The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between

by Hisham Matar

Each had tried, in his own way, to cure himself of his country. What you have left behind has dissolved. Return and you will face the absence or the defacement of what you treasured.

But Dmitri Shostakovich and Boris Pasternak and Naguib Mahfouz were also right: never leave the homeland. Leave and your connections to the source will be severed. You will be like a dead trunk, hard and hollow. What do you do when you cannot leave and cannot return?

That special thing, when a friendship comes to resemble a shelter, began to occur between Hamza and me.

It turns out that I have spent all the time since I was eight years old, when my family left Libya, waiting. My silent condemnation of those fellow exiles who wished to assimilate—which is to say, my bloody-minded commitment to rootlessness—was my feeble act of fidelity to the old country, or maybe not even to Libya but to the young boy I was when we left.

That was his first time back. He went again after Tripoli fell, in August, and Mother went with him. I was the last, the youngest and the last, just as when I was a boy and was told to always fill the glasses of my parents and older brother before my own.

He, like many of his generation, was inspired by the example of Egypt, where, led by Gamal Abdel Nasser, a young, secular and nationalist pan-Arab republic replaced a corrupt monarchy. Qaddafi had declared his admiration for Nasser, and Nasser gave his full support to Qaddafi. So, as reluctant as my father must have been to leave Libya, I don’t imagine he went to New York in despair. It took a couple of years—after Qaddafi abrogated all existing laws and declared himself de facto leader forever—for Father to discover the true nature of the new regime.

My ambitions, when it came to my father, were ordinary. Like that famous son in The Odyssey—like most sons, I suspect—I wished that “at least I had some happy man / as father, growing old in his own house.” But, unlike Telemachus, I continue, after twenty-five years, to endure my father’s “unknown death and silence.” 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.

That day in June, in southern France, the day Ziad entered Libya, I swam out alone into the same Mediterranean Sea. For some reason, I remembered, more vividly than ever before, that it was my father who had taught me how to swim: holding me up, one open hand against my belly, saying, “That’s it.” I never feared the sea until he was gone.

Once he joined us in Cairo, we moved to a bigger and better flat. It was there that I understood that we were not going back, that I had been tricked. I demanded to be returned to my country. My mother tried to console me. “Leave him be,” Father told her. “He’ll get used to it.” It was the cruelest thing he had ever said. Cruel and nearly true. Even then I knew, more from the voice than from the words, and also from the way he stood, not facing me, that he too was mourning the loss.

This was the land my father loved more than anything else. “Don’t put yourselves in competition with Libya. You will always lose,” he had said, when once the three of us had tried to dissuade him from openly opposing Qaddafi. The silence that followed was the distance between him and us. The disagreement had a historical dimension. It placed a nation against the intimate reality of a family.

Spring in full bloom. And, when we stepped out of the aeroplane, the familiar scents in the air were like a blanket you were not aware you needed, but now that it has been placed on your shoulders you are grateful.

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.

To be a man is to be part of this chain of gratitude and remembering, of blame and forgetting, of surrender and rebellion, until a son’s gaze is made so wounded and keen that, on looking back, he sees nothing but shadows. With every passing day the father journeys further into his night, deeper into the fog, leaving behind remnants of himself and the monumental yet obvious fact, at once frustrating and merciful—for how else is the son to continue living if he must not also forget—that no matter how hard we try we can never entirely know our fathers.

And I suppose that is what we want from our mothers: to maintain the world and, even if it is a lie, to proceed as though the world could be maintained. Whereas my father was obsessed with the past and the future, with returning to and remaking Libya, my mother was devoted to the present. For this reason, she was the truly radical force in my adolescence.

He felt responsible for her and me, and I felt responsible for him and her, and she for us all. Each one was parent and child. To make up for the missing pillar, the once balanced structure of four columns was now in perpetual strain.

It reminded him of the Libyan dish mardoma, where the meat is slowly cooked in cinders. We ate well. “I’ll never find this place again,” he said as we were leaving. I stood him in the middle of the alleyway and pointed out the silver shop on the corner, the large brass lantern blackened with age on the opposite side, the old man selling pickled lupins and the sign above him that read: MERCIFUL. Father took note of all of these markers, but then repeated, “I’ll never find it.” But perhaps taking Uncle Mahmoud to the tailor had reminded him of our meal together and the location of the restaurant.

I 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. And in my conversation with Hisham I saw sunlight on a wall, a woman’s hand, shadows of trees on the ground, a shut window with the sun lighting up the particles that clung to the pane, and I heard the sound of cloth being beaten outdoors, as though someone were airing linen, and the words “together” and “maybe” and “I am.”

“What happened?” I asked. “I watched them from my window. They came with bulldozers and dug up the graves, one after the other. They burnt the corpses, and now everyone is afraid to touch them.” Then he said, “But, thanks be to God, my son is here.” “He’s safe?” I asked. “Yes. He’s in his room. The air conditioner has been on the whole time.” Then after a pause he added, “But it’s been three days now. I am doing my best but he’s beginning to smell. I must find a way to bury him soon.”

“God is great,” he says. “Here is the flag of freedom, the flag of life.” Then he watches silently as Marwan fastens the top of the flagpole to a metal rod above the water tank. As the red, green and black colors of the flag rise and catch the sun, Marwan shouts, “God is great,” and Izzo joins him, then adds, “God bless our country.”

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

Guilt is exile’s eternal companion.

How odd to enjoy a longing now superseded by other places and the fragile life I had made for myself some 3,000 kilometres north, in a land where none of the words I grew up hearing are spoken, where my grandfather, had he been alive, would not be able to read a word of what I have written, and where the colors contradict, as though deliberately, those of the southern Mediterranean.

