Bread on Uncle Milad’s Table: Masculinity, memory and Libya

"My life is full of anticipation and anxiety," says Milad, the central character in Mohammed Alnaas’s Bread on Uncle Milad’s Table, comparing his life to the anxious wait for dough to rise, a feeling that runs through the novel as he struggles with the uncertain space between who he is and who he is allowed to be.

First published in 2021, Bread on Uncle Milad’s Table won the International Prize for Arabic Fiction in 2022, making Mohammed the first Libyan, and the youngest author, to receive the prestigious award.

Now, in Sawad Hussain’s English translation (HarperVia, October 2026), Mohammed’s distinctive voice comes through in all its intimacy: digressive, sensory and gentle.

That intimacy comes through in the way Milad tells his story, addressing an unnamed listener while repeatedly cautioning that his wife, Zeinab, is asleep and must not be woken, the care with which he guards her sleep becoming part of the atmosphere of his telling.

Those memories take him back to his childhood, where Milad grows up as the only boy among four sisters. His father, a baker, learnt the craft from an Italian mentor and teaches Milad the art of breadmaking in moments of rare tenderness and sudden rage.

"The heart, Milad," he would advise, "some people don’t put love in their bread."

But that tenderness comes with another lesson: love and affection are not to be shown to his sisters, because "you’re only meant to keep them safe and order them around."

The man Milad must become

For Milad, the love of bread and the demand to harden become intertwined, shaping one of the central pressures of his life.

While the novel is littered with self-deprecating humour, Mohammed is funniest in his treatment of the former Libyan regime. Gaddafi is a background force in the story and is always referred to by his chosen title, 'Brother Leader'.

The months also run on the calendar 'Brother Leader' invented, without missing a beat. This deadpan consistency turns the era’s forced theatrics into dark comedy.

In one scene, Milad waits in a room where a framed portrait of the 'Brother Leader' hangs on a wall while a propaganda song lists his virtues.

He is the ideal man: confident, virile, macho, powerful, all-controlling patriarch who "rode his horse to free the country."

He was everything that Milad was not. The image is what schoolboys were meant to grow into. The feeling of not being enough is a constant from childhood to adulthood.

It is this feeling that leads Milad to the "factory that would make a man out of him." His father’s final wish was for Milad to join the military, believing it would harden his son.

There, he meets Madona, a brutal trainer who takes a particular aim at him. Madona christens him "doughboy," and so begins the cycle of beatings and humiliations. The abuse intensifies until Milad attempts, without success, to take his life.

The attempts do not end with his time in the military. They continue afterwards, messy and undignified. Some are weirdly hilarious, interrupted, unsurprisingly, by domestic attentiveness. The effect on the reader is not so much horror as a protective tenderness.

But suicide here does not act as an abstract plot device. In Libya, men die by suicide at a higher rate than women. Milad is shaped by everything that pattern is made from: the lasting scars of military service and society’s narrow codes of honour. That he fails in these attempts is Mohammed’s deft hand. Even in the act of trying to die, Milad remains insufficiently a man.

The idea of what makes a man runs through everything Milad tells us: his childhood, his relationship with his father, the bond he shares with his sisters, the military, his marriage and his humiliations.

All are set against Libyan proverbs on manhood. Some counsel ferocity, insisting it is better to be a rooster for one day than a chicken for ten, or that the rider makes the mare. Another promises immunity, claiming that a man can do no wrong. One warns that a devil has many daughters.

Another advocates cruelty as a lesson, suggesting that "skinning the cat" will scare the bride. Yet it is the saying that opens the novel, and hangs over the story, that becomes its most pointed refrain: the whispered verdict on any household where the man cannot control the women inside, "it must be one of Uncle Milad’s."

Bread, music and memory

In his essay Kneading Words, translated by Nashwa Nasreldin (Arablit, 2022), Mohammed talks about learning to bake before writing the novel, and the care it shows.

