Hisham Matar

I wanted to wear her as you would a piece of clothing, to fold into her ribs, be a stone in her mouth.

Can you become a man without becoming your father?

There has not been a day since his sudden and mysterious vanishing that I have not been searching for him, looking in the most unlikely places. Everything and everyone, existence itself, has become an evocation, a possibility for resemblance. Perhaps this is what is meant by that brief and now almost archaic word: elegy

And I remember this man who never ran out of poems telling me once that knowing a book by heart is like carrying a house inside your chest.

And I remember this man who never ran out of poems telling me once that 'knowing a book by heart is like carrying a house inside your chest.

There and then, sitting beside her and within the strength of my adoration, I felt invincible.

One's nature is like a mountain