Hisham Matar Quotes
As a young boy in Libya, it was hard to escape the conclusion that the women were the most feeling and most functional part of society.
Matar, Hisham. Interview by Aida Edemariam. The Guardian, 9 Sept. 2011.
Her husband had been assassinated. It is not uncommon that after a political assassination, the widow of the slain male politician, carries on the political legacy. But otherwise there are few female politicians in the Third World in general and the Middle East in particular. Arab and other cultures so severely restrict a woman’s mobility within the society that death of a husband or father seems to be the only vehicle whereby a woman enters politics.
Marcus Porcius Cato. This quotation has had two different interpretations over time. One was that women if they received equality of treatment and voting would have an advantage for they also had their traditional “feminine wiles” and their sexuality, hence would dominate men. The second was a also a warning but based on the fact that women were superior in many ways, and given an equal chance, would excel men. The later interpretation is argued by some who point to the 2011 American data that shows more females than males graduating from high school and college, and females outnumber males in medical, law and several other professional schools. With the exception of a few Roman men, most heeded Cato’s warning and never took a chance on female equality.
Hisham Matar (Arabic: هشام مطر) (born 1970) is an American born British-Libyan writer. His memoir of the search for his father, The Return, won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography and the 2017 PEN America Jean Stein Book Award. His debut novel In the Country of Men was shortlisted for the 2006 Man Booker Prize. Matar's essays have appeared in the Asharq al-Awsat, The Independent, The Guardian, The Times and The New York Times. His second novel, Anatomy of a Disappearance, was published to wide acclaim on 3 March 2011. He lives and writes in London.
