Historical fiction · colonial Libya · Italian fascism · Benghazi · World War II · 2022
Benghazi is a historical novella by Salah el Moncef centered on Mariam Khaldoon’s memories of childhood and adolescence in colonial Libya during the later 1930s and early 1940s. From the distance of adult life, Mariam attempts to write the story she has postponed for decades, returning to a Benghazi transformed by Italian fascism, racial politics and the approach of the Second World War.
Colonial Benghazi and the spectacle of fascism
The novella places political history inside the perceptual world of a young girl. Mussolini’s 1937 visit to Benghazi, Italian colonial institutions, school life, civic spectacle and the pressures of fascist rule are experienced through family relationships and everyday social encounters rather than as detached historical background.
This perspective allows the book to examine the seductions and violences of authoritarian spectacle at close range. Public ceremony, education, ethnicity, class and family authority become interconnected forms through which power enters ordinary life.
Mariam Khaldoon, memory and belated narration
Mariam’s difficulty in writing about her childhood gives the novella its retrospective structure. The past is not simply recovered: it has to be approached through hesitation, partial memory and the emotional consequences of displacement. The act of narration becomes part of the story’s inquiry into what historical trauma leaves behind.
Jewish life, antisemitism and the approach of war
As fascist rule intensifies, the increasingly precarious position of Benghazi’s Jewish population becomes part of Mariam’s remembered city. The novella connects antisemitism, colonial hierarchy and family psychology while preserving the cosmopolitan texture of a Mediterranean city in the process of being violently reordered.
Critical reception
Stephen Watt’s essay “An Enormous Enigmatic Signifier”: Salah el Moncef’s Benghazi in Michigan Quarterly Review emphasizes the novella’s treatment of colonial fascism, Mariam’s psychology, Jewish life under increasing antisemitic pressure, and the poetic density of its prose.
The novella’s world later became an important imaginative foundation for The Woman from Warsaw, which returns to wartime Benghazi on a larger novelistic scale.
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