The Aesthetic of an orphaned memory : journeying across the ‘Lit-Up Stage’ of Hisham Matar's Siena

Abstract

This article discusses Hisham Matar's second work of memoir, A Month in Siena in terms of its complex, longer engagement with the disappearance of Matar's dissident father, its aftermath, and the son's own relation to his father's ultimate fate. Attempting to articulate what may be an unrealisable form of grief, Matar seeks to elicit from the spaces of the medieval Sienese Republic an aesthetic grammar by means of which the process of surviving with(in) a forcibly suspended relation with his absent forebear may be spelt out. Matar's memoir mobilises the ability of memory to interpellate the act of self-narrative in the service of achieving a mourning-in-progress. Referencing the work of Massimo Cacciari, T.J. Clark, Mark Dooley, John Baldacchino and Philippe D’Averio, the author discusses Matar's contemplations of works from the Sienese School, including those of Ambrogio Lorenzetti and Duccio di Buoninsegna. The article opens up Matar's ekphrastic journey, suggesting that through it, art holds forth a configuration of power that is expansive in character: one whose semantic vista is as affirmative in its potential for articulating a complex, often damaged political world as the Libyan regime's own silence about his father is negatingly labyrinthine.