Benghazi

By Salah el Moncef and Mari Ruti

Benghazi is an odyssey into the mental universe of Mariam Khaldoon, a Libyan teenager confronted with a life-changing emotional crisis. The story is centered around the power exerted over Mariam by two powerful men: her father, and the Fascist Italian leader Benito Mussolini. Between the omnipotent family patriarch who makes an unjust d

• Language: English
• Publisher: Penelope Books
• Release date: Oct 23, 2022
• ISBN: 9782494412033

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Preface

Set in 1930s Benghazi, the cosmopolitan Libyan city perched on the Mediterranean, Salah el Moncef’s dazzling novella transports us to a time right before the Second World War, when Mussolini’s boot presses oppressively on Libya’s throat, suffocating the country’s anticolonial and antifascist sentiments. Narrated from the perspective of an adolescent girl, Mariam Khaldoon, the novella weaves a complex mesh of conceptual connections between the authoritarian rule of a colonizing dictator and—the far less menacing yet still disconcerting—authoritarian rule of a family patriarch, between Mussolini and Mariam’s father, the successful business owner Mr. Khaldoon. I do not mean to imply that Mr. Khaldoon is anything like Mussolini: quite the contrary, it is his deep hatred of Mussolini, whose political views he explicitly resists, that causes Mr. Khaldoon to withdraw from his family, particularly from Mariam and her older sister, Zaynab. More specifically, what torments and alienates Mr. Khaldoon is that the Italian school attended by his daughters chooses the two girls to greet Mussolini on behalf on their school during the dictator’s visit to Benghazi. However, from Mariam’s young point of view, Mr. Khaldoon’s power over her is as seamless as that of Mussolini over Libya. The situation is made all the more perplexing by the fact that Mariam regards her father as a reasonable man who deserves her love and respect (whereas Mussolini is an unreasonable persecutor who is despised by everyone in the family).

Mr. Khaldoon is distant and detached from his daughters even before Mussolini’s visit. Yet he is not a tyrant: despite his profound distaste for all things related to fascism, he has struck a compromise with his wife, who believes in the importance of educating Mariam and Zaynab, by allowing them to attend the Italian Mussolini school. However, the brief exchange between the dictator and his daughters breaks his spirit, causing him to retreat even more than before into his study within the men’s quarters of the family residence. Although Mariam’s contact with him has, prior to this rupture, been limited to Friday morning visits to his study—visits carefully curated and mediated by her mother—she feels the loss of this already limited avenue of communication deeply, not being able to understand why her father is so upset yet vaguely aware that his frustration and depression are caused by her fleeting interaction with Mussolini. It is as if, without meaning to—after all, she did not ask to be her school’s ambassador in relation to Mussolini—she has betrayed her loyalty to her father and her family, a loyalty that is the glue that has until then held the family unit together. On some level, then, Moncef’s novella is about a girl’s attempt to navigate the treacherous terrain between love and fear, affection and remorse, in relation to her remote father.

As an adolescent girl, Mariam does not fully grasp the brutality of Mussolini. For her, he is a cartoonish character whose pomp she mocks with Zaynab from a distance even as she is also terrified when compelled to talk to him. Unfortunately, she is also terrified to talk to her father. All she wants is his affection, which means that she feels his disapproval keenly, even if this disapproval remains largely unspoken. Indeed, what makes matters even harder is that her father’s intense aversion to her meeting with Mussolini remains profoundly enigmatic to her. In this sense, the psychoanalytic concept of enigmatic signifiers—developed by Jacques Lacan and Jean Laplanche—seems to accurately capture Mariam’s side of the affective dynamic between her and her father. Enigmatic signifiers are opaque messages emitted by other people that are derailing because they remain inaccessible and indecipherable. Their power over children and adolescents is especially formidable because children and adolescents do not necessarily possess the cognitive capacity to fully make sense of the adult world. They are routinely left wondering what adults mean, what they want, and why they want what they appear to want. The attempt to please an adult who transmits enigmatic signifiers, and who therefore remains unreadable and mysterious, can be utterly disorientating; it generates an inexplicable sense of restlessness and overagitation. No wonder Mariam has trouble sleeping at night. Enigmatic signifiers create a painful intersection between seduction and rejection, and this intersection is where Mariam finds herself trapped: her desire for her father’s approval is repeatedly met with a dismissal that is unintelligible in not having a clear cause.

Mariam’s father is a formidable presence even in his absence—perhaps precisely due to his absence. He dictates what Mariam is and is not allowed to do through her mother. However, more than anything, it is his detachment that causes her to feel irrelevant. It is, then, fitting that Moncef’s novella contains only one scene where Mariam interacts with her father in person: a masterful depiction of one of her Friday morning visits to his study. Mariam is not permitted to speak to her father directly unless explicitly invited to do so. It is her mother who tells her father about her achievements at school, about how her teachers have praised her as a highly gifted and precocious pupil, and about a poem she has written. Pleased by her naïvely nationalist poem, which Mariam is asked to recite for him, Mr. Khaldoon proudly exclaims: "Mashallah, Mariam! Brahwa!"

Uncannily—and this is perhaps the most obvious way in which Moncef draws a cautious analogy between Mr. Khaldoon and Mussolini—this endorsement echoes that of Mussolini, who states "Brava, Miriam, brava after she hands him the gift that her school has chosen for him: a pair of elaborately embroidered black-and-gold slippers. Although Mussolini mispronounces her name, she is pleased by the notoriety that his using it grants her, especially after he fails to remember Zaynab’s name when thanking her for the greeting that Zaynab reads, in perfect Italian, from an index card. Although Mariam is proud of Zaynab’s excellent Italian, hearing the dictator signal her out by calling her by her name makes her feel special—which is precisely how she would like to feel in relation to her father but never does. Indeed, at the end of the novella, Mariam recalls that her father stating Mashallah, Mariam! Brahwa!" in response to her poem was the only time he ever said her name. That this sole utterance of her name by her father replicates Mussolini’s praise creates an uncomfortable correspondence between the two men.

The parallels between Mussolini and Mr. Khaldoon—not in terms of their political views but in terms of the cryptic power that the two men wield—are evident from Mariam’s depiction of the atmosphere of her father’s study during the visit when she is asked to recite her poem:

The head of our family sat in his armchair like a monarch, beneath that most emblematic symbol of protection: his beloved damascene silver plate, adorning the wall with a hamsa sign at its center. . . . I don’t remember how long we spoke, but I can clearly visualize how humbly satisfied I was: just glad to be sitting there before Father, contemplating the distant glow of his barely contained pride—the tentative warmth of his oblique gaze, the uplifting power of his indirect words.

Mr. Khaldoon’s authority is here depicted as being more benign than that of Mussolini: a form of protection—even of a barely contained pride, tentative warmth, and uplifting power—rather than of tyranny. Yet at the end of the