The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between

by Hisham Matar

And I remember this man who never ran out of poems telling me once that “knowing a book by heart is like carrying a house inside your chest.”

Mark Walters was to take it. I watched him walking back from the ball. I began reciting Surat al-Fatiha. Here was an eighteen-year-old Arab Muslim praying in an English pub for a Scottish team because they had a black player who might or might not have been African, while his Libyan family, exiled in Cairo, was rooting for a German team.

Revolutions have their momentum, and once you join the current it is very difficult to escape the rapids. Revolutions are not solid gates through which nations pass but a force comparable to a storm that sweeps all before

History remembers Mussolini as the buffoonish Fascist, the ineffective silly man of Italy who led a lame military campaign in the Second World War, but in Libya he oversaw a campaign of genocide.

I have no illness but the loss of noble folk and the foul ones who now, with calamitous, shameless faces, govern us. How many a child have they taken and whipped? The poor young flowers return confused, made old without having lived.

I have wondered ever since about the timing, about why my father chose that particular moment to tell me of his secret visits to Ajdabiya. I had then assumed it was because Grandfather Hamed had just passed away, but now I am not sure. On that same tape, which over the past twenty-five years I have managed to listen to only five times, he says, “Don’t come looking for me,” and every time that line brings to mind that afternoon when he and I stretched, side by side, facing one another, on my narrow bed in London. His words, “Now that he’s gone, there’s no need to worry,” which I had then taken as reassurance, I have come to see as a warning that I had missed. What he really meant was, now that his father was gone, he could take even greater risks.

My father is both dead and alive. I do not have a grammar for him. He is in the past, present and future. Even if I had held his hand, and felt it slacken, as he exhaled his last breath, I would still, I believe, every time I refer to him, pause to search for the right tense. I suspect many men who have buried their fathers feel the same. I am no different. I live, as we all live, in the aftermath.

Following Tony Blair’s visit, the British capital became the number one place from which the Libyan secret service could monitor Libyans abroad. Britain helped to deliver dissidents to Tripoli. The Libyan Investment Authority, a corrupt institution that claimed to manage the national wealth, was based in London. The LIA purchased hotels, real estate and various investments, often in the names of individuals from the Qaddafi inner circle. Noted and powerful British financiers were board members. The dictator’s son and heir apparent, Seif el-Islam Qaddafi, became the darling of the British establishment. The London School of Economics awarded him a PhD, which later turned out to be fraudulent. Several British academics, politicians, lawyers and public relations agencies began working hard at washing the blood off the Libyan regime.

Officials from the Libyan embassy attended the first reading I gave from my first novel. A report was sent to Tripoli and I became a watched man. It was deemed no longer safe for me to visit my family in Egypt, which caused a second exile. When friends or relatives visited London, many did not feel it was prudent to be seen with me. Every time I gave an interview criticizing the dictatorship, I walked around for days feeling the weight of the regime on my back.

But grief is a divider; it moved each one of us into a territory of private shadows, where the torment was incommunicable, so horribly outside of language.

I felt my heart contract and grow small. Pain shrinks the heart.

You make a man disappear to silence him but also to narrow the minds of those left behind, to pervert their soul and limit their imagination.