57 pages • 1 hour read
Hisham MatarMy Friends
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2024A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Personal Versus Political Identity
Khaled’s life in England causes him to feel divided between competing versions of himself. When he’s a young man and leaves his home in Benghazi, Libya, his family warns him not to “be lured in” to life away from home (46). Khaled doesn’t “fully understand [his parents’ words] or understand why” (46) they are giving the warning. Over the years following, however, he finds himself increasingly divided between the person he imagined himself to be in Benghazi with his family, and the independent person he longs to become in London. Khaled’s inner conflict thus illustrates the theme of personal versus political identity.
Khaled’s involvement in the 1984 embassy demonstration and shooting augments the internal divide he feels between his contrasting versions of self. When he attends the protest with Mustafa al Touny, he believes he’s doing his duty to his country, but doesn’t feel a direct personal attachment to the cause. After the shooting, however, his scars symbolize his incidental political identity, as they attach him to the conflict for freedom in Libya and thus to one possible iteration of himself.
Meanwhile, Khaled tries desperately to root himself in his life in London by investing in his schooling and work. He hides his involvement in the protest for his own safety, but also in an attempt “to hold fast to some semblance of equilibrium” (262). He wants “to imagine that other, unharmed version of [him]self,” who was unharmed in the shooting and “who got back on the bus to Edinburgh, and could fly home for the summer, to sleep in his own house and swim in his childhood sea” (262). However, because the shooting precludes him from inhabiting this imagined personal identity, the “line that […] separates [him] from [his] former self [becomes a] chasm that [he’s] unable to bridge” (262).
Khaled decides not to return to Benghazi in the 32 years after moving to England because he’s trying to claim and protect his personal identity. He chooses to quash his affiliations with his family, country, and home, because he regards these connections as proof of a political identity he has no interest in. He goes so far as to avoid visiting St. James’s Square for decades, because this setting also ties him to the political conflict in Libya. His avoidance is a manifestation of his desire to disassociate from the Libyan conflict to preserve his new, English, academic, and autonomous identity. These facets of Khaled’s experience capture the ways in which migration might divide the individual’s sense of self across ideological and geographical borders.
The Enduring Bonds of Friendship
Khaled’s close connections with Mustafa al Touny, Rana Lamesse, and Hosam Zowa form important cornerstones in his life and personal development. Over time, Khaled develops deep relationships with these three friends, which offer him a sense of grounding in his life and identity. Through these connections, the novel examines the enduring bonds of friendship.
With Mustafa, Khaled shares a love for learning and literature. With Rana, he shares an intuitive emotional understanding. With Hosam, he shares a philosophical, artistic, and intellectual connection. Whenever Khaled is with Mustafa, Rana, or Hosam, Khaled feels engaged in his life. Being with his companions causes him to feel a “happiness and excitement belong[ing] to childhood” (277). By way of contrast, whenever Khaled is apart from his friends, his life in London “fe[els] like hard labor” (221). The differences in Khaled’s behavior when he’s with versus without his friends therefore illustrates how friendships positively impact his psyche.
Khaled’s friendships with Mustafa, Rana, and Hosam withstand the tests of time, space, and political conflict. Over the course of the novel, Khaled’s dynamics with his three friends change due to time and geography. Like “all meetings of friends who live apart,” Khaled’s communications with Mustafa, Rana, and Hosam often take “the form of reports” as they try “to list the things that [have] happened since [they] were last together” (220). Despite the occasional strain between the friends, however, Khaled consistently longs for his companions and his solitude without them makes him feel “a sense of regret” (220). Although the friends’ various moves, life changes, and ideological evolutions challenge Khaled’s ability to remain connected to Mustafa, Rana, and Hosam, he never ceases to care for them.
In spite of these challenges, the novel’s title implies that Khaled’s relationships with his friends are the most important facet of his life and story. Khaled’s retrospective reflections throughout the narrative present proof that his relationships with Mustafa, Rana, and Hosam have come to define how he sees and understands himself. Khaled’s memories do include descriptions of his academics, his family, and his work, but these descriptions are tangential when compared to Khaled’s focus on his interpersonal relationships.
Khaled’s narrative attention thus formally indicates the transformative power of friendship and implies that the truest bonds will survive even great hardship. In the narrative present, Khaled and Hosam have just reunited despite being apart for five years. Their reunion represents the indelible nature of close bonds and their emotional resonance.
The Entanglement of Past and Present
Khaled’s experience in the narrative present causes him to reflect on his past, and to consider the ways in which his former experiences have influenced who he has become. The narrative structure enacts the entanglement of the past and present: Khaled is situated in 2016, but as he walks through London’s streets after parting with Hosam, his mind meanders through the scenes of his past. Each site that he passes or visits reminds him of a different episode from his early life in the city, tugging his consciousness and the narrative into scenes of flashback. The use of the past and present tenses, and the narrative shifts between various temporal eras, conveys how inextricable one’s historical experiences are from one’s current reality.
Khaled’s internal conflict is in part inspired by his fraught relationship with the past. His character is divided between national borders, political ideologies, and cultural disparities, but it’s also divided between the person he used to be and the person he has become. Indeed, the narrative present marks the first time that Khaled has let “[his] mind reach back” (208) since he was a young man. He’s actively quashed reminders of his past because he fears that his memories will impose upon his present and challenge his newfound sense of self.
In the narrative present, he remains convinced that “even though [he] remain[s] standing in St. James’s Square, thinking about all that has happened since the day [he] was last here, [his] devotion is not to the past but to the present” (208). This passage affects a resolved, yet hesitant narrative tone. Khaled is still trying to convince himself that his past is irrelevant to who he’s become, yet the narrative structure, form, and tone throughout the novel imply otherwise. Khaled is still searching for some “crucial detail that [he might] have overlooked, and that may help [him] with the present” (208). Khaled’s thought processes throughout the novel enact the notion that the individual might understand himself better if he can reconcile his past and present experiences. This is the internal work Khaled is attempting as he wanders through London in an ongoing state of remembrance.
However, Khaled’s character remains resistant to letting the past and present coexist, largely because he still fears that his personal and political history will threaten his perceived independence and autonomy in the present. This is why Khaled chooses not to call out to Hosam in the station, and why he returns home to his flat, puts away his and Hosam’s mugs, and makes his bed at the novel’s end. These images illustrate Khaled’s attempt to erase evidence of the past and to embrace comfort over the discomfort of remembering. Subtextually, the novel is suggesting that if one denies one’s past, one fails to perceive its warnings for the present and future.
