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.”

We need a father to rage against.

I envy the finality of funerals. I covet the certainty. How it must be to wrap one’s hands around the bones, to choose how to place them, to be able to pat the patch of earth and sing a prayer.

Not since my father’s disappearance had I felt closer to him. My aunts have his eyes. All they wanted was to look at me, and all I wanted was to look at them. We sat next to one another and held hands. My father had beautiful hands like theirs, the skin cool and soft.

remember once hearing a conductor say that he had always, ever since he was a young boy, heard music in his head and that it wasn’t until he was an adult that he realized this was not the same for everyone else. That has been my experience too, but with words and images.

It makes me think that we all carry, from childhood, our death mask with us.

Or is this what being home is like: home as a place from which the entire world is suddenly possible?

Then he went to that place I was meant to have become accustomed to, where, through veiled speech, I was to understand the obvious, that my father was dead.

That slightly stifled gait all political prisoners have. As though oppression were toxic sediment that lingered in the muscles. It

the twice-repeated line from the chapter “Soothing” in the Quran: “With hardship comes ease. With hardship comes ease.”

And now, after a quarter of a century of not seeing my father, I would take the same risks to see him, even if for an hour or two.

?

Not knowing when my father ceased to exist has further complicated the boundary between life and death.

absence has never seemed empty or passive but rather a busy place, vocal and insistent.

The body of my father is gone, but his place is here and occupied by something that cannot just be called memory. It is alive and current.

The dead live with us.

What is extraordinary is that, given everything that has happened, the natural alignment of the heart remains towards the light.

Eventually, the original loss, the point of departure, the point from which life changed irrevocably, comes to resemble a living presence, having its own force and temperament.