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.
Symbols & Motifs
St. James’s Square
St. James’s Square is the setting where the 1984 embassy demonstration and shooting takes place. As Khaled was shot and wounded during the protest, he has a fraught relationship with the place and makes a concerted effort to avoid it in the years following his traumatic experience. The setting therefore symbolizes The Entanglement of Past and Present and reifies Khaled’s fraught relationship with this temporal era.
In the narrative present, he revisits the square for the first time in over 30 years. As soon as he returns, he sees himself as a young man “sitting there on the pavement, bleeding beside the drain” (263). The setting triggers his traumatic memories and emotional response to the shooting. In returning, he’s trying to reconcile himself with what happened to him years prior. At the same time, his avoidance of the square for so long captures his resistance to revisiting the scenes, experiences, and emotions of his past, because he fears that they will compromise his life in the present.
St. James’s Square also marks a turning point in Khaled’s storyline and narrative arc. Before he visits the square to participate in the demonstration, he’s a young man who’s just setting out into adulthood. He feels as if he can be anyone and can flex between his political and personal identities. After the shooting in the square, Khaled becomes desperate to disassociate from the experience—and, therefore, from who he used to be.
“The Given and the Taken”
Hosam Zowa’s short story “The Given and the Taken” is symbolic of Khaled’s internal conflict over Personal Versus Political Identity. In Hosam’s story, a man lies down impassively as his cat slowly eats his body. After hearing the story on the radio in 1980, Khaled tries “to push it out of [his] mind, but it remain[s] always there, in the depths, rising at the most unexpected moments” (23). The story’s unnerving events therefore foreshadow how Khaled will become divided between his national and cultural identity and his personal, independent identity. The image of the cat eating the man symbolizes the political unrest in Libya, and how this ongoing conflict devastated its people over time. The image of the man allowing his cat to eat him throughout the majority of the story represents Khaled’s passive response to the Arab Spring and his seeming inability to actively engage with the conflict.
Furthermore, Khaled’s emotional and psychological attachment to Hosam’s story conveys his simultaneous desire to bridge the gap between his competing identities and his ultimate resistance to doing so. The story has a “claustrophobic atmosphere, manifested so horribly in the man’s inexplicable lack of objection” (23), which mirrors the atmosphere of Khaled’s overarching narrative, particularly during the Arab Spring. Indeed, the images of the man lying down parallel the images of Khaled lying awake in his bed in London while his friends fight in the revolution in Libya. The author therefore uses “The Given and the Taken” to provide insight into Khaled’s internal experience and to evoke the emotional intensity of the individual’s powerlessness amidst sweeping political turmoil.
Books and Reading
Allusions to and descriptions of books and reading pervade the novel, collectively acting as a motif for Khaled’s personal identity. Khaled’s interest in stories develops when he’s a young man living at home with his family in Benghazi, Libya. His father’s historical and literary interests particularly inspire Khaled’s, as does Muhammad Mustafa Ramadan’s reading of Hosam’s short story on the BBC Arabic World Service.
Over time, Khaled uses his reading pastime as a way to establish his identity beyond his family, country, and past. For Khaled, “work[s] of the imagination [soon become] more pertinent than facts” (20), and afford him an escape from his reality when he’s feeling overwhelmed or helpless. This is particularly true in the aftermath of the shooting and during his years at Birkbeck College in London. Immersing himself in the British literary canon grants him a sense of connection to, and a grounding within, his new English reality.
Furthermore, whenever Khaled feels distant from his friends or incapable of engaging in the Libyan conflict, he turns to books and reading. This pastime transports him out of the present and ushers him into alternate worlds where his physical engagement or action isn’t required. His Shepherd’s Bush flat is filled with “a large number of books” (279), which comfort him and offer him a sense of balance, because Khaled believes that “[r]eading requires one to be still” (279). This stillness is a state Khaled constantly craves, and also feels guilty for in light of the Arab Spring and his friends’ participation in the uprising.
