The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between (2016)
Hisham Matar (1970)
243 pages
It’s frightening to think of the hours – soon distant and forgotten, yet so slow and negligible while they’re going by – during which our friends and relatives think we’re alive when in fact we are dead…. This fear isn’t for the dead … but for the living, who will later have to reconstruct those hours … that they lived through unaware their world had changed.
Javier Marías, Dark Back of Time
In the spring of 2012, writer Hisham Matar returned to Libya with his mother and brother, just months after the conclusion of the civil war that had led to the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi’s brutal regime. (And, though they could not know it at the time, during an all too brief period peace, as a second civil war broke out only two years later.) Having fled Libya in 1979 to escape the Gaddafi regime, they returned to see their homeland and visit with extended family and friends for the first time in decades.
Matar, however, arrived in Libya freighted with another, quite specific desire: to understand what had become of his father, who had been seized in 1990 by the Egyptian secret police, transferred to Libya, and taken to “Abu Salim prison in Tripoli, which was known as “The Last Stop” – the place where the regime sent those it wanted to forget.” (10) Until 1996, his family had news of his father; but then, nothing. In The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between, Matar writes of the many years he spent haunted by the lack of closure regarding his father: “When I think of what might have happened to him, I feel an abyss open up beneath me. I am clutching at the walls.” (43) His return to Libya in 2011 serves as a framework for his recollections of both his years as an exile and his pursuit of information about his father.
Through flashbacks, Matar tells the story of his father’s growing disillusionment in the 1970’s with the Gaddafi regime, the family’s eventual exile, and his life outside of his homeland. He recalls that
For months after we left Libya, when I was a child, I used to lie staring at the ceiling, imaging my return. I pictured how I would kiss the ground [and] embrace my cousins. (36)
But months became years, and eventually he left Egypt to attend boarding school in England – under an assumed name for security reasons – which eventually led to university there.
During his time in England came his father’s kidnapping, imprisonment in Libya, and subsequent disappearance, leaving Matar in a kind of twilight state with respect to both his life and his connection to his homeland. He tells of his attempts to uncover what became of his father, his inability to move on from the traumatic uncertainty, and the constant sense of disconnectedness the effort of this search precipitated in his daily life and work.
His pursuit of the truth led him into contact with one of Gaddafi’s sons, who promised to provide him information. His descriptions of this engagement, in which he was strung along for years without resolution, provides a disturbing look into the cavalier disregard for people’s humanity that too often characterizes the behavior of dictators and their entourage, who feel themselves above any law. He comes to realize that
Power must know how fatigued human nature is, and how unready we are to listen, and how willing we are to settle for lies. Power must know that, ultimately, we would rather not know. Power must believe, given how things proceed, that the world was better made for the perpetrator than for those who arrive after the fact, seeking justice or accountability or truth. Power must see such attempts as pathetic, and yet the bereaved, the witness, the investigator and the chronicler cannot but try to make reason of the diabolical mess. (214)
In The Return, Matar provides a thoughtful examination of the ties between a father and son, and between a person and their homeland. When these connections become severed, the effects can ripple on through one’s life, he makes clear, in complex and lasting ways. Perhaps most pressingly, he struggles with the question of whether and how to find peace regarding the disruptions and uncertainties that result, and how to decide when to stop trying to achieve some closure regarding what has been lost. Can we, should we, he asks himself and his readers, move on with our lives with such fundamental holes in our being? And if so, how?
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