BENGHAZI

A visit from Benito Mussolini upends the lives of an anti-Fascist family in el Moncef’s novella set in 1930s Libya.

There’s nothing more important to the Khaldoon family than loyalty. Indeed, the Italian occupation of their native Benghazi means that loyalty is more important than ever, but it’s frequently put to the test. According to their mother’s wishes, 9-year-old Mariam Khaldoon and her sister, Zaynab, attend a so-called “Mussolini school” to further their secular education. Their merchant father, a committed anti-Fascist, regards their attendance at the school as a capitulation to the occupiers. After accidentally splitting her lip on a washboard, Mariam returns from the infirmary and encounters Markunda, a Tuareg woman who insists on reading her fortune: “The reading did not last more than ten or fifteen minutes,” Mariam recalls years later, “and yet Markunda was able to put her finger on some of the most crucial things my inner world revolved around: the inexplicable sensitivities; the middle-of-the-night onslaughts of unruly ideas and unrelenting mental energy.” Markunda predicts that Mariam will do marvelous things in the future, but the youngster has no idea just what they will entail. The answer arrives a few years later when Mussolini himself visits Benghazi. Mariam and Zaynab are chosen among all the girls to welcome Il Duce to their school—a move that their father interprets as a deliberate effort to shame him for his work to fund the resistance against Fascist rule. Will Mariam betray her loyalty to her father, her family, and her country by doing what the teachers at her school tell her to do?

El Moncef’s prose is elegant and evocative; he captures not only the street life of Benghazi, but the imaginative mind of his narrator Mariam: “I caught myself playing a game: narrowing my eyes and tilting my head slightly, visualizing the wide neoclassical building at the end of the long, slate-cobbled alley as one of the messy watercolors I would paint with Mother’s awkward help.” The novella (which, at fewer than 70 pages, feels very much like a short story) seems overpacked; in addition to a list of characters and unnecessary maps of Benghazi and the Khaldoon household, there’s a 15-page introductory note by Mari Ruti, a professor of critical theory and gender and sexuality studies at the University of Toronto. Additionally, the plot’s main action is nested within two separate frame narratives. All of these layers have the unintentional effect of drawing the reader’s attention to how slight and uneventful the narrative ultimately is. A great deal of text is expended on the incident of Mariam injuring her lip, for example, even though it reveals very little regarding the central conflicts of the story. However, the setting is compelling and well rendered, and the relationship between Mariam and her father is worthy of exploration. Readers will likely wish that they didn’t have to wade through all of the additional, unneeded material to get to it.

A promising but padded work that’s hampered by its slow pace.