Details like nurturing a yeast starter for years, the feel of dough under the hands, and the score of a baker’s blade “like a finger drawing in fine sand” are written with sensory details that can only come from a baker's observations.

Bread, he writes, "requires patience, precision and a touch of creativity." The story, too, takes time, adding texture through careful "kneading, shaping and reshaping."

That texture comes not only from bread, but from music. Songs by Abdel Halim Hafez, Fairouz, Cheb Khaled, Bob Marley and even the more obscure Libyan voice of Sadeq Bo Abaab, among many others, run through the story. They carry Milad’s longings and the small private freedoms he allows himself, like dancing to Layl as-Sahraneen as he bakes.

Of all the musicians Milad listens to, Ahmed Fakroun holds a particular place.

"No other musician could console me, assure me the way Ahmed Fakroun did," Milad says, as the lyrics of Hareb fil layali — "oh, you flee in the nights, from nights in the fog… the sorrow of your heart is in your heart" — give words to what he carries silently, making the novel feel as though it should be read with its soundtrack playing.

The same attention to small details shapes the way Milad tells his story. He is fastidious about his housework, but his narration obeys no such order. He wanders, doubles back, picks up a thread pages later, then digresses again into recipes and songs.

Sometimes, he moves on to a seemingly unrelated story. He reassures the listener: "You might be tempted to ask why I’m even telling you all this, and if it has anything to do with my story. It does."

For some readers, these digressions may feel indulgent, but this one found them charming.

The book asks its readers for the same patience dough demands. By the final page, the digressions and little details have built a full picture of Milad’s interiority.

We understand why, for instance, in the novel’s climax, Milad reaches for the old apron his father gifted him, and why Zeinab immediately realises what it means. The result is both intimate and capacious.

All of this makes Milad an easy character to care about, but for all his sensitivity, he is not a progressive hero. He is passive and easily swayed by louder, more insistent voices, a kind man socialised into a world that equates masculinity with dominance.

The same men, his father included, will weep over Umm Kulthum songs and later strike their wives. Milad notices this hypocrisy without articulating an alternative. He knows it, too: "I am not a big thinker or some intellectual."

That passivity has consequences. When Milad finally performs the role expected of him, the repercussions are devastating for him and for the women around him. For the reader, too, who has been invited to sit at his table and eat his bread.

**Learning to be tender **

The question of the man a society expects also connects Mohammed’s novel to the work of Tayeb Salih, whom he has named as a formative influence. His debut carries echoes, perhaps unconsciously, of Season of Migration to the North.

Both are confessional novels. Tayeb’s unnamed narrator listens to Mustafa Sa’eed, while Mohammed’s unnamed listener receives Milad’s monologue.

Mustafa and Milad are polar opposites. Mustafa performs the hyper-masculine role in Salih’s colonial encounter, while Milad is forced into it by his family, the military and his village’s mockery of his unmanliness.

The forces that made a Mustafa are scaled down to a village, a bakery, a marriage and a kitchen, producing instead a Milad: where Mustafa mastered the role demanded of him and was destroyed by it, Milad tried to resist and was destroyed anyway.

Yet for all that happens to him, what stays with us is Milad himself. We grow fond of him. How could one not? The man who flinches at loud voices, the "sunflower lover," the careful hands that waxed his sisters’ legs with syrup he made himself, the small mercies he extends even to those who once hurt him.

That tenderness returns us to the lesson his father teaches him at the beginning of the novel. Early on, Milad’s father teaches him that dough needs the right amount of air, and that too much or too little will ruin it. "Love," his father said, "is about giving it the right environment."

What happens, the novel asks, when the air stifles instead of lifting? When the heat is set by other hands to a scorching level? His name means 'birth', and the novel finally gives him that. He is at last "a man" by the warped standards he was forced into his whole life.

Sweet Milad. Kind Milad. Gentle Milad. Foolish Milad. What have you done, Milad?

***Fifi Bat-hef is a Kenyan book reviewer with a bias for literary fiction ***

Follow her on Instagram: @fifi.bathef