"O Regresso" (2016)

"O Regresso" (2016) de Hisham Matar é um livro autobiográfico com um fundo histórico internacional, pelo que nunca seria uma perda de tempo por tudo o que aqui podemos aprender, mais ainda quando essa história é distante da nossa, ou pouca reconhecida internacionalmente como é o caso da história da criação da Líbia moderna, no século XX, com a invasão e genocídio levado a cabo por Itália que levaria depois ao poder um dos mais inumanos ditadores desse século, Khadafi.

A estrutura e a escrita são atrozmente atabalhoadas durante os primeiros 2/3. Não se constrói qualquer linha narrativa, apesar de se referir a ela desde o título, tudo vai sendo construído através de pequenas historietas sobre dezenas de personagens — tios, tias, primos e conhecidos — que contribuem para criar a ideia de família, conceito que nunca sai da abstração pela total falta de ligação entre as historietas dessas pessoas. As historietas raramente descolam dos aspetos descritivos, mesmo quando o autor cede a tecer algumas interpretações a raiar a filosofia de café. 

Um ponto bastante negativo que fica da leitura, é o modo como o autor convoca a pobreza e o facto de ter de trabalhar a fazer as coisas mais inóspitas, algo que não combina com nada do que é a descrição da vida com os seus pais e depois com a sua mulher e irmão. Não é crível que alguém que se desloca, e vive, entre Benghazi, Cairo, Nairobi, Paris, Londres e Nova Iorque, múltiplas vezes ao longo dos anos, que possui casas, suas ou da família, espalhadas por todos esses locais, ou que viaje de um dia para o outro entre esses locais, tudo isto em plenos anos 1990, possa ser alguém de classe média simples, quanto mais pobre como pretende por vezes dar a entender. 

Apesar de tudo, na parte final do livro, depois de conhecermos um pouco melhor o autor e o mundo em que viveu, depois de termos uma ideia mais clara do que foi e de onde veio a Líbia, estamos confortáveis dentro da cabeça do autor e no seu mundo. Ainda assim, não raras vezes emergem descrições desgarradas, ou tentativas de filosofar sobre comportamentos. 

Excerto sobre a invasão italiana, da edição inglesa:

"All the books on the modern history of the country could fit neatly on a couple of shelves. The best amongst them is slim enough to slide into my coat pocket and be read in a day or two. There are many other histories, of course, concerning those who, over the past three millennia, occupied Libya: the Phoenicians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Ottomans and, most recently, the Italians. A Libyan hoping to glimpse something of that past must, like an intruder at a private party, enter such books in the full knowledge that most of them were not written by or for him, and, therefore, at heart, they are accounts concerning the lives of others, their adventures and misadventures in Libya, as though one’s country is but an opportunity for foreigners to exorcize their demons and live out their ambitions.

This shortage of historical accounts is partly a result of the painful birth of modern Libya. The country experienced one of the most violent campaigns in the history of colonial repression. The Italians arrived in 1911. They had calculated rightly that the few Ottoman garrisons based in coastal towns would quickly fall. What they did not expect, however, was the determination, discipline and stamina of local resistance. Between 1911 and 1916 — and in retaliation for a popular uprising in Tripoli, what the Italians term the “Arab Revolt” — more than 5,000 men were banished from the city and sent to small islands scattered around Italy — islands such as Isole Tremiti, Ponza, Ustica and Favignana — and kept in prisons there. Five thousand is a large number, but it is even more significant given that the population of Tripoli at that time was only thirty thousand. In other words, one in every six inhabitants of the Libyan capital was kidnapped and made to disappear. The damage was more lasting because the Italian authorities selected the most noted and distinguished men: scholars, jurists, wealthy traders, and bureaucrats. The conditions aboard ship were so bad that during the journey, which couldn’t have taken much more than a couple of days, hundreds of prisoners died. Some historians claim that one-quarter of the 5,000 men lost their lives during the passage. The majority of those who reached the island prisons perished in captivity. There appears to be no record of survivors from those prisoners. It is an extraordinary example of a European occupying power devastating a city. Yet, as with Italian crimes in Libya in general, it is an event little known today. It has been clouded over by the greater horrors inflicted by the Italians later, which are, alas, only slightly less obscure.

Almost immediately after the Italians arrived, a local leader emerged. Omar al-Mukhtar, the man we grew up referring to affectionately as Sidi Omar, was part of the Senussi order, a mystical religious family that ran schools and charities from Cyrenaica in the north-east of the country all the way west into Algeria and further south into sub-Saharan Africa. Its patriarch, Idris, was to become king and Libya’s first head of state after independence. Despite having very few resources, Omar al-Mukhtar led Libya’s tribesmen on horseback in what became a very effective campaign. But after the Fascists marched on Rome in 1922 and Benito Mussolini seized power, the destruction and slaughter took on a massive scale. Airpower was employed to gas and bomb villages. The policy was that of depopulation. History remembers Mussolini as the buffoonish Fascist, the ineffective silly man of Italy who led a lame military campaign in the Second World War, but in Libya he oversaw a campaign of genocide.

The tribal population was marched on foot to several concentration camps across the country. Every family lost members in these camps. Several of my forebears died there. Stories of torture, humiliation and famine have filtered down through the generations.”

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"It is not clear how many perished in the camps. Official Italian census records show that the population of Cyrenaica plummeted from 225,000 to 142,000. The orphans, numbering in the thousands, were sent to Fascist camps to be “reeducated.” Brand-new planes machine-gunned herds of livestock. An Italian general boasted that between 1930 and 1931 the army reduced the number of sheep and goats from 270,000 to 67,000. As a consequence, many people starved to death."