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now it is time for hardtalk. welcome to hardtalk. i'm stephen sackur. the arab experience of the past 50 years has been scarred by dictatorship, repression and cruelty, inflicted and endured. since the uprisings of 2011, voices have risen in protest, but how much has really changed? and to what extent can the western world really understand the impact of this prolonged trauma? my guest today is renowned libyan writer hisham matar, whose writing has explored the impact of having a father disappeared by the gaddafi regime. how hard is it to move on? theme music plays.

hisham matar, welcome to hardtalk. thank you. you have written extensively about the impact of your father's disappearance on yourself, both in terms of novel, memoir, and ijust wonder, now, years on, whether you have found peace? i think what i'm interested in, is what every writer is interested in, is taking an experience that you...that has initiated you, into certain themes, certain experiences and ideas, and making something of it, exploring it. not in order to prove a point or to close a door on a subject but rather to explore or understand it.

in this case, it is the relationship between these things out there, these big political ideas and formations and policies, and how they infiltrate and affect personal life, and the life of ordinary people. so the absurd thing is that i'm not, on some level, really, i'm not very interested in myself or in my father or necessarily in my country. in otherwords, i mean, i'm interested in them in the personal sense, but i don't objectively think that they are more interesting than other people, other countries, but they have taught me things. yes, and they've beenjumping—off points for you to get into these very big things themes, which include the relationship between father and son, they include the notion of exile, what it means to belong somewhere and yet not belong. i mean, all these things seem to be wrapped up in your work. yes and also our relationship

to the dead, you know, that in my case i have a father who disappeared... and we should remind people who are not aware of your personal story that your father was a libyan of some renown. he had been a soldier, a diplomat, a successful businessman. he fell out — he certainly could not tolerate the gaddafi regime so went to live in exile in cairo. and there he was literally picked up on the street by the intelligence services of libya, who appeared to be working with the egyptians. he was taken, ghosted, back to libya, imprisoned and, well, i have to ask you, in your mind, is he definitely dead? through the laws of deduction he's dead. i do not have any evidence, regardless of all my efforts and the efforts of so many other people, to find information about when, how, where he was killed, if he was killed, where his remains might be.

we do not know any of those things and that, of course, is a very specific case that involves me and the search of my father. but as a writer, also, has really taught me something, i feel, about the strange business of being in the present, alive, and yet still in conference and in some close intimacy with the dead. you evocatively described yourself as living in a sort of cage as a result of what happened to you as a youth, ‘cause i think you were just 19 when he disappeared and, of course, you never got to see him again and you were not even in cairo at the time, i think you were studying abroad... i was in london, yeah. so i just wonder, if we take that metaphor of the cage,

whether you are still in a cage? no, i mean, one of the things i tried to do in my book, the return, is i tried to sort of expose the different stages that i went through. my father disappeared when i was 19. he was kidnapped when i was 19, and i am today 118, so there's much of my life has been spent under this inconclusive absence, and so i tried to explore but also expose some of the things i went through and, certainly, in my 20s i felt captured by this fate, by the double bind of being afraid to speak about it, in case this would endanger his life, and being also compelled to speak about it.

at your lowest ebb, when you were dealing with all this, and as you say, you are now in your late 40s, but i believe in your very early 30s, and you have written very frankly about it, you reached such a low ebb in your dealing with this or yourfailing to deal with it, in a way, that you contemplated suicide. yes, i mean, there are certain things that you can write about, but you are not very good at talking about. and that is certainly one of them. i write about it in the book because i have always assumed that such dark thoughts about taking your own life come out of long contemplation — that is why people leave letters and so on. that is what i always thought. i also assumed and this is something that is true, that i have taken very much from my mother, which is the very deep conviction that life is for the living.

notwithstanding all the tragedies, i have a very deep passion for life and for living. yet this situation got me to such a dark point that, at one point, when i was crossing one of the bridges across the seine in paris, and when it was a particularly dark time for me, where my father, my two uncles, my two cousins, were imprisoned for their political views, a friend of mine was killed under tortured — i do not even write about that in the book. and suddenly, as i walked across the bridge, i looked at the water and the thought emerged so naturally so available, "why not?" it is difficult to talk about it and you are talking about it with me but i wonder, as your use these words to describe that experience, whether you feel very, very distant from the man you were those years ago?

