Longing and Belonging in Hisham Matar’s A Month in Siena

Abstract

The sense of longing and belonging overwhelms diasporic individuals, and Hisham Matar is no exception. His memoirs are living proof of the author’s inner search for balance. In his work A Month in Siena, Matar embarks on a journey to a new space—a third space between his homeland and host land. Hisham visits Siena for the sake of the galleries the city possesses and the paintings it bestows for the beholder to contemplate and meditate. This paper then aims to examine how Matar navigates and transforms these intense emotions through the lens of art in Siena and seeks to uncover the psychological depth of his journey and the underlying motivations and implications of his engagement with paintings. Mainly, through Freudian and Jungian lenses, this paper links the fragmented aspects of the memoir to illustrate how time and place interplay in reinforcing the protagonist’s struggle and the author’s conscious and unconscious strategies to overcome such a predicament.