From Kawther Al-Jahmi’s ‘A Son of the Country’

For June 2026, our Monthly Newsletter for Publishing Professionals (this month, curated by Masoud Masoud) will focus on Libya’s publishing scene: publishers, prizes, festivals, and how authors make things work in an unstable living, working, reading, and publishing environment. Thus, this month, we will be particularly featuring excerpts from Libyan works and talks with Libyan writers.

One of our featured authors is Kawther Al-Jahmi, whose A Son of the Country revolves around Majdi and his family; his father, Rashid, is a Moroccan who fled his country after a conflict with police in 1976 and found his way to Tripoli, where he marries his boss’s disabled sister Moufida. When they have children, the issue of their children’s documentation comes to the fore, as Rashid cannot secure his own paperwork, and Libyan law doesn’t allow Libyan women who marry foreigners to pass their citizenship to their kids. To make it worse, Rashid dies, leaving Moufida—with the help of her brothers—to take care of the two kids. We follow these characters from 1990s to 2000s and then to 2011 and the years that followed, including wars, armed conflicts, and hopes that the law would change, since the two children are considered stateless: neither Libyan nor Moroccan. The novel poses a question about identity: Is it a piece of paper, or a sense of belonging?

From A Son of the Country

By Kawther Al-Jahmi

Translated by Alaa Alqaisi

 

And once, by chance, they met outside the entrances of their two houses at the start of their first year in preparatory school. He looked at her for a long moment, bewildered. She had covered her head with a white scarf; her shirt now fell to her knees, and her trousers had grown wide.

At the small shared window opening, when she appeared before him without her scarf, he asked, “Aren’t you going to wear hijab in front of me?”

“I will… when you grow a moustache like a man.”

“I’ll shave it off…”

She let out a rippling laugh, and he grew bolder, making his eyebrows dance. “You’ll never know.” He was serious.

He remembered Nasr’s moustache, which he had glimpsed recently when Nasr lingered nearby, the boys’ preparatory standing wall-to-wall with the secondary school. He wondered what Nasr’s moustache had to do with the way he was always slipping out over the school wall. Since the incident, Nasr had stopped pestering him. He limited himself to a searching look at Magdi’s face, aimed precisely at his left eyelid, and a drawn-out “Basboosa,” accompanied by a small wave of his hand. It seemed more like a passing greeting than anything else. Magdi accepted this new distance between them. In fact, he liked it. To him, Nasr seemed to be busy with his own affairs. Most of the time, he was surrounded by boys his age or older, smoking cigarettes and breathing in their smell by the back wall of the school before morning assembly.

Less than two months into his second year at preparatory, toward the end of 2007, Magdi found himself standing in a line with boys from different year groups, waiting to learn why they had been summoned to the office.

Still water, however long it had lain still, needed a hard stone to be thrown into it, to break its stillness and make one wave after another.

The stone:

“A decision has been issued, boys, by the Secretary of the General People’s Committee, to exclude foreign nationals from free education. That is, from government schools. You’ll go home with your files. Anyone who can walk home may leave now. As for the rest, you may stay here until your guardians come to collect you at dismissal. I wish you success.”

His words seemed empty of any trace of sympathy, as though he were merely reciting a notice sent around to men like him, school principals.

Whispers crowded among the boys, but Magdi did not fully understand what “foreign nationals” meant.

“Excuse me, sir… I’m Libyan.”

“Really? What’s your name?”

But before he could search for his file among the files stacked before him, another teacher, standing beside the principal, spoke up. He knew Magdi well; he was a customer of his uncle’s and lived right next to the bakery. Stroking his beard, after teasing a shred of the tooth-cleaning siwak from between his teeth, he said:

“Why are you lying, Magdi?”

“I’m not lying. My mother is Libyan. I was born here. I live here.”

The teacher laughed, and some of the boys laughed along to please him. The principal, meanwhile, removed his glasses. He was about to speak when the teacher cut in, overzealous:

“Call them by their fathers. Their fathers, I said. You see?” He wedged the siwak back between his teeth, and the principal turned his attention away from Magdi and toward the teacher.