i think our contemporary culture places a lot of value in thinking of the self in these terms, in this way. we talk about moving on. my experience of living is not like that. my experience is more a kind of layering that happens. so i feel that self is available to me, or intimate to me, but i also feel there are other selves or a lot of other layers that have reshaped me in some way. so, yes, ifeel, in some essential ways, very different, and in some essential ways, very similar. you of course had to come to terms with the fact that your father could not be found and all of the evidence that you gathered ultimately pointed to his probably being murdered in gaddafi's infamous prison, just outside of tripoli, i think in 1996, probably... with the massacre that took place

there in the summer of 1996. ijust wonder, when you look back on that quest you made for information and all the extraordinary things that happen to you, including sort of delving deep inside the british establishment to try and get the british government to take seriously the case of your father and other libyans who'd been imprisoned, at a time when the british government was trying to cosy up to gaddafi, for all sorts of reasons. what did that teach you about political systems, about the way men — maybe sometimes women as well — in power work and think? that is such an interesting question. i mean, it is one of the subjects that has always fascinated me. and partly because of my mischievous autobiography that makes me feel i'm libyan but i'm also very deeply a londoner — i've lived in london longer — three times as long as i have lived anywhere else. i am american by birth. and i know these countries very intimately.

i teach — i live a part of the year in new york, where i teach. so i am very close to these places. most of my friends are from these places. it has always been fascinating to me that this strange and tragic distance that exists between my experience of society in london and new york and my experience as a libyan of us and british foreign policy and those things are not commiserate... so where is the disconnect and what does it mean to you? i think that, particularly with the middle east, that there has—been this story that's been told and it is a very clever story by the systems, by the political systems and not wishing to speak abstractly, but by the political system in britain and the united states, that goes something like this, that says these countries are too complicated and too volatile to not be interfered with in some way. democracy does not quite work there.

they're just hardwired not to be democratic as societies. they are a different kind of people. ok, i am simplifying butjust for the purposes of being expedient. whereas, on the ground, what ends up happening is that very strong ties are then formed between whitehall and washington and the sort of despotic regimes that are stable, that give these governments, these superpowers a kind of guarantee of contract... because these dictators become people "we can do business with". we can do business with but also they are super—reliant on us. so they are great agents. there is a wonderful — there has been lots written on this, but there is a very good new book,

called anglo arabia, by david wearing, in which he really dissects the ways in which britain and america have created a kind of new forms of colonies, particularly in the gulf of arabia. and so all of this, in action, in foreign—policy action, it is everything that is antidemocratic. you're promoting things that are very antidemocratic and at the same time making it very difficult for things like what happened in my country... and the embodiment, in a way, of this was your relationship, if i can call it that, with gaddafi's son, saif al—islam, whom you met in london because at the time britain was reaching out to gaddafi, was building some sort of relationship with the man, and indeed his family, and they were free to come and go. and in the course of i think

it was 2010, in your efforts to really get to the truth of what had happened to your dad, you had the most extraordinary encounter with sa if al—islam, in london, which you have described as the hardest thing you've ever done. yes... and ijust wonder again, now that years have passed — nine years have passed since then, do you look back and regret that you did it because it didn't yield anything, the man never told you the truth? no, i do not regret it, but it was very difficult and i think it was very dangerous. it was more dangerous i later learned, than i assumed it was then. because? because gaddafi's extended system, whether the hard or the soft of it, whether it was saif islam or the secret services, arejust very good. they were very good, they were very well—trained. they had a lot of experience in co—opting, tricking decent people into positions of compromise and i...

