타자 이해의 출발점으로서의 문학작품 활용

Using Literary Works as a Starting point for Understanding the Other: Regarding Hisham Matar's In the Country of Men

This paper is to suggest that because literature humanizes and makes familiar what otherwise would remain alien, reading literary works can be one of the viable, effective ways to understand the "other." In the Country of Men, the first novel by Hisham Matar, exiled Libyan British novelist, testifies it. Matar's novel gives us a rare glimpse of what it means for ordinary people to live in Libya which has been shut down from the rest of the world. Even though it has a lot to do with the dictatorship of Quddafi and the political landscape of Libya, it is not a political novel but a Bildungsroman that deals with a story of growing up. It is a poignant story of a nine-year-old boy Suleiman who happens to get entangled in things he hardly understands such as his mother's dependency on the "medicine", his father's involvement in anti-government activity, and the forces that threaten his family to fall apart. The novel vividly depicts ordinary lives and the relationships between ordinary people. More than anything else, it is love that is at the heart of the novel, the love between the narrator and his mother who was forced to get married too early at the age of fourteen. By making the novel a kind of love story situated in political landscape of Tripoli, Matar's debut novel makes Libya a familiar place for outside readers. The country becomes a place where ordinary people enact human drama. Libya and Libyans become so humanized to the point in which we feel they are no different form us. This paper is ultimately to suggest that reading Matar's novel can be a starting point for understanding the other(Libya, Libyans) as well as for overcoming our misconception, prejudice, and complicity regarding the other's negative image which has been artificially perpetuated by the West. By reading the novel and thereby opening our mind for the other, we may begin to hope that it would not be impossible to reach what Jacques Derrida calls "the law of absolute, unconditional, hyperbolical hospitality."