university student unions in the post-colonial Arab world. Executing its leaders in public squares and imprisoning hundreds of its members, society was chased indoors until the only place Libyans could exist unmonitored was inside their homes. But even that final domain was invaded. Interrogations were regularly broadcast on national TV. Men, the revolutionary committees, deemed anti-revolutionary or traitors or bourgeois or backward or people who were halting the march, endless, the list goes on, were questioned and accused on television. From our sitting rooms we watched men stiff with fear under a camera's harsh lights, answering questions delivered by faceless voices. We must have known that the questions were also intended for us. And when some of those men were executed, we watched also on national television the summery and clumsy nature of the executions held in sports stadiums or city squares. We watched men hanging by the neck, swinging by a rope, fear killed many poems, fear killed many novels, fear was like thorns in the mouth. Conversation in the home changed. Members of the same family distrusted one another. And when children were around, any criticism of the regime became coded, lest the young innocently carry words out to the street. It was not uncommon for the dictators Henschman to interrogate young children about their parents. This practice returned darkly during the Libyan Revolution when security officials went to schools in Tripoli to ask children as young as seven what their parents thought of the uprisings taking place in Benghazi and other cities. Throughout the 42 years of the dictatorship, certain things could only be said in the marital bedroom. And the Libyan male endured both Marlowe's assassination, his silence and impotence in the face of Gaddafi's authoritarianism, and Vargas Llosa's estrangement. Without a voice, the Libyan male's identity and power became obscure. You could see this play itself out during the revolution. The enthusiasm by which Libyan men took up arms, for example, was of course an expression of audacity and bravery, but also I believe a reclaiming of will and an assertion of their masculinity. And the final act, the killing of Gaddafi, its violence, the sexual nature of the abuse the dictator endured at the hands of his captors was a dark reflection of both the crisis of masculinity and impotence the Libyan male endured for four decades. As well as being many other things, the Libyan Revolution is an attempt to redefine the existential place of the Libyan male, to bring him out of his hiding places. What he will make of this opportunity remains to be seen. Similarly, the revolution has redefined the place of the Libyan writer. And as so much as one can speak about such a complex figure, such a vague and fragile and nearly ephemeral figure, for Libyan literature has been dealt so many blows that it now seems to tremble at the edge of oblivion. It is a literature that has for too long been subjected to political interference and interference that has developed so many ways to undermine the imagination. For if dictatorship is to exist, it exists against the imagination. It cannot tolerate variance or contemplation and therefore it cannot tolerate spontaneity or dreaming. Like Edward Said's exile, dictatorship too is jealous, but more violently so. In the words of the late Resiart Kapushinsky, every dictatorship not only surrounds itself with kitsch, it is in itself a vulgar political kitsch, unhappy, often stained with blood. It is the triumph of tastelessness, not the harmless, containable kitsch of mass culture, but an aggressive kitsch, which ruins the creative culture, poisons the social atmosphere, and has only hate and contempt for the individual. Perhaps dictatorship's fear literature because they see it as a competing narrative, dictatorship is a sort of hideous fiction and tolerant of the very idea that there might exist more than one possibility, the very idea of other fictions. I remember when I was writing my first book in The Country of Men, a novel set in Libya and in which the constant and menacing gaze of the dictatorship pierces its way through the private quarters of a family's daily life. I often felt the temptation to expose the awfulness, the sheer absurdity and vileness of the Libyan dictatorship further. A dictatorship that stole our house, a dictatorship that killed people I know, people I love, people I admire, a dictatorship that in 1990 colluded with the Egyptian government to kidnap my father from his home in exile in Cairo, took him to Libya where he was subjected to torture and imprisonment and worse of all, to the fate of the disappeared. So as you can see, I had many reasons to make my book an attack, a catalog of their crimes. I had to resist such temptations. And on the other extreme, when I was gripped with a sense of panic, fearing retribution against me or worse, members of my family, as indeed has happened to other Libyan writers who spoke out in the past, the temptation to act as my own censor, in other words, my own Augustus, my own oppressor was also great. I had to resist that too. If I succeeded in protecting my work from such extra literary concerns, then I did it because I was somehow convinced that to give in to those temptations, regardless of the legitimacy of my grievances, would turn my novel into a diatribe, a dead corpse. For any writer caught amid such violent tides, literature must be his measure. His prose would show him up. In the prose of any work of literature, one finds the very DNA of the entire thing, right there in the sentences, sometimes in the first sentence. A writer who thinks he can fool language will be made a fool of by language. Language's main purpose, after all, is to betray us. Every word we utter betrays us. It says a little more than what we think we are saying. Reveals more than we had anticipated, exposes us. And if a writer's intention is to use literature for his own ends, then all the evidence will be on the page, regardless how hard he tries to hide his footsteps. Gaddafi's political war on literature was effective. He silenced the whole generation of Libyan writers. Burnt books made it a dangerous activity to think, but he could have never succeeded because literature is not a plant one can uproot, but a vapor, as agile as oxygen. It is by nature rebellious, resists control and will never be satisfied. No prizes, no praise, no success, and no torture or burning of books or closure of universities could ever satisfy or kill it. It is in every one of us, including those who have never read a word in their lives, those who do not know how to read. It's the cluttering tongues and the poetic ones. It is wild and searching and it finds opportunity everywhere. This is its genius. Back in 1948, Albert Camus declared that the 17th century was the century of mathematics, the 18th century of the physical sciences, the 19th of biology, his century, the 20th century, the century of fear. I wonder what image we could assign our new 21st century. For this, and to close, I will turn to the words of another author, Italo Calvino. Were I to choose an auspicious image for the new millennium, he wrote, I would choose that one, the sudden agile leap of the poet philosopher who raises himself above the weight of the world, showing that with all his gravity, he has the secret of lightness and that what many consider to be the vitality of the times, noisy, aggressive, revving and roaring, belongs to the realm of the old death, like a cemetery of rusty old cars. The Libyan novelist went from being followed, pursued and persecuted, to now being free to write whatever he or she wishes. Therefore, Calvino's image of the sudden agile leap of the poet philosopher who raises himself above the weight of the world is not an inappropriate model because there exists the danger of replacing the burden of oppression and persecution with that of public duty and obligation. If the imagination itself is that private chamber, like the marital bedroom, in which the artist renews his or her vows to literature, then let it be a place not of assassinations and betrayal, but a place of wonderment and what the creative process has always seemed to me to be a state of absolute freedom. Thank you. Thank you.