Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

Everywhere I went in Libya, opposition to US policy was tempered by enthusiasm for individual Americans. Among the older generation of Libyans, the reformers were eager for news of the towns where they had once studied, in Kansas, Texas, Colorado. (Most of the hard-liners I met had never visited the United States.) Because the pariah experience has been a lonely one, many Libyans hoped for improved relations with the outside. I spent a morning with the human-rights lawyer Azza Maghur, a striking woman with cascading hair and a warm laugh who had just returned from a humanitarian conference in Morocco. Her father was an important figure in post-revolutionary Libyan politics, and this has given her leeway; she seemed almost oblivious of the constraints that keep most Libyan women in head scarves and at home. I asked her how she felt about the United States, and she told me that it was hard for her to be pro-American in the wake of the news reports about Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo. “You cannot imagine how we worshipped the idea of America.” She looked down at the floor, as though she were talking about a relative who had recently died. “We wanted nothing more than to be with you: this rich, fair democracy. But now we ask, ‘Who is giving us this lesson of freedom?’ I mean—if you caught your high priest in bed with a prostitute, would you still count on him to get you in the door of heaven?” Maghur is still hoping to show her young daughter the United States. She said that at least once a week, her daughter asks how things are going between Libya and America, and Maghur says, “It’s going, sweetheart.” And her daughter wonders, “So can we visit Disneyland yet?” And Maghur has to say, “Not yet, sweetheart, not yet.”

For a culture that is politically and socially underdeveloped, Libya has a surprisingly active intelligentsia, who view their society with tenderness and irony. People I met and liked invited me out repeatedly and introduced me to friends and family. I went to a birthday party at the house of one such Libyan; his wife cooked a feast, and we stayed up half the night with their children, watching movies. The day before I left, friends took me out for late-night tea and gave me full traditional Libyan dress—a long shirt, an embroidered vest, and a little black hat—as a going-away present.

The social life of Libyans is essentially private. Tripoli is latticed with wide highways; gasoline is subsidized, and because there are no bars or clubs and few cinemas or theaters, the most popular pastime is driving; people cruise around for hours. The privacy of cars enhances their charm, but mostly the Tripoli highways, busy through the night, provide diversion for citizens desperate for entertainment or novelty. When they aren’t driving, most Tripolitans socialize at home rather than in cafés, partly because of the absence of women and alcohol in public places.

I had my first drink in Libya after a friend called an army colonel and asked, “Do you have any pomegranate seeds?” (It is wise to use euphemisms in police states.) He did, and we drove to the outskirts of a small city, to a large white house with a long veranda, beside a dirt road. In the Libyan way, the house was built of concrete and painted white, but it was beginning to show signs of wear. We sat on a wide, bright-colored banquette under fluorescent lights in an enormous room. The place was decorated with souvenirs from Central Asia, where our host had trained, including many carvings of bears with fishing rods. We listened to a medley of Shirley Bassey hits played on the zither and took turns smoking from a five-foot-tall hookah. The colonel, a beaming, extroverted Libyan of sub-Saharan ancestry, served the local home brew, 80 proof and rough enough to remove not just fingernail polish but quite possibly fingernails as well, on a table covered with a lavishly embroidered cloth and laden with Fanta and Pringles. The atmosphere was reminiscent of a high school pot party. I asked my friend how he would feel if his sons drank, and he laughed, replying, “It’s inevitable.” Then I asked about his daughters, and he grew serious: “If my daughters were drinking, I would be very, very upset—furious, in fact. Because, if people found out that they had been drinking, they would think they might also be sexually active, and their marriage prospects would be shattered.”

I met a Libyan woman who worked for Alitalia, a job that she loved but that she felt no Libyan husband would tolerate. “I have to choose between a marriage and a life, and I have chosen a life,” she said. “Most women here choose a marriage. It’s a question of taste.” The restrictions are a matter not of laws—on issues such as gender equality, the laws are more progressive than in most Arab countries—but of social norms.