Incidents in an Educational Life: A Memoir (of Sorts)

Three: Two Spells in Libya with a Post-Graduate Interlude

three Two Spells in Libya with a Post-Graduate Interlude 25 Entering the Orient At the end of the last chapter, I intimated my feeling that I might be happier in a university environment, so on returning to the UK, I applied for lecturing jobs at the British Council, which acted at that time as a recruiting agency for many overseas universities. I applied for a lectureship in English at the famous Charles University in Prague, which naturally enough I didn’t get. I also put in for one of three assistant lectureships in English at the University of Libya in Benghazi, the provincial capital of the eastern part of country, known as Cyrenaica. Somewhat to my surprise (my “nice smile”?), I was successful, again collected my Morris Minor in St Germaine de Près and drove to Naples. There, we (my car and I) embarked on a small Italian ferry for a leisurely four-day journey to Benghazi, with lengthy stops at Catania in Sicily and at Valletta in Malta. On the journey, I am afraid I appeared as stand-offish to a number of the British passengers because of my chattering away in Italian with the crew and my probably ostentatious study of a grammar of Modern Standard Arabic, replete with exercise ex56 amples of the following type: “Translate into Arabic, ‘The princess has two beautiful brown eyes’”. On arrival, on a hot and dusty afternoon in September, 1963, I had some considerable delay in passing through Libyan Customs. After my car was eventually lifted off, I was assigned to a plump female Palestinian Customs Officer, who insisted that I unload all my books from the boot so that she could check them one by one against some Index of Forbidden Works. She spent a particularly long time on my copy of Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, by now suspiciously battered, presumably because the title might be taken to invoking some type of revolutionary militancy in the relatively peaceful Libyan realm of King Idris. This was my first taste of that Arab suspicion of published words. Another came shortly later. After getting established in a small flat rented by the university near the traditional market or souk, and finding my way around the Department of English and the College of Economics and Commerce, in both of which I was assigned to teach, I took advantage of the small university library to read up as much as I could about Libya. The university at that time was very young and, apart from the senior administrators, nearly all the staff were expatriates, many from the Arab World, but also including Nigerians and at least one tall, imposing Turk with a tarboosh. The best recent Libyan graduates were “demonstrators”, anxiously working on their applications for graduate school, mostly in the U.S. Obviously , this was a group that I got to know quite well since we were similar in age and educational experience. Anyway, one of the books that I got to read about Benghazi was a surprisingly sexy novel by, if I remember , a Glyn Williams, the inaugural head of the English Department. When I mentioned to a bunch of these demonstrators that I had been reading this novel, to a man they turned on me and said that this was a bad book because the author asserted that there were black prostitutes in Benghazi who had come up from the southern oases. When I countered that this was a novel and that certain kinds of authorial license might be permitted, they responded that the book should be banned because there was no prostitution in Libya tout court. However, there were firm rumours that at least one such lady of the night plied her trade just a cou57 ple of streets from me in the “Arab Quarter”. Much as I admire many aspects of Arab intellectual culture, I have never really come to terms with this disjunct between rhetoric and reality, the belief that you can say and write things that you know aren’t really true, or deny things that are said or written that you know are really true. It is an odd kind of verbalism that never sat well with my empiricist upbringing. 26 A rich mix of English Department colleagues One of my new departmental friends in Libya was an elderly gentleman called Dr Fred Koerner. Eventually, he revealed to me his...