Interculturalism in Sam Najjair’s account of the battle for Tripoli: Soldier for a Summer

Abstract

We, here in our internment camp, greet the 1st September revolution and its leader, Colonel Mu'ammar al-Qhadafi. The voice of this leader reaches us despite the solitary confinement cells and the prison guards. [...] Long live the Arab-Irish struggle. Libyan radio Voice of the Arab Homeland, 22 December 1976 This message of support for Muammar Gaddafi's pan-Arab and quasi-socialist aspirations emanated in 1975 from republican prisoners in the Maze prison in Northern Ireland. It was read on the official Libyan radio Voice of the Arab Homeland one year later, as part of the propaganda celebrating the anti-imperialist convictions of the Libyan regime a few years after Gaddafi came into power following the 1969 coup against King Idris. (1) Simultaneously with the radio announcement, An Phoblacht, the Irish republican newspaper, was publishing extracts from Gaddafi's Green Book promoting his model of direct popular democracy, based on the participation of grassroots popular committees. (2) The striking contrast between the republicans' enthusiasm shortly after Gaddafi seized power in the 1970s and the general discredit at the moment of his fall in 2011 resulted from a reign associated with despotism, corruption and widespread oppression of the people. In Soldier for a Summer, Irish Libyan Sam Najjair gives a detailed account of his participation in the Libyan revolution against Gaddafi in 2011, while making a point of explaining his motives to the general public, in particular to Irish readers. In the narrative, he conjures up the memory of the republican commitment of his Irish grandparents to anti-imperialism. After 40 years of the Gaddafi dictatorship, the republican ideal was intact but the old Libyan ally had become an enemy to destroy. Comparisons between the Irish struggle to obtain independence from Britain and conflicts in the Arab world have been commonly deployed by militants since the end of the 1960s (Louvet 2016), but one striking feature in Sam Najjair's autobiographical work is the extent to which interculturalism pervades the narrative of the man born in Ireland to an Irish mother and a Libyan father. Interculturalism results from an interaction between different cultures and announces the possibility of the emergence of a new form of cultural expression and identity. As such, interculturalism can be observed in particular as an outcome of immigration, with the second generation of immigrants being steeped in two cultures and trying to reconcile them in the narrative of the self to build a sense of identity. In the case of second-generation immigrants, autobiographical narratives are written testimonies of the process of conciliation and reconciliation at play in "minor literature" in the words of Deleuze, that is to say emerging from a minority living among a majority culture and whose main three characteristics are the deterritorialization of the language, the connection of the individual and the political and collective arrangement of utterance (Deleuze and Guattari 1996: 29-33). Such characteristics are at play in Soldier for a Summer as the reader follows the narrator from Dublin to Tripoli and then back to Dublin at the end of the war. Throughout the narrative, Sam Najjair outlines an intercultural space between Ireland and Libya, opening 'an Irish angle' on the Libyan conflict, directly connected to his dual identity as the son of a Libyan immigrant living in Dublin. The Irish angle, which will be analysed in this paper, provides legitimacy to the fight in Libya while soliciting empathy and understanding from the Irish reader. It can be identified as being part of what the political sociologists Keck and Sikkink call "framing" the issue, that is to say shaping the narrative in such a way that it is likely to rally support for a cause, often by making use of symbolic references which are immediately identified by the target audience (Keck and Sikkink 1998: 10). …