In a lecture delivered at a literary prize ceremony in Florence last May, American-Libyan writer Hisham Matar stood up and confronted his audience with the second person. He was there to tell them what it is like; to bring them into the experience of
witnessing some of your European colleagues, otherwise liberal and fair-minded intellectuals, some of whom you love and who live in your heart, perform new forms of the same old and inelegant acrobatics you have witnessed all your life, so as not to name the crimes for what they are, but name some of them, so as to have named something, when all of this happens, you are reminded of the centre, that these good people operate from within a conceived centre, a perceptual centre from which the world is viewed, and that you are outside that boundary. …more