The Aesthetic of an Orphaned Memory: Journeying Across the ‘Lit-Up Stage’ of Hisham Matar's Siena

ABSTRACT

This article discusses Hisham Matar's second work of memoir, A Month in Siena in terms of its complex, longer engagement with the disappearance of Matar's dissident father, its aftermath, and the son's own relation to his father's ultimate fate. Attempting to articulate what may be an unrealisable form of grief, Matar seeks to elicit from the spaces of the medieval Sienese Republic an aesthetic grammar by means of which the process of surviving with(in) a forcibly suspended relation with his absent forebear may be spelt out. Matar's memoir mobilises the ability of memory to interpellate the act of self-narrative in the service of achieving a mourning-in-progress. Referencing the work of Massimo Cacciari, T.J. Clark, Mark Dooley, John Baldacchino and Philippe D’Averio, the author discusses Matar's contemplations of works from the Sienese School, including those of Ambrogio Lorenzetti and Duccio di Buoninsegna. The article opens up Matar's ekphrastic journey, suggesting that through it, art holds forth a configuration of power that is expansive in character: one whose semantic vista is as affirmative in its potential for articulating a complex, often damaged political world as the Libyan regime's own silence about his father is negatingly labyrinthine.

KEYWORDS:

• Hisham Matar
• Siena
• memoir
• Sienese School

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Siena itself, it perhaps bears adding, being geo-politically situated at a historic core of the Italian polity whose conquest Matar's own ancestors, as he describes in The Return, confronted and resisted in Libya.

2 This is a practice that Matar refers to or documents in both his memoirs to date, as well as in other contexts beyond the books themselves.

3 ‘Gli imperi non muoiono, e certamente non evaporano. Gli imperi implodono. Troppo è la forza di tenuta richiesta per farli vivere nella loro forma poliedrica per ipotizzare un banale crollo. Quando questa forza viene a mancare, gli imperi non crollano su loro stessi, collassono verse il loro centro […] Perché l’impero in realtà è il risultato della coabitazione di elementi eterogenei che si riconoscono sotto un medesimo afflato d’appartenenza all’avventura della storia il quale rimane tale solo fintanto che la storia vi insuffla una quotidiana energia’ (Daverio 2012, 48).

4 For an insight into Cacciari's understanding of the Roman civitas, see Cacciari, Massimo (2012).

5 Aesop (Oil on canvas, ca. 1638), is on permanent exhibition at Spain's Museo Nacional del Prado.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Norbert Bugeja

Norbert Bugeja is an Associate Professor within the Department of English of the University of Malta and Director of the university’s Mediterranean Institute. He has published extensively in the fields of Mediterranean life writing, memory studies, memorial-historical dialectics, and memoir-writing in the MENA region, including his monograph Postcolonial Memoir in the Middle East (Routledge 2012). He is the General Editor of the Journal of Mediterranean Studies (Project Muse/Johns Hopkins University Press), Advisory Editor of CounterText (Edinburgh University Press), a Member of the International Advisory Council of the Anna Lindh Foundation and, until recently, Deputy Chair of the National Book Council (Malta). He has lectured at the universities of Kent (UK), Warwick (UK), where he completed his studies as a Commonwealth Doctoral Scholar, Toronto, Malta and at other major higher-education institutions. He is regularly invited to deliver presentations at universities and educational institutions internationally and is also a published poet.