..not totally but partly function on the assumption that i was immune from this but maybe not. maybe i could have been tricked into a position where my position would have been compromised. so what i wanted from him was i wanted him to confirm the whereabouts of my father, to tell me if my father is dead or alive. and he told me right from the beginning that he knows but he can't tell me, yet. and then proceeded, over a period of about ten months, to tempt me into certain situations that would then earn me the information. and this was the game. but would compromise you at the same time? yes, and so this was the game. the game was, i wanted this information and he wanted to basically stop this troublesome writer who keeps writing, you know, ‘cause there was a big campaign to varnish the image

of that dictatorship. and of course, that relationship of sorts between you and him ended, not least because the revolution came along and his father was killed and saif al—islam was imprisoned and i believe he is still somewhere in libya today. so let's fast forward. here you sit, as you say, you're not a straightforward libyan, you have great, strong ties to britain and the us as well, but you still are a libyan and you have been back to libya since the revolution. what do you say to those, and maybe some ordinary libyans say it to you, that actually, things were better or indeed less bad under the gaddafi dictatorship than they are in the chaos and the violence of libya today. i think the trouble with that sentiment, even though one can understand it, and you are right, i've spoken with libyans who feel that way, and i've always sensed a tragic flavour of self—loathing because that does occur when things are so terrible like this. say well, maybe we don't actually

deserve to live decently. but there's a structural problem with the question. the present is far truer to the reality of the dictatorship than it is to the aspirations of the revolution. the fact that a 42—year—old dictatorship leaves a country with such rudimentary state institutions tells you a lot about what it was doing there, that it was run as a family. it was run the way a mafia might run a country. so there was no investment in anything that has a semblance of institutional efficiency. and so you have that which means that after we succeeded in toppling gaddafi, we were left with very little to work with.

so do you mean that the country is robbed of all of the sort of social, the emotional capital to actually be anything different other than a screwed up society? no. no, no, no, that's not what i'm saying. i'm saying that not having a state, a proper state infrastructure, meant that we didn't only have to topple a dictatorship but we had to topple a dictatorship, which in itself is very difficult, and then build from scratch a state structure and that made it very, very difficult for libyans. i tell you what, a very good comparison is, because that's not the only difficulty, it's one of the difficulties. the other difficulty is that we have an extremely large territory. libya is very large and it has a very small population, 6 million. seven times the size of the united kingdom in landmass.

we have that and then we are excessively wealthy. we are so rich. king idris when he inaugurated the first oil well in 1963, he gave a very short speech. libyan history can be very ironic because we had basically two indigenous leaders since independence. one was infamous for the brevity of his speeches and the other one was infamous for his very long speeches. king idris when he inaugurated the oil well said, "i don't know if this will be a blessing or a curse but let's hope that it will be a blessing". there's a lot of wisdom in that because actually now, from this moment in history, hopefully not from a further moment in the future, but from this moment in history it is not unreasonable to say that oil has been a curse for libya because it has excited the parasitic appetites of foreign powers and of neighbours and of libyans too! it has complicated the project

of what it means to be part of the society. where is my responsibility to society? a lot of people say where is my share? when we're talking about responsibility and personal stake in libya, i do want to bring it back to you because i'm fascinated by some of the things you reveal about what happened to you. in 2011 for example, members of the revolutionary council reached out to you and said, essentially, do you feel like playing a role as this revolution unfolds? and you write very honestly about how you were struck by the uselessness of being a writer at a time when practical skills were needed, whether it be literally baking bread or even handling a kalashnikov. but all you handled was a pen, metaphorically speaking. yes, i mean, i don't remember writing about it being useless but certainly there was, in moments of great urgency, my kind of work is challenged.

i suppose what i'm getting at is you could have chosen or attempted, at least, a different life. because you feel so connected to this country, albeit you haven't lived there since you were a child, were you ever drawn to do that? you had a cousin, for example, who fought in 2011... several. and one particular you have written about who was killed trying to get into gaddafi's palace. that's right. did you think, maybe it's time for me to get involved? certainly in those days i did. it was hard not to. but what about now? because now we have general haftar, who of course was gadhafi's general, on the doorstep of tripoli. we've got the potential for a horrible conflict in your country. we do, yes, absolutely, yeah. your feelings now about whether there's something you can

do in libya? i don't know why writers are often spoken to this way. i'm not accusing you, stephen, but this idea that, you know, "haven't you thought of something else to do that's more active?" is that really annoying? no, but i find it very interesting, because i think it says something about how our culture looks at writing and what writing is. i mean, look, i've given my vows years ago to this practice, to this work of writing. writing takes all of my time. is it useful? is it not useful? that's not for me to say but that's what i do. but, yeah. when i used the word useless i didn't mean it to be any sort ofjudgement on your writing which has won acclaim around the world. it's just a question of what, i suppose, what is life for? it's very interesting to me that you almost use religious terminology. you've made a vow to write.

