Kamal Ben Hameda’s novel reveals the underside of a 1960s’ Libyan idyll

A sometimes dark novel about growing up in 1960s Tripoli is also a celebration of the resilience of women.

Like these women in the city’s port area in May 1969, Hameda’s protagonist, a small boy, walks the streets of a very different Tripoli. AP Photo

Childhood, for the narrator of J M Coetzee's fictional autobiography Boyhood (1997), is not "a time of innocent joy" as the Children's Encyclopaedia informs him, more "a time of gritting the teeth and enduring". Hadachinou, the young narrator of Libyan-born Kamal Ben Hameda's novel Under the Tripoli Sky [Amazon.com; Amazon.co.uk], would identify more with the first description than the second.

Solitary rather than lonely, he spends lazy days wandering sun-baked streets and along the shore, or losing himself in the alleyways of the Medina. It is only when he stops to listen to the tales of the city’s women that hardship intrudes: they are the ones gritting teeth and enduring. In this portrait of Tripoli in the 1960s, Hameda juxtaposes carefree youth with the trials of adult women and creates jarring but mesmeric effects.

Hadachinou’s only ordeal appears in the book’s opening pages. Told by his family that the next day will be a celebration – “your celebration!” – he goes to bed unconcerned, wakes up none the wiser and heads off on one of his customary jaunts where he witnesses with quasi-morbid delight the local butcher slaughtering a lamb. When he gets home, a barber shaves his head with a knife and then circumcises him with a razor blade. During the act he remembers the lamb and its glassy stare, and imagines it having similar thoughts of sacrifice and ­renunciation.

After this overcast moment his sunny childhood can resume. We see him at his happiest when the Tripoli fair opens at the end of spring. In one tent he is enthralled by freaks (“counterfeit creatures”) and in another he enjoys a “licentious experience” with the mysterious Narcissus.

However, Hadachinou’s days – and, indeed the novel – are enlivened by encounters with a succession of female relatives and acquaintances. Hameda opens up a segregated society in which maltreated, embittered and sometimes vengeful women seek solace and unity among fellow sufferers. Hadachinou either eavesdrops or is admitted into their confidence to hear them vent their frustrations or narrate tales of woe. Aunt Hiba is beaten and raped by Uncle Saïd. Aunt Zohra and her two “puny, mewling” daughters are routinely left hungry by tight-fisted Uncle Abdou. Signora Filomena, an Italian immigrant, lives in fear of being deported. Hadachinou’s formidable great-aunt Nafissa scoffs at marriage, teaches him about how Italian soldiers raped Tripoli’s women during the war, and tells him that all men are “deceitful and servile when they don’t have any power, and depraved and offensive when they do”. Several cases are truly tragic: there is Siddena, the black slave turned house-servant; Khadîdja, whose father sold her to a spice trader, not realising he was a pimp; and Zaïneb, who takes extreme measures to escape an arranged ­marriage.

While most of Hameda’s women have been ground down, some have transformed their hard knocks into brute strength to rise up and fight back. Fella now loathes men after being jilted by an American soldier and may have exacted revenge by becoming, literally, a man-eating woman. And a black sorceress called Hadja Kimya possesses the power to cure sterile women and render men ­impotent.

Some readers will be ready to write Hameda’s book off as nothing more than a catalogue of downtrodden women, each one spouting a litany of lamentations. But it is worth noting that no two women’s tales are the same and each reveals valuable truths about the speaker, the era and the fragmented, male-dominated society. Tea ceremonies, we learn, are oases in the day, the only time when women can talk comfortably about their dreams, longings and anxieties: “Without these moments of trusting abandon, they would have dried up with sorrow. Or imploded as they toiled over their cooking pots.” And as Hadachinou yearns to listen, his curiosity becomes ­infectious.

But not all the women meet publicly and in a group. While her husband prays at the mosque, Hadachinou’s mother meets in secret with her childhood friend Jamila. Hadachinou skulks in the shadows and voyeuristically looks in on a screened-off sensual world. He is too young to pass judgement on this or any of what he sees and hears, and too callow to be corrupted, which forces us to read between the lines and filter his thoughts and impressions to get at Hameda’s intended meaning.

Under the Tripoli Sky – seamlessly translated by Adriana Hunter – is a celebration of women but also an insightful snapshot of a postwar, pre-Qaddafi city on the cusp of change. Hameda's prose is a sensory experience, with food, fragrances, heat and desire all richly conveyed, and his characters, although little more than a string of cameos, always worth hearing. It all adds up to a short but shimmering read.

Malcolm Forbes is a regular contributor to The Review.