My Friends

by Hisham Matar

“No man should seek to see his family objectively,” she said. “Not only because of the sheer impossibility of the task, but because such an ambition alone breaks the covenant between kin. The whole point, silly child, is to love unfathomably. Where hate and affection, bewilderment and clarity, are braided so tightly that they form an unbreakable cord, a rope fit to lift a nation. That’s what your forebears did. And you—it’s not your games with the truth, your disregard for God and tradition, but this, this above all else lights the fire in my veins: you sit, as a stranger would, as a member of the audience, observing, affording yourself the space created by that objectivity of yours, which is nothing but a cold and empty schoolyard at night, a sad and abandoned place, in order to watch from a distance. Watch, then, as we lift our loads, as if you were the master and we the slaves. For the point about this life, my boy, is not to be good or wise but to be human, not to show the rest of us up.”