“The world holds a pistol to your head.”

Ilana Sichel has a fantastic interview with Libyan novelist and Booker Prize shortlistee Hisham Matar over at Fiction Writers Review, which is a bit of a bookend to that essay of Uzodinma Iweala’s we were discussing earlier this week.

I admire intellectuals but I don’t feel I am one. I think of myself as an artist who is using words.

There are so many different definitions of an intellectual, but one of the possible definitions is sort of a moralist in the French tradition, the sense that you are attending to current events and calling things by their name. I’ve done a lot of this recently, but I never feel I am in my skin when I do it. I do it out of a sense of civic obligation. So I think somebody like Albert Camus was an intellectual. Edward Said was an intellectual. These people I admire, hugely, but I don’t think I am like that. Part of me wishes I was but, to be honest, I am very content with the silence and solitude and the uncertainty of writing novels. Novels can be loud and certain, but the act of doing — I like that space. It’s soothing to me. There’s something intellectually very exciting about it.

Matar, of course, is a political writer whether or not he’d like to be; his father “disappeared” after being exiled by the Gadhafi regime in 1990, an experience he draws upon in his most recent novel.