that is your... for now. meaning the vow is connected to whether i have something to write. i don't want to be a careerist and just keep writing for the sake of it, but as long as long as i have something to write, and this has been the case with me, a book arrives with its appetites, with its demands on you. and, you know, i really do think your books are your fate because they do form the habits of your work. but where is fate taking you then because it is very striking to me that in different, very interesting and different and creative ways, you have reflected deeply in different books on your past, on yourfamily, on loss, on place. yes. are you going somewhere different now or are you still dealing with those themes by drawing

upon your personal experience? i am the worst person to give you a reading of the work as the writer, him or herself, because it's too close. but i can tell you that after the return, so after my third book, i did feel that those three books that i wrote were dealing with a similar subject. they're different from each other but they're thinking about similar ideas. i certainly felt after them that now i have now a different kind of curiosity about something else, and certainly my new book which is not out yet, but is about a set of paintings that i've been looking out for a long time in siena and about my relationship to those paintings but also to the ideas in them. again, to do with grief and love and death. and so that's what that's about. the book i'm writing now i can't talk about but it's not, it feels new and different to me.

and it's not libya. it has libya in it, yes. laughs. it has libya in it a bit, but also other places. we look forward to reading it when it does come out. hisham matar, it has been a pleasure having you on hardtalk. thank you. thank you very much indeed. thanks for having me. hello. it looks like being a very warm start to the weekend across some parts of the uk, but right now we are in a spell of cooler weather, there has been a bit of rain, there's another chance of rain on the way during wednesday. an atlantic weather system pushes outbreaks of rain eastwards is the day goes on.

here it comes. ahead of that, with clearing skies, it'll be a fairly chilly start to wednesday with a of dry weather around, and a few showers rushing through the northern isles. single figures for most, and cold enough across parts of northern england, especially in scotland. in the coldest spots, a touch of frost. already that weather system coming in, outbreaks of rain feeding towards western england, into wales, northern ireland, and on towards southern scotland. feeding further east during the day, early sunshine across eastern england, cloud building, maybe a shower, not a huge amount of rain arriving until late afternoon or into the evening. in northern scotland, it will have the lion's share of the sunshine. notice the wind switching direction, the breeze moving from a northerly more to a southerly, and that will bring in some warmer air, but on wednesday nowhere is particularly warm. heavy showers in the northern isles, and single figures for some of us. on the south—westerly breeze, some warmer air drawing in from the south—west,

more humid on wednesday night into thursday morning. plenty of cloud and outbreaks of rain. chilly in northern scotland, and elsewhere temperatures starting the day on thursday into double figures, mild and muggy start to the day. we will draw in ever warmer air, particularly in parts of england and wales, on through the rest of the week into the start of the weekend. weather fronts never far away from scotland, northern ireland, north—west england and north wales at times, and on thursday plenty of cloud around, it feels humid, some patchy rain. some cloud breaking through central and eastern areas of england, and this is where we will get to see some warm and sunny spells coming in.

the temperatures peaking in the upper 20s in some areas. cloud and outbreaks of rain in scotland and northern ireland, but that will hold temperatures down. for some it will be into the midteens. the weather system will move south at some point, uncertainty over the timing, but at the moment it looks like the warmth of england and will peak on saturday, then it will turn cooler and feel less humid by sunday.

i'm rico hizon in singapore. the headlines: america's opioid epidemic. now, a major drugs company goes on trial in a landmark court case. we're not a dumping ground. malaysia says it is sending back thousands of tons of imported plastic waste to the countries of origin. i'm lewis vaughanjones in london. also in the programme: european leaders meet to thrash out who gets the eu's top jobs, and already there is disagreement. torn apart by the islamic state group, the yazidi families of iraq rebuilding their lives after the fall of is.