In the car driving away from Ajdabiya, towards Benghazi and its coast, I realized that I have been carrying within me all these years the child I once was, his particular language and details, his impatient and thirsty teeth wanting to dig into the cold flesh of a watermelon, waking up wondering only about one thing: “What is the sea like today? Is it flat as oil or ruffled white with the spit of waves?”

I stood at the door to our flat and, before ringing the bell, listened to the familiar voices, all grown up but the child in each still perceptible. I looked down at my own grown-up leather shoes. They did not seem to belong to me.

The plane was full of Dutch families. But, even with eyes wide open, I remained convinced that they were all speaking Arabic and in an accent more authentically Libyan than my own. I felt the shadows of my aunts’ and cousins’ hands, now round my wrist, tapping my shoulder, through my hair, then with a feathery touch brushing my ankle. I was twenty-two and my small London flat was crowded with old questions, more severe now than ever.

We tiptoed around each other, trying our best to avoid confronting the ways in which political reality manages to infiltrate intimacies, corrupting them with unuttered longings and accusations.

“She said, ‘Aren’t you frightened for your daughter?’ I told her, ‘It is exactly because I am afraid for my daughter’s future that I am going out.’

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 it.

To be a Libyan artist in Libya was heroic.

I would never be part of anything. I would never really belong anywhere, and I knew it, and all my life would be the same, trying to belong, and failing. Always something would go wrong. I am a stranger and I always will be, and after all I didn’t really care. When

All the tools I had to connect with my country belonged to the past. Rage, like a poisoned river, had been running through my life ever since we left Libya.

The cocktail of influences—Arab, Ottoman, Italianate, European modernist—suits the relaxed, eclectic and rebellious nature of the city. But there is something else, a material that does not belong to any other culture or period. It is timeless and unique to Benghazi. It is perhaps the most important architectural material there is, more than stone. It is light. The Benghazi light is a material. You can almost feel its weight, the way it falls and holds its subject.

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

“What of the Islamists?” I asked. “They won’t succeed,” Maher said, and then proceeded to tell me about a Tunisian rapper who, having been threatened by an Islamic group, was forced to cancel a planned concert. “These people want a country without art, without conferences, without cinemas. An empty hole,” he said. “And they succeeded with the Tunisian,”

As though oppression were toxic sediment that lingered in the muscles. It expressed itself in a certain reticence. And the grievance seemed not to be with fate or ideology but with humanity itself.

The journal’s motto was: “Education gains the nation its dignity, sovereignty and pride. Where knowledge spreads, prosperity, happiness and security prevail. Education is as necessary as water and oxygen.”

He is transformed, feels a bitter strength, and is emboldened by a youthful vigor that, at any moment, is liable to fade, and self-discipline earned by old age and a harsh life….“No, I will not escape!” he murmured to himself. “I will not try to escape….I will remain until this white hair is soaked in blood, deep red blood that will spring out of the countless wrinkles in my skin. I will not let disgrace stain my forehead. Let the resistance begin.”

The old man’s words, “I will not let disgrace stain my forehead,” were echoed thirty-six years later in Father’s first letter from prison, when he wrote, “My forehead does not know how to bow.”

I think every child is born with a tiny device implanted in their chest that signals the moment their mother is about to cry.

Our unfinished homes are, in other words, a reflection of our present. Just as we have made them, they have come to define us.

A Libyan hoping to glimpse something of that past must, like an intruder at a private party, enter such books in the full knowledge that most of them were not written by or for him, and, therefore, at heart, they are accounts concerning the lives of others, their adventures and misadventures in Libya, as though one’s country is but an opportunity for foreigners to exorcize their demons and live out their ambitions.

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.

“Where is Ahmar Moktar [Omar al-Mukhtar]?” The Bedouin showed his white teeth in a smile. “Ahmar Moktar,” he said, making a sweeping gesture towards the mountains with his arms, “is everywhere in the mountains and the valleys.”

It is not clear how many perished in the camps. Official Italian census records show that the population of Cyrenaica plummeted from 225,000 to 142,000. The orphans, numbering in the thousands, were sent to Fascist camps to be “reeducated.” Brand-new planes machine-gunned herds of livestock. An Italian general boasted that between 1930 and 1931 the army reduced the number of sheep and goats from 270,000 to 67,000. As a consequence, many people starved to death.

Disbelief is the right instinct, for how can the dead really be dead? I think this because absence has never seemed empty or passive but rather a busy place, vocal and insistent.

He says nothing of time here, and time is surely part of it all, of how we try to accommodate the absence. Perhaps this is why, in countless cultures, people in mourning rock or sway from side to side—not only to recall infancy and the mother’s heartbeat, but to keep time. Only time can hope to fill the void. The body of my father is gone, but his place is here and occupied by something that cannot just be called memory.

How could the complexities of being, the mechanics of our anatomy, the intelligence of our biology, and the endless firmament of our interiority—the thoughts and questions and yearnings and hopes and hunger and desire and the thousand and one contradictions that inhabit us at any given moment—ever have an ending that could be marked by a date on a calendar?

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.

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 am nowhere near as thoughtful, yet I find it impossible to be “myself” in the company of others. I am constantly thinking about those around me. If I like them, my opinions sway in their direction, and if for whatever reason they irritate me, I am willfully obstinate. Either way, I am left weary and unclear, regretting ever having relinquished my solitude, and, because I desire the company of others and always have, the cycle is endless.