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Mourning And Melancholy In Hisham Matar's In The Country Of Men And Anatomy Of A Disappearance, John C. Hawley

English

In a recent study of masculine identity in the fiction of the Arab East since 1967, Samira Aghacy analyzes those novels that "possess an underlying political awareness revealing the centrality of political life in the fiction of the Arab East and the precedence of collective over private issues" (Aghacy, 7). Hisham Matar, though, has chosen to work against the grain and to shrink the political down to the personal; politics remain almost unseen, ghost-like, something his protagonists cannot comprehend or fully see. 1 Muhammad Siddiq famously notes that "any writer can ill afford to remain uninvolved and merely watch history …