“What are you on about? What does lineage have to do with nationality? Go to your class. Go on.”

The teacher shrugged and shook his head, grimacing in refusal, unable to answer the school principal, who turned back to Magdi and explained what “foreign nationals” meant. He explained that his mother’s nationality meant nothing; she, too, had been transferred to the register of foreigners the moment she married his father.

“Don’t they renew their residence permits every year?”

Magdi didn’t answer. For a few seconds, he seemed to drift away, trying to grasp what was happening and to connect it with their standing, year after year, in dull queues outside the Passports and Immigration Office. Before, it had seemed to him merely routine. He had never understood its true meaning or thought to question it, as though this were something all Libyans did, especially when, in every queue, they met women like his mother: Libyan women with their children, trading complaints and that ache lodged in the throat, exchanging phone numbers in the hope that one of them might someday bring the others good news, news that their children had been spared exclusion, and that each woman among them had been spared those looks of suspicion, those doubts cast upon her honor and upon the reasons that had driven her to leave one of her own for an outsider; as if marriage was available to every woman, and that it was a marriage were a market in which some women turned away from the national product in search of the imported.

Magdi understood what was happening. He took his file with his head bowed and went out with the rest of the boys. Each of them was thinking about what he would do next, where he would go, and whether his family could afford the cost of a private school, under the thing they called an “educational partnership.”

The first wave:

But Magdi could think only about the look in the eyes of the teacher with the siwak. Why had it seemed like he’d been gloating?

The boys scattered, while Magdi remained standing there, gazing at that teacher’s car: a white Daewoo, rust eating into some of its corners. How could he turn that gloating look into a look of sorrow? Sorrow might suit his square face better. Perhaps the man did not yet know how much private schools cost, since he owned a car like that. Magdi had heard the boys talking about big amounts of money, almost equal to what his mother paid every year to renew their residence permits. How would she take it? Would she have to ask her brothers for help so that he and Magda could continue their educations?

The moment he imagined it, he picked up the first stone he found lying in front of him. It was not a stone, exactly, but the remnant of a concrete block. He was careful not to be seen by the school guard, who was always asleep beneath a mulberry tree beside his little annex.

He gathered as much strength as he could, lifted it with both hands, and hurled it. It struck the front of the car, leaving a slight dent and a broad scratch, but nothing worthy of his wound. So he picked it up again, as though the failure of the first throw had doubled the force inside him, and hurled it from a shorter distance, heedless of the guard, heedless of the tearing pain he felt slicing through his forearms. The lower corner of the windshield shattered. An alarm went off in a nearby car, and Magdi bolted, only to crash into a stinking heap of rubbish at the first turn, exactly at the fork in the road below the boys’ preparatory and secondary schools.

The second wave:

“Basboosa… So you’ve learned how to escape school?”

There was something strange in Nasr’s eyes, a kind of redness, and in his voice there was a sleepiness, or a slurring, that Magdi could not place. He thought perhaps Nasr, too, had been affected by the same decision, and asked without thinking:

“Did they give you your file, too?”

“What file?”

Magdi felt he had stepped into some sort of trouble. Was Nasr meant to know? And who was Nasr, anyway, to know?

Kawther Aljahmi is an award-winning Libyan novelist and short story writer. She also contributes to various Libyan journals and online platforms. The Colonel is her second novel, following her debut, The Returnees, for which she won the 2019 Mai Ghoussoub Novel Award. The Colonel focuses on untold aspects of The Returnees, unfolding the story of Colonel Ali Al-Murabit, who was assumed to have died in the battle of Wadi Doum. Al-Jahmi’s other works include a novel, A Son of the Country, and a short-story collection, The Fat Cat Neighborhood. Her story “Tripoli the Blessed, 1785” won first prize at the Fezzan Libyan Short Story Competition.

Alaa Alqaisi is a Palestinian translator, writer, and researcher from Gaza, deeply passionate about literature, language, and the power of storytelling to bridge cultures and bear witness to lived realities. Read more of her work at linktr.ee/alqaisialaaq.